| Category | Journal | From |
|---|---|---|
| Best for swing trading | TradePiko | $20/month |
| Best all-rounder | Tradezella | $35/month |
| Best value for depth of analysis | TradesViz | $19.99/month, free tier |
| Best for multi-asset traders | TraderSync | $29.95/month |
| Best for reviewing with a coach | Tradervue | $29.95/month |
| Best on trading psychology | Edgewonk | $197/year |
| Free option | A spreadsheet | Free |
Prices taken from each product's own pricing page in September 2026. This category changes quickly — check before you buy.
Almost every journal in this category was designed around day trading and extended toward swing traders afterwards. You can see it in what they measure: time-of-day heat maps, per-session P&L, commission analysis across hundreds of round trips a month.
A swing trader takes far fewer trades than a day trader and holds each one across many sessions. At that frequency commissions are noise. And far more than the entry and exit matters: what the market was doing while you held, how far the trade ran in your favour before you got out and how far it went against you first, how large the position was against the account, and what you did to it along the way. That whole window is what a day trading journal is not built to look at.
TradePiko started at the other end, which is why it sits at number one here. Everything below follows from that. If you want the criteria rather than the head-to-head, the longer buyer's guide is here.
Best for: traders holding positions for days or weeks whose biggest open question is whether their exits are costing them money.
The only tool on this list built for the multi-day holding period rather than adapted to it from a day trading product. It re-runs the trades you actually took under a different exit rule or a different position size and recalculates P&L, win rate, profit factor and expectancy against what really happened — not a backtest of a strategy you have never traded, but your own filled orders, replayed.
Around that sit the parts a swing trader needs and a day trading journal has no reason to build: MFE and MAE across the whole hold, live analytics on positions you are still carrying, sizing driven by your rolling win rate rather than a fixed percentage, and a curated watchlist of current momentum leaders instead of a screener returning four hundred names.
Pricing: Standard $20/month covers the journal, auto-generated charts, Live Position Analytics, tagging, the Mistake Tracker and broker sync. Pro $40/month adds the simulation engine, the Position Sizing Advisor, MFE / MAE, the AI Trade Coach, the Daily Report Card, Model Books and the PIKO 50. 7-day free trial, no free tier.
Best for: traders who run more than one style and want a single polished tool that does a great deal competently.
The most recognisable name in the category and the most refined interface here. Broker sync, an analytics dashboard, a Notebook with custom templates, trading-plan building and a Zella University library sit behind a genuinely well-made product, and Zella AI reviews trades alongside you.
Its centre of gravity is the intraday trader — the replay is tick-level and the reporting is built for volume — but very little of it is wasted on a swing trader. Tick-by-tick Trade Replay and a backtesting engine give it a real answer to whether a trade could have gone differently; R-multiple statistics and trade rating speak to sizing and execution quality; and reports that surface your best and worst days and your top setups answer which setups make money.
Pricing: Essential $35/month, Pro $59, Ultra $99. No free tier. Auto-sync is on every tier, but Essential connects a single account; Pro raises it to 50 and Ultra is unlimited.
Best for: traders who want the maximum amount of data and enjoy configuring a tool until it shows exactly what they want.
The most analysis per dollar anywhere in this category: 70+ interactive charts, 50+ pivot-table statistics and drag-and-drop custom dashboards, across stocks, futures, options, forex, crypto and indices. The free tier covers 3,000 executions a month permanently, which makes it the easiest thing on this list to try properly before paying.
Its exit-analysis charts — multi-timeframe, end-of-day and best-exit — get closer to "would a different exit have made more money" than anything else here short of a simulator, and the pivot grid will break expectancy down by setup, symbol, day of week or anything else you tag, as thoroughly as you are willing to configure it.
Pricing: free Basic tier, Pro $19.99/month (10 accounts), Platinum $29.99 (20 accounts). Auto-sync starts at Pro — the free tier is manual import only.
Best for: traders whose activity runs across several asset classes rather than equities alone.
The widest coverage on this list — one of the longest-established journals, with the largest broker network in the category and analytics spanning stocks, options, futures, forex, crypto, CFDs and indices.
The Playbook is the standout. You define a setup formally — name it, write the entry criteria, describe how it is supposed to behave — and then score each trade against how closely it actually matched, which attacks "which setups make money" and "how good was the execution" in the same place. Mistake tags such as FOMO or failing to cut a loss carry through into the reports, so errors accumulate somewhere you can read them.
Pricing: Pro $29.95/month, Premium $49.95, Elite $79.95. 7-day trial, no free tier. Auto-import is on every tier; Pro caps you at five connected accounts.
Best for: anyone whose review process involves another person — a coach, a mentor, or a study group.
The veteran of the category, and still the most natural fit for putting your trading in front of someone else. You can invite a mentor by email for read-only access to your whole log and reports with private per-trade comments, share a single trade or the full journal by private link, or post to the public feed and message boards for feedback.
On the analysis side, MFE and MAE are first-class here — it shows the most you were up and the most you were down on every trade — and its exit performance metric scores your actual exit as a percentage of the best exit available, which is a genuine partial answer to the exit question without a simulator behind it.
Pricing: Silver $29.95/month, Gold $49.95. Broker sync is listed on both paid tiers.
Best for: traders who are confident the problem is discipline rather than data.
Sold as a yearly licence rather than a monthly subscription, and the deepest thing here on the behavioural side. The Psychology Lab tracks your state alongside the trade itself, the Edge Finder scans your history for patterns of strength and weakness you have not noticed, and the mistake-tracking system exists to make errors countable rather than remembered.
It comes at the analysis from the other side. Chart Lab carries 50+ reports and the Strategy Lab tests an idea against your own history before you commit real size to it, but the question Edgewonk is really built for is what you were doing while the trade was open, and whether that is repeatable.
Pricing: $197/year, annual licence only, 14-day money-back guarantee. Only MetaTrader 4 and 5 sync automatically; every other broker imports from a file.
| TradePiko | Tradezella | TradesViz | TraderSync | Tradervue | Edgewonk | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $20/mo | $35/mo | $19.99/mo | $29.95/mo | $29.95/mo | $197/yr |
| Free tier | 7-day trial | No | Yes, 3,000 execs/mo | 7-day trial | Trial | 14-day refund |
| Auto-sync on entry tier | Yes | Yes, 1 account | Paid tiers only | Yes, 5 accounts | Yes | MetaTrader only |
| Brokers supported | 40 | 500+ | 250+ | 900+ | 80+ | 200+ |
| Built around | Multi-day swing | All styles | Data depth | Multi-asset | Shared review | Behaviour |
| Testing a different exit | Simulation on your own fills | Backtesting + tick replay | Best-exit charts | Market replay | Exit vs best exit % | Strategy Lab |
| Position sizing | Advisor driven by win rate | R-multiple stats | Pivot stats | Risk reports | Risk reports | Risk/return profile |
| Open positions | Live Position Analytics | Dashboard | Dashboards | Dashboard | Dashboard | Open trade view |
| MFE / MAE | Full hold | Trade rating | Excursion charts | Trade analytics | First-class | Chart Lab reports |
| Per-setup expectancy | Per-tag statistics | Top-setup reports | Pivot grid | Playbook scoring | Tag reports | Edge Finder |
| Mistake tracking | With a dollar cost | Loss recaps | Notes and tags | Mistake tags | Notes | Core feature |
| AI review | AI Trade Coach | Zella AI | AI Coach + Query | Cypher AI | — | — |
| Sharing with a coach | Share a trade | Spaces | Share links | Share links | Mentor access | — |
| Curated watchlist | PIKO 50 | — | — | — | — | — |
Broker counts are each vendor's own published figure. Feature names are what each product calls the nearest thing it offers, not a judgement on how well it works — the only way to settle that is to trial them.
Not a product, but genuinely the right answer for some people. It fails in a predictable order: manual entry becomes tedious enough to skip, then MFE and MAE need intraday highs and lows for every hold, then pulling the chart for an eight-month-old trade takes long enough that you stop. Getting the data in at all starts with exporting it from your broker.
Whichever one you will still be filling in after sixty days. TradesViz has a permanent free tier, so it costs nothing to find out whether you are the kind of trader who keeps a journal. If you already know you swing trade, start where the tool is aimed at that.
Tradezella or TraderSync. Both are built around the intraday session — tick-level replay, time-of-day analysis, per-session reporting — and that is a genuinely different product from one built around a three-week hold.
Not on every plan. TradesViz's free tier is manual import only, Edgewonk auto-syncs MetaTrader 4 and 5 and imports everything else from a file, and Tradezella's entry plan connects one account. TradePiko, TraderSync and Tradervue sync on their entry tiers.
This is the question the category handles worst. TradePiko re-runs your own filled trades under a different exit and recalculates the result. TradesViz's best-exit charts and Tradervue's exit-performance metric both get part of the way there by measuring the gap between your exit and the best one available. The rest answer it with a replay, which shows you the trade again rather than the alternative.
Usually, via CSV. Every tool here imports a spreadsheet, so the practical cost of switching is re-tagging your setups rather than losing the trades.
Only if you would not keep the spreadsheet. The value is in the data arriving without you typing it, and in the questions the tool answers that you would never compute by hand.
A journal measures. It does not trade, and it does not supply discipline. If you are not going to review what it records, the most sophisticated tool here will produce the same outcome as a spreadsheet you abandon in six weeks.
Which is the actual selection criterion, and it is not on anyone's feature list: trial the one you like and see whether you are still filling it in after sixty days. The tool you keep using beats the tool that scored higher on a comparison table, including this one.
Broker sync from 40 brokerages, MFE and MAE on every trade, a daily chart around every entry and exit, and a simulation engine that re-runs your real trades under a different exit. 7-day free trial, cancel before it ends and you are not charged.
Start free trial →