Day One is the best journalling app that exists and the case for leaving it has nothing to do with quality.
It has been shipping since 2011, it runs on the Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows and the web, and the details are right in the way only a long-maintained app gets right. Entries pick up the date, the weather and your step count without being asked. On This Day puts you in front of something you wrote four years ago. There are templates, a map view, writing prompts, and it will print the archive as a hardback book. All from dayoneapp.com/features, checked 18 September 2026.
People search for it as day one notes or one day notes. It is a journal rather than a notes app, and that distinction is most of this post.
Who Day One is for
If you write most days, stay. The streaks, the prompts, the calendar and On This Day are built around a daily habit, and they work. Nothing general-purpose replaces them.
If photos are half the entry, stay. Day One handles a journal that is mostly images better than any notes app does. The media is the point there, not an attachment.
If you write on a phone and read on a Mac, stay. Sync is the product here, and it is end-to-end encrypted, which is a rare combination.
If resurfacing is why you journal, stay. Being shown an old entry unprompted is what makes a decade of writing worth having, and it is the hardest thing here to replace.
What it costs, precisely
From Day One's own pricing guide, checked 18 September 2026, and annual only — there is no monthly option listed.
Basic is free and more capable than people assume: unlimited entries and journals, one photo per entry, writing prompts, end-to-end encryption, export, and cloud backup for one active device.
Silver is $49.99 a year — this is the tier that used to be called Premium — and adds up to 30 media items per entry and sync across all your devices.
Gold is $74.99 a year and adds the AI features: Daily Chat, Entry Highlights, Go Deeper, title suggestions, image generation, multi-entry summaries.
So the real line is Basic against Silver, and Silver is a sync-and-photos subscription. If you journal on one Mac and nowhere else, the free tier is already a complete journalling app and there is nothing to save by leaving at all.
The reasons people leave anyway
It is $49.99 a year for a diary. Not for a work tool that pays for itself, but for the private document nobody else reads. That is a defensible price for what is being maintained, and it still feels different from every other subscription when the renewal lands.
The journal-specific features only pay off daily. Weather, step count, streaks and prompts are built for someone writing every evening. Write once a week, when something happens, and you are paying for the scaffolding of a habit you do not have.
Two apps for one kind of writing. People keep notes in one app and the journal in Day One, then notice the boundary is arbitrary. The decision log, the work notes and the personal entries are the same act with different headings.
The ownership question. Day One was acquired by Automattic in June 2021; founder Paul Mayne stayed on to lead the team (TechCrunch, Day One's announcement). That is the whole factual position as of writing. But a journal is a thirty-year document whose owner is now a larger company with other priorities, which is a fair thing to weigh — the same thinking as what happens to your notes when you die.
Getting ten years of entries out
A journal with a decade of entries and several thousand photos is a genuinely awkward migration, and no route is clean. From Day One's export guide, checked 18 September 2026:
JSON is the complete one. Entries plus media, attachments organised into folders by type — photos, videos, audio, PDFs. It keeps everything, and it is the one format you cannot read without a tool.
PDF keeps the formatting and puts photos inline. Tables do not render. This is the archive format: readable forever, editable never.
Plain Text / Markdown keeps the text and the Markdown syntax and drops the photos entirely. This is the one that catches people out. On iOS there is also CSV: entry text and date only.
On the web, JSON is the only option. PDF, plain text and CSV are Mac and mobile exports.
One more thing: Day One's encryption FAQ states that only Sync backups are encrypted — JSON exports and text backups are not. Your export is plaintext from the moment it lands, which matters for where you keep it.
The realistic migration is JSON plus a converter — an Obsidian community plugin, or one of several scripts that turn the JSON and its media folders into Markdown with front matter. They work, they are third-party, and you should check fifty entries rather than five.
And "a folder of Markdown and photos I can read without any app" is a legitimate destination on its own. You do not have to import it anywhere. Getting your entries out plus a fresh start elsewhere is often the sane version of a ten-year migration.
What you give up
No resurfacing. Nothing will show you 18 September 2021 unprompted, and you will miss it.
No photo handling of that quality. A notes app stores images; it does not build a journal round them.
No end-to-end encrypted sync. You get a journal that never leaves the machine instead — a different guarantee, not a strictly better one.
No prompts. If a prompt is what gets you writing, removing it removes the writing.
The honest version
Cyanote is not a journalling app. No On This Day, no weather, no streak, no prompt, no phone app, no sync. On Day One's own ground it loses outright.
What it offers is the other shape: entries that are simply notes, ⇧⌘D for today's dated note, any note lockable and encrypted where it sits, everything in one SQLite file on your own disk alongside your to-dos, calendar and clipboard, for $7.99 once, no account, and no subscription to leave.
If the journal is a daily practice with photographs in it, stay where you are. If it is a document you add to when something happens, and it has been quietly costing $49.99 a year to keep in a separate app, that is the trade on offer — and do the export first either way.