Alternatives
Products that do what Retro Journal does
Local-first journaling with retro game vibes.
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Look, every journaling app out there wants you to organize things into folders and tags and templates. I just wanted to write something down every day. So I built this. One note per day. That's the whole deal. - Can't edit yesterday. What's done is done. Keeps you from fussing over old entries instead of writing today's. - Year view with dots showing which days you actually wrote. It's a streak chart. Works better than it should. - No signup required. Opens right up, stores everything locally in your browser. Optional cloud sync if you want it - E2E encrypted with AES-GCM, zero-knowledge,…
Mar 2026
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Hey HN, I want to share with you something I and my four colleagues have been working on for the last several years. It’s a whiteboarding and notes tool called Muse[1]. We just released a 2.0 version which includes local-first sync. A little backstory: I’m one of the authors of the 2019 essay Local-first software[2]. (Past HN discussions[3][4].) The thesis is to reclaim some of the ownership over our data that we’ve lost in the transition from filesystems to cloud/SaaS. So I’m excited to bring CRDT technology “out of the lab” and into a commercial product as a chance to prove the value…
2022 · museapp.com
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2021 · thezenjournal.com
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Hey HN! I recently released baseline, a journaling and mood tracking app for iOS, Android, and web. If you've been looking for a better journal, or just want to work on your mental health, you should check it out! It includes: - Simple and fast journaling — just open the app and start typing. - Visualizations to help you understand your progress over time. - Screeners to help you better understand what you might be struggling with. - Customizable notifications to help you build journaling into your daily routine. - Strong privacy — personal data is encrypted with user-specific keys that I…
2022 · getbaseline.app
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I searched for a simple, self-hosted journal app for my girlfriend and everything I found was either too complex, too feature-heavy, too feature-less for what I needed or required trusting a cloud service. So I built Piruetas (it means pirouettes in Spanish - she chose the name btw). It's a day-per-page diary with rich text editing, drag-and-drop image uploads, auto-save, public share links, and a clean mobile UI. It can be set up for Personal or Multi-user usage via docker compose deployment. She seems to like it so I decided to give back to the community and make it available for everyone…
May 2026 · piruet.app
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Heya HN, I started journaling about a year ago and recently landed in my perfect setup, a simple sentence to remember each day, combined with a flexible habit tracker. Over the holidays I turned this approach into a free expo app that I want to share. Basically, you get: - One sentence per day, enough to remember each day. - Flexible habit tracking (still working on finding the best UX here) - No backend, no tracking, all in device (just sentry for errors) - Clean, minimal interface - Export your data - Stats to track your progress I built this primarily for my own use, but I'd love to hear…
2025 · habby.day
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