Free Trading Journals That Are Actually Free

The phrase free trading journal covers two very different things, and the difference costs people money. Some tools run a real free plan you can use indefinitely. Others run a seven or fourteen day trial, call it free in the marketing, and start billing once you have already imported six months of history. Below are the six that are genuinely free in 2026, what each one actually includes, and where the free version stops being enough.

One disclosure up front. JournalX is a paid trading journal with a trial, so it is not on this list. We wrote it anyway because for a lot of traders a free tool is the right starting point, and a journal you never open is worth nothing at any price.

Free plan or free trial? Check this first

Before comparing features, check which model a tool is running. It is the single most common trap in this category.

• A free plan never expires. You may hit a cap, lose auto-sync, or be limited to one asset class, but you keep your account and your data without paying.
• A free trial expires, usually after 7 or 14 days, and most require a card up front. Useful for testing, useless as a long-term journal.

Here is where the well-known names actually land as of August 2026. TradeZella has neither a free plan nor a free trial, and its cheapest tier is $35 a month ($26 billed annually). TraderSync offers a 7-day trial with no card required, but no free plan. Edgewonk has no free tier and now runs $197 a year after dropping its old one-time license. None of those three belong on a free list, whatever a comparison page tells you.

The 6 genuinely free trading journals at a glance

1. StonkJournal (the only uncapped free plan)

StonkJournal is the closest thing to a free journal with no strings. The free plan gives you unlimited trades and unlimited accounts with no credit card, across stocks, options, futures, forex, and crypto, and it has been running since 2021. You get multi-leg options detection, stackable filters, a stats page with an equity curve, a calendar heatmap, and rule-based risk settings. It installs as a progressive web app, so it works on a phone.

The trade-off is entry. The free tier is manual only, with a fast entry form rather than any import. CSV import from brokers like Schwab, Fidelity, E*TRADE, Webull, Robinhood, and Interactive Brokers sits on the $10 a month Pro plan, alongside an AI coach and aggregated multi-account dashboards. Direct broker sync is still on the roadmap rather than shipped. If you take twenty trades a week, hand-logging will hurt.

Best for traders who want an uncapped journal at zero cost and are willing to type trades in themselves.

2. TradesViz Basic (the most analytics you can get for free)

TradesViz has the deepest analytics of anything with a free tier. The Basic plan is free forever with no card, and it is the rare free plan that includes broker sync, though only stock trades import on the free tier. You get P&L tracking, notes, and charts on your trades, backed by the same engine that powers the paid tiers.

The limits are specific and worth reading twice. Basic caps you at 3,000 executions a month, one trading account, and stocks only, with two charts per trade and two indicators each. An execution is a fill, not a round-trip trade, so a scalper who gets partial fills can burn through that faster than the number suggests. AI features, simulators, and the full 600+ chart library are paid. Pro is $19.99 a month and Platinum $29.99, both cheaper annually, and TradesViz applies regional pricing in some countries.

Best for data-driven traders who mostly trade stocks and want real analytics without paying.

3. TradeTally (free forever if you self-host)

TradeTally is the open source pick, and unlike most projects in this corner it is actively maintained, with commits landing in August 2026. It is licensed under Apache 2.0, ships as a Docker image, and the self-hosted version includes every paid feature with no cap and no subscription. It imports from Lightspeed, Charles Schwab, ThinkorSwim, Interactive Brokers, E*TRADE, and ProjectX, with automatic sync for Schwab and IBKR, handles options and futures contracts, draws candlestick charts with your entries and exits marked, and has behavioral analytics that flag things like revenge trading. There is also a hosted version at tradetally.io with a free tier and a paid Pro plan, plus an iOS app.

The cost is your time. You need to be comfortable running Docker and a Postgres database, keeping it patched, and backing it up, and full market data needs a Finnhub API key. If data privacy matters to you more than convenience, this is the strongest free option on the list.

Best for technically comfortable traders who want no caps, no subscription, and their data on their own machine.

4. Tradervue Free (mature tool, 30 trades a month)

Tradervue has been around longer than almost anything else here, and it still runs a free Basic plan with basic reporting, journaling, and trade sharing. The catch is the quota. Free accounts can import 30 trades per calendar month, and that counts logical trades rather than individual executions, so a single trade built from twelve fills still uses one slot. Go over and the extra trades simply do not import until the next month.

Two things to know. Broker sync, advanced reports, and unlimited imports are all paid, at $29.95 a month for Silver or $49.95 for Gold. And Tradervue no longer advertises the free plan on its pricing page, which now shows only the two paid tiers, though the free plan still exists and is documented in its help center. That is a soft signal about where the product is heading, so do not build a five-year habit on it without a backup export.

Best for swing traders and low-volume traders who want a proven journal and stay under 30 trades a month.

5. Myfxbook (free auto-sync for MetaTrader forex traders)

If you trade forex on MT4 or MT5, Myfxbook is free, uncapped, and syncs live with no manual entry at all. You connect a read-only investor password, and it pulls your trade history and keeps updating it, then computes balance, equity, drawdown, win rate, and profit factor for you. For pure performance tracking with zero effort, it is hard to beat at zero dollars.

Be clear about what it is, though. Myfxbook is an account analytics and track-record tool more than a journal. It records what happened, not why you took the trade, so there is no real place for setup tagging, screenshots, a pre-trade plan, or the notes that make a review useful. Plenty of traders run it alongside a written journal rather than instead of one.

Best for MT4 and MT5 forex traders who want automatic performance stats for free.

6. A spreadsheet (still the most flexible free option)

Google Sheets, Excel, and Notion remain the most-used free trading journals in the world, and dismissing them is a mistake. A spreadsheet costs nothing, runs anywhere, exports anywhere, and you can shape it around how you actually think about your trades. Log the date, symbol, direction, setup, entry, stop, target, exit, and size, and a handful of formulas will give you R-multiple, expectancy, and win rate by setup. Free templates for all three are everywhere.

The reason people leave is friction, not capability. Nothing syncs, nothing validates your typing, and a spreadsheet does not analyze itself. A fee or a partial fill you forget to enter quietly corrupts your numbers. At a few trades a week this is often the right answer. At a few a day, it is usually the reason the journal stops getting updated.

Best for traders who want total control, low volume, and no dependency on any company.

Two more worth knowing

Trademetria runs a free plan capped at 30 order imports a month, one account, and three open positions, which is tight but real. TradeNote is the older open source journal, GPL-3.0 with about 900 GitHub stars, and it still works, but its last commit was April 2025, so treat it as unmaintained.

What a free journal actually costs you

Free plans are not charity. Every tool here funds itself by holding something back, and it is nearly always one of these four:

• Automatic import. The most valuable feature is the one most often paywalled, because manual entry is what makes people upgrade. Manual logging is also where journals go to die, so be honest about whether you will keep it up.
• Analytics depth. Free tiers give you P&L, win rate, and a calendar. Slicing expectancy and profit factor by setup, session, and time of day is usually paid, and that slicing is where the useful answers live.
• Asset classes and accounts. Several free plans are stocks-only or single-account. If you trade futures and options across two accounts, check this before anything else.
• Your exit. Confirm you can export your full history to CSV before you commit. A journal that holds your trades hostage is expensive later, whatever it costs today.

Which free trading journal should you pick?

Whichever you pick, the tool is the smaller half of this. The habit is what produces the insight, and our guide on how to keep a trading journal plus the weekly trade review process cover the routine that makes any journal, free or paid, worth opening. It also helps to know which numbers deserve your attention, because a high win rate can still lose money.

The bottom line

There is a genuinely free trading journal for almost every kind of trader in 2026. StonkJournal wins on no caps, TradesViz on analytics, TradeTally on ownership, Myfxbook on free forex syncing, Tradervue on maturity at low volume, and a spreadsheet on flexibility. Start free, log real trades for a month, and let the friction tell you what you need. The moment manual entry costs more time than the review saves is the moment a paid tool starts making sense, and our comparison of the best trading journals covers that field in detail.