Best Trading Journal for MetaTrader (MT4/MT5) in 2026

Search for a MetaTrader trading journal and every result claims to support MT4 and MT5. That checkbox is almost meaningless. Behind it sit four different mechanisms that ask for different things, break in different ways, and in two cases do not cover both platforms equally.

Worse, the price you see is often not your price. Two of the best-known journals put forex behind a paid tier, so the free plan you were comparing does not exist for someone trading EUR/USD on MetaTrader.

This is the comparison that survives contact with reality. Seven journals, what each one actually does to get your trades out of MetaTrader, and the cheapest plan where a MetaTrader forex trader is genuinely covered. Every price and connection method here was checked on 9 September 2026 against the vendor's own pricing, integration or help pages.

"Supports MetaTrader" Means One of Four Things

The trade is the same one every time. Anything that keeps syncing while your platform is closed has to hold a credential on a server somewhere. Anything that holds no credential has to run inside your terminal, which means your terminal has to be running.

An investor password is read-only because your broker issues it without trade permissions, so it genuinely cannot open a position. It is also a live credential sitting in a third party's database, and databases leak. Neither answer is wrong. Pick the one whose failure mode you can live with, and never hand any journal your master password.

The mechanics of each route, including the full Expert Advisor walkthrough and the WebRequest whitelist step that silently breaks most installs, are covered in how to auto-import MT4 and MT5 trades. This post is about which journal to pick.

The Seven, and What They Actually Do

Myfxbook, free and automatic, but not a journal

Myfxbook links an MT4 or MT5 account through a read-only connection and tracks it for nothing, forever. For pure track-record and account statistics it is unbeaten on price.

What it does not do is journal. There is no record of which setup you traded, what the chart looked like, or whether you followed your own rules. It measures the account, not the decisions. If your problem is "I do not know my drawdown", Myfxbook solves it today. If your problem is "I do not know which of my setups is losing money", it cannot help, because it never collected that information.

TradesViz, the most MetaTrader routes of anyone

TradesViz offers three separate ways in: an MT5 investor-password sync that runs server-side, FTP auto-import that MetaTrader triggers on a schedule, and a real-time Expert Advisor that reports executions as they happen. The FTP route removed for MT5 in favour of the newer credential method still serves MT4, and the investor-password path is documented as MT5 only for now.

That asymmetry matters if MT4 is your platform, because the MT4 routes both want your terminal open, while the MT5 route does not. The free plan is stocks only, so a forex trader starts at Pro, $19.99 a month, which is the joint-cheapest automatic MetaTrader import in this comparison. The tool is dense, statistics-first, and has the steepest learning curve here.

TraderSync, the widest net beyond MetaTrader

TraderSync pulls MT4 and MT5 automatically and backs it with a broker list in the hundreds, which is the strongest reason to choose it: if you also trade US equities or futures through a separate broker, one subscription consolidates everything. Entry is Pro at $29.95 a month, no free plan, and annual billing takes roughly 25% off but charges the full year upfront.

If MetaTrader is the only platform you use, you are paying for import breadth you will never touch.

Tradervue, an equities tool that accepts forex

Tradervue takes MT4 and MT5 through statement import rather than a live connection, so a MetaTrader trader is exporting and uploading a file rather than watching trades appear. The free tier is stocks and ETFs only. Forex requires Silver at $29.95 a month.

Tradervue is a serious, long-established journal, and the trade grouping in its reports is genuinely good. It was built for US equity day traders, and a MetaTrader forex trader is at the edge of its design rather than the middle.

TradeZella, the most marketed and the most expensive entry

TradeZella syncs MT4 and MT5 with your broker or firm name, server, login and investor password, or takes a statement upload instead. It supports a large broker and prop firm list and the interface is the most polished in the category.

It also has no free plan and starts at $35 a month, or $26 a month billed annually. Its Pro tier, where the backtesting and replay features people quote in reviews actually live, is $59 a month, and a third tier sits at $99. For a MetaTrader forex trader specifically, you are paying an equities-market price for a product whose depth is aimed elsewhere.

Edgewonk, the one-payment desktop option

Edgewonk uses a mechanism nobody else does: you paste Edgewonk's FTP details into MetaTrader's own Tools and Options FTP tab, and MetaTrader publishes its statement outward on its own schedule. No credential leaves your machine and no Expert Advisor is installed, though the platform still has to be running for a publish to happen.

Pricing is $197 per term billed as one payment with no monthly option, and EU and UK buyers pay VAT on top. Over twelve months that is the lowest per-month figure in this comparison, and it is also the largest cheque, paid before you know whether the workflow suits you. The statistical depth, particularly the exit analysis and the Tiltmeter, remains the reason people stay with it.

TradingSFX, the Expert Advisor route

We use the Expert Advisor push, and the reason is narrow enough to state plainly: we would rather not hold your broker credentials at all than hold read-only ones carefully. The EA installs into your own terminal, reads the closed history tab, and posts trades outward on a timer. It never sees a password and has no order function in it, so even a hostile copy could not open a position.

The cost of that choice is real. Your terminal has to be open for trades to sync. Close MetaTrader and syncing pauses, then catches up on everything that closed in between when you reopen it. Nothing is lost, it arrives late. If you want trades landing while your machine is off, one of the investor-password journals is the honest answer, and this post is not going to pretend otherwise.

MetaTrader auto-import is on Pro at $19.99 a month, with Premium at $29.99. Basic is free forever at 10 trades a month, logged manually, by CSV, or with the free TradingView indicator, which is enough to find out whether journaling changes how you trade before paying anything.

The Tier Trap Nobody Prices In

Three of the seven advertise a free plan. For a MetaTrader forex trader, one of them is real.

• Tradervue free: stocks and ETFs only. Forex needs Silver at $29.95.
• TradesViz free: stocks only, one account. Forex needs Pro at $19.99.
• Myfxbook: genuinely free for MT4 and MT5, and genuinely not a journal.

So the honest entry price for automatic MetaTrader import with a journal attached is $19.99 a month, from either TradingSFX or TradesViz. Everything cheaper is either statistics without journaling or a free tier that excludes your market. The five journals with a genuinely permanent free plan covers which caps bite first if free is the constraint.

The Four Fields No Connection Can Deliver

This is the part that decides whether the journal was worth paying for, and it is identical across all seven.

Every MetaTrader connection delivers the same execution data, because that is all MetaTrader ever recorded: symbol, direction, lots, entry and exit price, open and close times, duration, profit, commission and swap. Complete, accurate, and silent on everything that explains the result.

What never arrives:

1. Why you took the trade. No setup name, no conditions, no confluences. The question a journal exists to answer, and the import contributes nothing to it.
2. The chart. A row reading minus 180 dollars cannot tell a reasonable entry that lost from one that should never have been taken.
3. Whether you followed your rules. Only measurable if the check is recorded at the time.
4. The original stop. MetaTrader holds one stop-loss value and it is the final one, so a stop widened mid-trade leaves no trace. That single gap is why an R-multiple column can read positive on a losing account, and why the most expensive habit in retail trading is invisible in the statistic meant to measure risk.

What the MetaTrader export gives you and what it drops works through the same limits on the file version, including the Positions versus Deals choice that quietly doubles your trade count.

The practical consequence for choosing a journal: the import is table stakes, and every product here does it. The differentiator is what the journal does with the twenty seconds you spend typing the four fields it could not fetch. Ask that question of each shortlist candidate instead of counting supported brokers.

If You Run Prop Challenges

Most funded programmes run on MT4 or MT5, so a large share of MetaTrader journaling is challenge journaling, and it changes the shortlist.

Check three things. First, whether the journal separates accounts properly, because a challenge account and a personal account merged into one set of statistics tells you nothing about either. Second, whether the import can be pointed at each account independently, so a second challenge does not contaminate the first. Third, and this is where most of the market is thin, whether the journal tracks the rules rather than just the trades: daily loss, maximum drawdown, whether the trailing threshold moves under you, and how much you can risk today without breaching.

Broad broker support and prop firm rule tracking are different features, and vendors that lead with the first often have none of the second. What a prop firm journal has to track to pass a challenge sets out the rule arithmetic, and the prop trader page covers how the presets work here.

Pick By Shape, Not By Feature Count

• You want free account statistics and no journaling to Myfxbook.
• You want the cheapest automatic import with a real journal to TradingSFX Pro or TradesViz Pro, both $19.99. Choose on whether you prefer an EA in your terminal or a credential on their servers, and on whether you want a clean workflow or maximum statistics.
• You trade several platforms beyond MetaTrader to TraderSync, where the broker breadth earns its $29.95.
• You mostly trade US equities and some forex to Tradervue Silver.
• You want one payment and the deepest exit statistics to Edgewonk, if you can commit $197 upfront.
• You run prop firm challenges to whichever option tracks rule thresholds rather than only importing fills.
• Your terminal is rarely open to any of the investor-password journals, and rule out the EA and FTP routes entirely.

Bottom Line

Stop comparing MetaTrader support as a yes or no. Every journal here has it. The three questions that actually separate them are what the connection asks you to hand over, which plan puts your asset class in scope, and what the product does with the reasoning you type in yourself.

For a forex or indices trader on MetaTrader who wants the import automatic and the journal to record more than fills, the entry price is $19.99 a month, and the free tiers that exclude forex are not options at all. TradingSFX Pro includes MetaTrader auto-import with no password ever leaving your terminal, and Basic is free forever at 10 trades a month if you want to test the workflow first.

Whichever you choose, connect it 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.

Published September 9, 2026. Competitor pricing and connection methods verified 9 September 2026 against each vendor's own pricing, integration and help pages: TradeZella pricing (Essential $35/mo or $26/mo annual, Pro $59/mo, Ultra $99/mo) and its MetaTrader 4/5 linking article (broker name, server, login, investor password, or statement upload); TraderSync pricing (Pro $29.95, Premium $49.95, Elite $79.95) and its MT4/MT5 auto-sync announcement; TradesViz pricing (free stocks only, Pro $19.99, Platinum $29.99) and its MetaTrader auto-import documentation (MT5 investor-password sync, MT4 FTP auto-import, real-time EA); Tradervue platform and pricing pages (free tier stocks and ETFs only, Silver $29.95, Gold $49.95); Edgewonk help centre MetaTrader 4/5 auto-sync article (FTP publishing) and $197 per term with VAT added for EU and UK; Myfxbook read-only account linking. Vendor domains are blocked by this environment's egress proxy, so figures come from indexed extracts of those official pages corroborated across two independent searches each. Vendors change pricing and integrations without notice, so confirm before switching tools.