a day one alternative

shizumu is a day one alternative for people who want the writing on their own device, on more than apple's platforms, and a page that asks nothing on the way in.

how the two behave

day one is a journal with an account. it keeps your entries in its cloud, gives you prompts and a daily reminder, and sells the sync and the extras as a subscription. that suits a lot of people, and it is not on linux or windows.

shizumu is a page. no account: the writing is a database on your device, and it goes nowhere unless you turn sync on. sync is end-to-end encrypted and free for two devices, and the relay is something you can run yourself. it runs on linux, android, and windows. the app is free, and the source is on github, apache-2.0 on the client and agpl-3.0-or-later on the relay, which is what people searching for a day one open source alternative usually want to know first.

what you keep, and what you leave behind

a day one journal alternative has to answer for the years of entries. day one exports to json and plain text; shizumu's page takes plain text and its own blocks, so the words move. what does not move is the shape: shizumu has no prompts, no reminders, and no calendar of moods. every day starts on an empty page, and the app does not ask how you feel or whether you wrote yesterday. people who came to day one for the nudges will miss them. people who came for a place to think tend not to.

what a page does instead

you write to think. when something turns out to matter, you pin it. when a thread continues past today, a book, a job search, a project, you put the page on a trail, and the pins you kept there come back onto the page the next time you open it. everything else stays in memory, searchable. among the day one alternatives people list on reddit, that is the one thing to check for: whether the app has a way back to what mattered, or only a calendar of everything.

day one on windows

people searching for day one on windows usually want the same daily writing on a pc. shizumu runs natively on windows, as well as on linux and android, and sync keeps the writing on more than one device when you turn it on.

try before you move

the whole app runs in your browser with a few weeks of writing already in it: try it. if a day one app alternative has to earn the switch, that is the fastest way to find out.

try it in your browser download