Grid Diary vs deariary: nine prompts vs zero prompts
Most diary apps hand you a blank page and trust you to fill it. Grid Diary does something different. Instead of one empty field, you get a three-by-three grid of cells, each one already labeled with a prompt. “What is one thing you are grateful for today?” “What did you learn?” “How do you feel right now?” You answer each cell in a sentence or two, and the grid fills in until the page is whole.
Sumi Interactive has been shipping Grid Diary since 2013, and at version 3.8 it has settled into a small but devoted audience: 4.6 stars from around 963 iOS reviewers, an active Android version, a developer team of three, no venture capital, no AI features in the core flow. The premise has not changed across the rewrites: structured prompts make journaling easier than a blank page.
Grid Diary’s premise is that the blank-page problem is really a “what should I write” problem. Give people the question, and the writing follows. deariary’s premise is that even a question still requires writing. The bottleneck is not the prompt; it is the typing.
This is a comparison between an app that asks you nine questions and an app that asks you zero.
What Grid Diary does well
Grid Diary has been on the App Store since 2014 in one form or another, and the current version is the third major rewrite. The current 4.6-star rating from a community of about a thousand reviewers is unusually high for the category, especially for an app without a marketing budget. Reviewers consistently mention the same thing: the prompts are the reason they finally kept up a journaling habit.
The Mandala layout. A standard daily entry shows a three-by-three Mandala (the app’s name for the layout), with each of the nine sections holding a different question. Tap a section, type your answer, and the Mandala grows fuller as you go. You can swap any question for another from the library, or write your own. Multiple Mandalas per day are also supported if nine prompts feels short. The structure is the feature: an empty Mandala feels different from an empty page because every section is a small, specific question rather than a void to fill in any direction.
Prompt library. Sumi Interactive ships hundreds of pre-written questions grouped by category: gratitude, productivity, creativity, mindfulness, relationships, health, learning. Some are evergreen (“Highlight of today?”), some are reflective (“One belief from a year ago you no longer hold?”), some are practical (“One task you can finish in fifteen minutes?”). You can pin favorites, build your own template, or let the app rotate them.
Time dimensions beyond the day. Beyond the daily Mandala, Grid Diary scales the same idea to weekly, monthly, and yearly views. The weekly view might ask “Highlight of this week?” and “What did you spend the most time on?” The yearly view does the same for a longer arc. Anyone who has tried to write a year-end retrospective from a blank page will recognize the appeal: smaller windows worth of structured questions add up to something coherent.
Multiple Mandalas, multiple journals. You can keep separate journals for separate parts of your life (a work Mandala, a travel Mandala, a gratitude Mandala, a habit tracker) and assign a different template to each. Templates are first-class objects: exportable, importable, shareable. The community trades good templates the way fountain-pen forums trade ink samples.
Built for keepers. Sumi Interactive is a three-person studio that has shipped Grid Diary for over a decade without venture funding, without selling the product, without a pivot, and without bolting on AI. If continuity matters to you (and for a journal you may keep for years, it should) that track record is rare in the category.
Other practical details: Premium is $4.99/mo or $29.99/yr (unlocking sync, the full prompt library, extra themes, template export). Apple Health on iOS feeds step counts, sleep, and workouts into a dedicated section. Photos, markdown, todos, tags, and stickers can live inside any section. Local storage with optional Sumi sync; Face ID protection; no third-party trackers. The app supports eleven languages.
The shape of the product is consistent across all of this. Grid Diary is a tool for people who want to write a journal, who know the hardest part is starting, and who find that a small structured nudge is enough to get past it.
Where the prompted-writing model has limits
The prompts solve one specific problem very well: they give you something to write about. They do not solve the larger problem of finding time, energy, and attention to write at all.
A prompt is not an answer. “What was the best part of today?” is a much friendlier opener than a blank page. But it still requires you to remember today, choose a moment, find words for it, and type those words into a small text field on a phone. On a Tuesday where you fall into bed at midnight, the prompt does not write itself any more than a blank page does. The prompt makes the first sentence easier; it does not make the writing free.
Nine cells means nine acts of writing. The grid format is satisfying when you fill it in completely. Half-filled grids are awkward by design: the empty cells are visible, and the same structure that makes a complete grid feel rewarding makes an incomplete one feel like a chore unfinished. Many users solve this by reducing their template to three or four cells. That works, but it is also a quiet admission that nine prompts a day is more writing than most people will keep up with.
No event integrations. Apple Health is the only data source Grid Diary connects to, and it only fills one cell with step counts and sleep. Your calendar, your code commits, your music, your messages, your locations, your tasks: none of those are pulled in. If you want your diary to remember the meetings you had on Tuesday, you have to remember them yourself and type them into the grid.
Platforms are mobile-only. Grid Diary is on iOS, Android, and the Huawei AppGallery. There is no native macOS app, no Windows app, and no web version. If you sit at a desk all day and would prefer to journal on a keyboard, Grid Diary has no answer for that. (The app does support iPad, which is the closest it gets to a desktop experience.)
No AI, no generation. The prompt library is hand-curated by the team. There is no language model assistance, no entry generation, no summarization across grids. This is by design: Sumi Interactive has stayed deliberately AI-free in the core flow, and many of their reviews call this out as a positive. It also means that on the days when the prompts feel rote, there is no escape hatch other than rewriting the template.
Templates do not become entries. A template is a set of questions. It is not a draft. If you do not answer the questions, no entry exists for that day. The Mandala stays empty.
These are not flaws so much as edges of the design. Grid Diary’s whole identity is “structured manual journaling done well.” The structure is what makes it work, and the structure is what makes it stop when you stop showing up.
How deariary handles the same blank Tuesday
deariary reframes the problem. Where Grid Diary asks “what would help you write?”, deariary asks “what if you did not have to write?”
The model is the inverse of prompts. Instead of cells with questions, deariary has connectors. You authorize access to any of 13 services (GitHub, Slack, Google Calendar, Todoist, Bluesky, Discord, Steam, Trakt, Last.fm, Toggl Track, Swarm, Linear), or route arbitrary data through a webhook, and from the next morning onward an entry is waiting when you wake up. A language model assembles it overnight from what those services already recorded: meetings attended, tasks closed, commits merged, tracks listened to, places checked into, posts written. Media (Bluesky photos, Slack file uploads, Swarm location pins) is collected alongside, and a highlight card surfaces the structured pieces (PRs merged, hours tracked, distance moved).
A Grid Diary user opening Tuesday’s page sees nine cells waiting for answers. A deariary user opens Tuesday’s page and reads: “Today started with the sprint review at ten, then a long one-on-one with the design lead. The merged commits on the cache invalidation fix landed mid-morning, followed by review on three pull requests. The afternoon went deep on the dashboard refactor, and seven Todoist items moved into Done. The evening ended quietly with a Bluesky thread on why measuring the wrong thing is worse than not measuring.” Below the prose, three photos from the day, four Last.fm tracks, and a Linear issue closed.
The trade-off is direct. Grid Diary asks nine questions and waits for nine answers. deariary asks nothing and produces an entry without your participation. What you give up with deariary is the writing act itself: the choosing of words, the small reflective pause that prompted journaling can create. What you get is a diary that exists on the days you were never going to fill in nine cells.
If the writing is the practice, Grid Diary is closer to what you want. If the writing is the bottleneck, deariary removes it.
At a glance
| Grid Diary | deariary | |
|---|---|---|
| How entries are created | You answer prompted cells in a grid | Generated overnight from connected services |
| Blank-page problem | Solved by prompts (still requires typing) | Removed (entry exists either way) |
| Default daily structure | Three-by-three Mandala grid (nine prompts) | Date-based diary entry, free-form prose |
| Integrations | Apple Health only (steps, sleep, workouts) | 13 services: GitHub, Slack, Google Calendar, Todoist, Bluesky, Discord, Steam, Trakt, Last.fm, Toggl Track, Swarm, Linear, plus webhooks |
| Time dimensions | Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly grids | Daily entries |
| Editor | Markdown, photos, tags, stickers, todos within each cell | Generated prose, editable |
| Templates | Hundreds of prompts, custom templates, exportable | Not template-based |
| Platforms | iOS, iPadOS, Android, Huawei AppGallery | Web |
| Account required | No (sync needs an account) | Yes |
| Privacy | Local storage, optional Sumi sync, passcode/Face ID | Cloud-based, account login |
| AI / generation | None (prompt library is hand-curated) | Yes (entry generation) |
| Languages | 11 (English plus 10 others) | 42 languages for diary generation |
| Pricing | Free tier; Premium $4.99/mo or $29.99/yr | See pricing |
| Free tier | Yes (limited prompts, no cross-device sync) | Yes (one integration) |
| Team | Sumi Interactive, three people, bootstrapped | deariary team |
Two beliefs about why diaries fail
Grid Diary and deariary disagree about why people stop journaling.
Grid Diary’s answer is that the blank page is intimidating, that a writer staring at “Dear Diary…” has no idea where to start, and that a small grid of specific questions removes the intimidation. The data backs this up: reviewers say the prompts are why they finally stuck with a journal. For people in that situation, the diagnosis is right and the medicine works.
deariary’s answer is that the bottleneck is not the prompt. It is the act of writing on a tired evening, in a busy week, on a Sunday when the whole month has slipped past unrecorded. A prompt makes the first sentence easier; it does not get sentences onto the page when no sentences were ever going to land there. If you have tried Grid Diary, Day One, Notion templates, the Five Minute Journal, and paper notebooks, and each one followed the same arc (“started strong, kept going for two or three weeks, fell off”), the constraint is not the prompt structure. It is the requirement to show up.
Both diagnoses are real. They describe different people.
Who should use which
Use Grid Diary if you like the act of writing and want a structure that helps you start. The grid is genuinely good design: nine small specific questions are easier to answer than one big “what happened today?” prompt. If you have a few quiet minutes most days, if you enjoy filling cells the way some people enjoy crossword puzzles, and if you want a lightweight, ad-free, quietly-built journaling app on your phone, Grid Diary is one of the better options. The pricing is fair, the team is small and steady, and the prompt library is one of the best in the category.
Use deariary if every prompt-based journal you have tried has ended the same way. If Grid Diary, the Five Minute Journal, Stoic, and Daylio’s note field have all followed the same diminishing curve in your hands (started, kept up for a couple of weeks, dropped), the constraint is not the structure of the questions. It is the requirement that you participate at all. deariary removes participation as a precondition: the entry is composed from the data your existing tools already produce, regardless of whether you opened the app.
Grid Diary is structured journaling done thoughtfully. deariary is for people who want a diary without the journaling.
Starting
For Grid Diary, the App Store and Google Play listings are at apps.apple.com and play.google.com. The free tier covers prompted-writing in full. Premium ($4.99/mo or $29.99/yr) adds cross-device sync, the full prompt library, and template export.
For deariary, sign up at deariary.com (free with one integration). Authorize whichever single service is already in your day (Google Calendar if you live in meetings, GitHub if you ship code, Bluesky if you post often) and the first entry will be ready by the next morning.
Both products are answering the same question: how do you make a diary that does not have empty days in it? Grid Diary’s answer is to make those days easier to fill. deariary’s answer is to fill them on your behalf.
