Best Free Trading Journal in 2026: 5 That Are Actually Free

Search for a free trading journal and most of the results are not free. They are 7-day trials that need a card, 14-day money-back windows that need the money first, or free tiers that quietly exclude the market you actually trade.

This is the honest list. Five journals with a genuinely permanent free plan, what each one caps, and which fits which trader. Call it a journal, a diary, a log or a trade tracker, the search is the same and so is the answer. Every price and limit here was checked against the vendor's own pricing page, most recently on 8 September 2026.

"Free" Comes in Three Shapes

Before the list, the distinction that decides everything:

1. Permanently free, capped by volume. You can stay on it forever, but you can only log so many trades a month. TradingSFX, Tradervue, TradesViz and Trademetria all work this way.

2. Permanently free, capped by market. No time limit and a generous trade count, but your asset class is not included. This is the one that catches people out, because the cap is invisible until you try to import.

3. Not free at all. A refund window or a card-gated trial marketed as free. TradeZella, TraderSync, Edgewonk and Journalytix are here.

The Five That Are Actually Free

Tradervue — the most generous count, if you trade US equities

Tradervue's free tier is permanent, not a countdown. It allows 30 grouped trades a month, and grouped is doing real work in that sentence: every execution belonging to one position counts as a single trade. Scaling in with four fills and out with two is one trade against the cap, not six. For a swing trader taking a few positions a week, 30 is not a limit you will feel.

The wall is the asset list. The free tier is stocks and ETFs only. Futures, forex and options are paid features. If you trade EUR/USD, this is not a smaller Tradervue for you, it is not available to you.

Best for: US equity swing traders who want a permanent free journal with serious reporting depth. Full tiers in our Tradervue pricing breakdown.

TradesViz — the highest ceiling for volume

The free Basic plan allows 3,000 executions a month on one trading account, which is by far the most volume any free tier here will absorb. Charting and analytics are unusually deep for a free product.

Two catches. It is stocks only on Basic, and auto-sync is not included, so imports are manual or by file. High-volume day traders get the count they need and then hit the market restriction. Futures, forex, options and crypto all start at Pro, which is $14.99 a month billed annually.

Best for: high-frequency US stock traders who want free analytics depth and do not mind importing by hand. More options in TradesViz alternatives.

Trademetria — free with most features on

Trademetria's free plan allows 30 orders a month on one account, plus 3 tracked open positions. What stands out is how little is fenced off: the journal, key metrics, day trade report, calendar, analytics and trade export are all available without paying, and every asset class is included, futures and CFDs among them.

Paid tiers move to $19.95 a month for Basic (500 orders a month, one account) and $29.95 for Pro (unlimited orders, up to 50 accounts).

Best for: multi-asset traders at low volume who want the widest feature set on a free tier.

Myfxbook — unlimited, but it is analytics, not a journal

Myfxbook is free, unlimited, and auto-syncs live from MT4 and MT5. For a forex trader who wants win rate, drawdown and profit factor computed automatically with no manual entry, nothing else on this page competes.

Understand what it is, though. Myfxbook analyses account performance. It does not journal the decision: why you took the trade, what conditions were present, what you were feeling, what the chart looked like. It will tell you that your Tuesdays are red. It will not tell you that your Tuesdays are red because you trade the London open without your setup confirmation.

Best for: forex traders on MetaTrader who want automatic performance stats and are not trying to audit their own reasoning.

TradingSFX — the smallest count, the widest market coverage

Full disclosure, this is our product, so read the number rather than the adjective. The free Basic plan is 10 trades a month, permanently, no card. That is the lowest trade cap on this page.

What it buys at that count: every market the platform supports rather than a stocks-only slice, which means forex, indices, gold and metals, crypto, stocks and the CME futures contracts with their real contract sizes. Plus the position size calculator, equity curve, chart replay backtesting, and CSV and JSON export so your data is never hostage. Ten trades a month is a real constraint for a day trader and irrelevant for a swing trader, and it is enough sample to answer the only question a free plan needs to answer, which is whether journaling changes how you trade.

Best for: forex, indices, gold, crypto and futures traders who want an actual journal on a free plan, since Tradervue and TradesViz exclude those markets and Myfxbook does not journal reasoning.

The Ones That Are Not Free

Worth knowing so you stop searching for a free tier that does not exist:

• TradeZella — no free plan, no trial. Essential $35/month ($26/month billed annually), Pro $59, Ultra $99. A 14-day money-back request is the only exit. Detail: is TradeZella free?
• TraderSync — no free plan. It had a free Basic tier once and removed it. A 7-day trial needs no card but restricts CSV export while it runs, which matters if the plan was to import your history, read the reports and leave with your data. Entry $29.95/month.
• Edgewonk — no free plan and no trial. $197 per term with a 14-day money-back guarantee, so the money leaves your account first. VAT is added at checkout for EU and UK buyers.
• Journalytix — no free plan, single tier at $47/month.

And the Actually Free Option Nobody Lists

A spreadsheet. It costs nothing, it works offline, and for your first fifty trades it is genuinely fine.

It stops being fine in predictable ways: screenshots have nowhere to live, filtering performance by two setup conditions at once turns into a pivot-table project, every report is manual chart work, and a single formula error silently corrupts months of statistics without ever throwing a warning. We wrote up where the wall usually is in trading journal template vs Excel.

Which One, By Market

The question that settles it is not which journal is best. It is which one includes your market on the free tier.

• US stocks, moderate volume → Tradervue free. Thirty grouped trades is a lot when scaling counts as one.
• US stocks, high volume → TradesViz free, for the 3,000 executions.
• Forex on MT4/MT5, want it automatic → Myfxbook, unlimited and synced.
• Forex, indices, gold or crypto, want a real journal → TradingSFX free.
• Futures → Trademetria free at 30 orders, or TradingSFX free at 10 trades.
• Multi-asset with low volume, want maximum features free → Trademetria free.
• Fewer than 50 trades total → a spreadsheet, honestly.

The sections below take each of those markets in turn, because the free tiers behave very differently once you name what you trade.

The Best Free Trading Journal for Forex

Forex is the market where "free" thins out fastest. Two of the four capped-by-volume options do not accept a forex trade at all: Tradervue's free tier is stocks and ETFs, TradesViz's free tier is stocks. So the free forex shortlist is three names, and they answer different questions.

Myfxbook is the automatic one. Connect MT4 or MT5 with the read-only investor password and your trades appear with no typing, unlimited, forever. If your question is "what is my real drawdown and win rate", this settles it today and costs nothing.

TradingSFX is the journaling one. Ten trades a month is the tightest cap here, but each of those trades carries the screenshot, the setup tag, the notes and the conditions you checked before entering, which is what makes a pattern visible later.

Trademetria sits between them: 30 orders a month, forex included, most reporting unlocked.

The decision rule most forex traders land on: if you want your numbers, use Myfxbook. If you want to know why the numbers look like that, you need something that records the decision, and then the cap becomes the thing you plan around rather than the thing you avoid. Running both is free and takes about ten minutes to set up.

If your broker is MetaTrader and you would rather not type anything at all, how MT4 and MT5 auto-import actually works covers what a statement sync can and cannot tell you.

The Best Free Trading Journal for Day Trading

Day trading breaks free tiers, and it breaks them on the count rather than the features. Thirty trades a month is two sessions. Ten is one.

TradesViz free is the only tier on this page built for that volume: 3,000 executions a month, on one account. If you day trade US stocks, that is the answer and there is not a close second. The trade-off is that it is stocks only and auto-sync is paid, so you import a file at the end of the day.

If you day trade forex or futures, no free plan absorbs that count and pretending otherwise wastes your week. Two approaches actually work:

Journal a sample, not everything. Log your A-setups only, the ones that follow your written plan, plus every trade you took that broke a rule. Ten trades a month of those two categories tells you more than 200 undifferentiated scalps, because the comparison you need is between "followed the plan" and "did not", and both groups are in there.

Journal one week per month in full. A complete week gives you time-of-day and sequence data that a sample cannot, and it fits in most free caps.

Either way, what kills day traders in a journal is not the missing trades, it is never going back to read it. A discipline score that scores rule adherence does more for a day trader than a bigger trade allowance.

The Best Free Trading Journal for Stocks

Stocks is the best-served market on free tiers, which is the mirror image of forex. All five options accept a stock trade, and three of them were built around one.

• TradesViz for volume: 3,000 executions a month, one account, deep charting.
• Tradervue for reporting depth at swing-trading pace: 30 grouped trades a month, so scaling in and out does not eat the cap.
• Trademetria if you also trade options or futures alongside equities: 30 orders a month, all asset classes.

The one thing to check before importing is account count. Tradervue, TradesViz and Trademetria free are all one account. If you run a taxable account and an IRA, or a personal account and a funded one, that limit bites before the trade count does.

The Best Free Trading Journal for Futures

Futures is the worst-served market on free tiers, and most "best free trading journal" lists never mention it.

The two well-known free tiers exclude it outright. Tradervue free is stocks and ETFs. TradesViz free is stocks, with futures starting at Pro ($14.99 a month billed annually). That leaves two:

• Trademetria free — 30 orders a month, futures included along with every other asset class.
• TradingSFX free — 10 trades a month, with the CME index, metal and energy contracts supported directly: ES, MES, NQ, MNQ, YM, MYM, RTY, M2K, GC, MGC, SI, CL, MCL and NG. Contract sizes are built in, so a 2-contract MNQ trade computes its own P&L and R multiple instead of asking you to do the arithmetic.

For funded futures traders the free question is usually the wrong one anyway. What decides a challenge is the daily loss limit and the drawdown, and no free tier tracks those. If that is your situation, what a prop firm journal has to track is the more useful read.

Free Trading Journals That Import Your Trades Automatically

Automatic import is the single most reliably paywalled feature in this category, so it is worth being blunt about what free actually gets you.

Free and automatic: Myfxbook only. MT4 and MT5 sync live, unlimited, at no cost. Everything else on this page charges for a broker connection, including TradingSFX, whose MetaTrader import sits on the paid plans.

Free and semi-automatic: CSV import, which every option here supports. This is the part most people underrate. Your broker already exports a history file, and a CSV import maps its columns once and then loads months of trades in a single pass. It is not live, but it is also not typing.

The practical setup for a free plan is: export from your broker at the end of the week, import the file, then spend the ten minutes adding what the file does not contain, which is the screenshot and the reason. The broker file has the what. You are there for the why. Quick logging and CSV import walks through that in detail.

Is There a Free Trading Journal App?

Searches for free trading journal software, apps and downloads all land in the same place in 2026: the category moved to the browser.

Every journal on this page is a web app, which means it opens on a phone without an install and your data is on the account rather than the device. The one genuine desktop download among the well-known journals is Edgewonk, and it is paid at $197.

That matters for a specific reason. A trading journal is only useful if you fill it in near the trade, and the browser on the phone you are already holding beats a desktop program you will open on Sunday. Whatever you pick, check that it opens cleanly on your phone before you decide it is the one.

What No Free Plan Includes

Consistent across every option here, so budget for it if you need it:

• Broker auto-import is a paid feature everywhere except Myfxbook.
• Prop firm rule tracking does not exist on any free tier, and on most paid tiers either. If you are running a funded challenge, that is the thing to check before anything else. What to track in a prop firm journal covers what the rules actually require.
• AI review of your trades is paid across the board.
• Chart replay backtesting is paid where it exists at all, with one exception: TradingSFX opened its replay backtester to free accounts, where you can practise on your own imported data without a card.

Bottom Line

If you trade US equities, Tradervue's free plan is the most generous serious journal on the market and you should start there. If you trade forex on MetaTrader and want zero manual work, Myfxbook is free and unlimited.

If you trade forex, indices, gold, crypto or futures and want a journal that records why you took the trade rather than just what it did, the free tiers that exclude your market are not options at all, which narrows the list considerably. TradingSFX Basic is free forever at 10 trades a month across every market it supports, no card.

Whichever you pick, pick one this week. The gap between traders who journal and traders who intend to is wider than the gap between any two products on this page.

Comparing paid tiers instead? See the best trading journals in 2026 roundup.

Published July 29, 2026 · Updated September 8, 2026 — free-tier caps, market coverage and paid entry prices re-verified against each vendor's own pricing page: Trademetria (free 30 orders, Basic 500 orders at $19.95, Pro $29.95), TradeZella ($35/$59/$99, no free plan), TraderSync ($29.95 entry, free Basic tier discontinued), Edgewonk ($197, no trial), Tradervue and TradesViz free-tier market limits. Vendors change limits without notice, so confirm before committing.