Free trade journaling: the trading journals that are actually free in 2026

Search for a free trading journal and you'll get a page of results that all say yes. Open them: for some, "free" means a few days of trial on a paid plan; for others, a permanent account capped in accounts, orders or trades; for others still, a file you maintain yourself. The word doesn't mean the same thing twice. This page records what it covers at each trading journal provider, with figures read in their own pricing pages on 7 October 2026.

• Three different things are called free: a time-limited trial, a permanent capped plan, and a spreadsheet you maintain yourself.
• The credit card is the best tell. If it's requested at sign-up, you're in a trial, whatever the button says.
• The real ceiling is rarely the price, it's the number of connected accounts, the number of orders imported per month, sometimes the asset classes accepted.
• Automatic broker sync on a free plan exists elsewhere too: TradesViz, TraderWaves and Trademetria all list it on their free tier. We are not the only ones, far from it.

The three meanings of "free"

A trading journal free of charge can mean three very different things. The confusion doesn't come from an industry-wide dishonesty, it comes from three different business models hiding behind the same adjective. Telling them apart takes thirty seconds and saves you from rebuilding your journal next month.

1. The free trial: free for a few days

This is the classic subscription model, and a perfectly legitimate one when it's labelled as such. The provider opens the full application for a short window and lets you judge. TradesViz's pricing page shows "Free 7 day trial" on its Pro and Platinum tiers, and Tradoshi opens a seven-day trial on its paid plans, with a card. Nothing wrong with that, as long as the word trial sits next to the word free. The problem starts when the page title promises a free journal and the duration only shows up when your card comes out.

Seven days is short for a trading journal. A journal's value doesn't show over a week of sessions: it appears once thirty or fifty trades are in it and the statistics start describing your behaviour rather than noise. A one-week trial shows you the interface, not the benefit.

2. The permanent free plan: free forever, but capped

Here the account never closes. In exchange the provider draws a line somewhere, and where they draw it tells you a lot about the product. Trademetria's pricing page caps its Free plan at 30 imported orders a month, 1 tracked account and 3 open positions. TradesViz opens a Basic tier at €0, "Free forever", with 1 trading account, 3,000 executions a month and stocks as the only asset class. TraderWaves' pricing page advertises an Essential plan, "Not a Trial · Free forever plan · No credit card needed", with up to 3 connected trading accounts. Edgyx's French homepage shows a plan "Gratuit à vie · sans carte" (free for life, no card), capped at 100 trades. At Tradoshi the free plan takes 1 synced broker account, unlimited file imports and manual entry.

Thirty orders a month is a real constraint for a scalper and an invisible one for a swing trader. Three thousand executions is the opposite: spread over some twenty sessions, that's about a hundred and fifty executions a day, the pace of very active or automated trading. A cap isn't good or bad in the abstract, it either fits your frequency or it doesn't. Count last month's orders before comparing anything.

3. The spreadsheet: free, and you do the work

An Excel journal, Google Sheets or Notion costs nothing beyond the tool you already have, and never expires: the Google Sheets page states that anyone with a Google Account can create spreadsheets in Sheets, the Microsoft 365 for the web page gives free access to Excel in the browser, and Notion's pricing page includes a Free plan for individuals. It's a serious way to start. Its limit isn't power, it's re-entry: every trade has to be typed again, and the busier the week, the more tempting it is to put that off until tomorrow, when those are precisely the weeks with the most to teach you. Re-entry also has an accuracy cost: in Raymond Panko's review presented at the EuSpRIG conference in 2015, fourteen spreadsheet-building experiments on 967 participants average 3.9% erroneous cells, and 85 operational business spreadsheets inspected contained errors in 94% of cases; those are management spreadsheets, not trading journals. A journal abandoned after six weeks costs more than a subscription, it costs you the measurement: in the meta-analysis by Harkin and colleagues, published in 2016 in Psychological Bulletin, across 138 studies and 19,951 participants, monitoring progress helped goal attainment (d+ = 0.40), more so when the information was physically recorded; those are health and habit goals, not trading. What a spreadsheet can and cannot do is compared line by line here.

The table, recorded on 7 October 2026

Every row comes from the provider's own pricing page, read that day. These grids change often: check on their side before deciding, and if you find a discrepancy, their page is the authority, not this one.

One thing stands out once the rows are lined up: the question isn't who is free, almost everyone is in one way or another. The question is what you have to give up to stay there: a second account, order volume, asset classes, or the depth of the statistics computed afterwards.

What the word doesn't say: broker sync

This is the feature that decides whether your journal survives three months of use, and it's the one you'd expect to see reserved for paying users. The reason would be economic and entirely understandable: keeping a MetaTrader or cTrader account connected costs the provider infrastructure every day, including for someone who may never pay. The pricing pages read on 7 October 2026 say otherwise.

Of the five providers recorded, four list broker sync on their free tier: TradesViz ticks "Auto-sync trades" on Basic, TraderWaves writes "Auto Broker Import & CSV Import" on Essential, Trademetria lists "Broker auto-sync" in the Free column, and Tradoshi includes it with one broker account. Edgyx presents its connectors, in auto sync or CSV export, on the same page as its free plan. On this specific point, honesty is due: you'll often read, including from us in the past, that a free journal with broker sync is unique. It isn't. We are not alone, and in connected accounts on the free tier, TraderWaves offers more than we do.

The real difference then lies in what comes with the connected account: which asset classes are accepted, how many orders get through, and what the application computes afterwards. Less spectacular than a ticked box, but it's what you live with daily.

How to choose, in three questions

1. How many orders did you place last month? Under 30, every plan recorded here suits you. Above that, the 30-order plan drops out. Above 3,000 executions, only plans without a volume cap hold.
2. How many accounts do you want to track? One personal account, or one personal account plus two prop firm evaluations? Among the free plans recorded here, TraderWaves takes up to three, TradesViz, Trademetria and Tradoshi stop at one, and Edgyx counts in trades rather than accounts.
3. Are you willing to re-type trades? Answer honestly, not bravely. If the answer is no, a journal without sync won't be kept, whatever it costs.

Those three questions eliminate most options in two minutes, and more importantly they put the decision where it actually belongs: your trading frequency, not the length of a feature list.

What Tradoshi puts in its free plan, and what it doesn't

Worth stating plainly, since this is our site. Tradoshi's free plan is permanent, with no card and no end date. It includes one automatically synced broker account, unlimited file imports, manual entry, the full journal, the P&L calendar, statistics and track record, 500+ reports and the Oshi Score.

What it doesn't include, deliberately: Oshi, the AI coach, which burns credits with every answer, beyond the credits offered when the account is opened, and any account beyond the first. Those are the two items that cost us per use.

The reasoning behind that split fits in one sentence: a journal only proves its worth after several dozen trades, so a few days of trial prove nothing. We'd rather you stay free as long as you need, and pay the day you want a second account or a coach that answers you. The full grid is on the pricing page.

The trap to avoid: switching journals midway

The real cost of a bad choice isn't the subscription, it's the migration. Your history is what gives your statistics meaning, and it doesn't always move cleanly between tools. If you want to widen the comparison beyond price alone, our ranking of trading journals covers the same providers on other criteria. Six months of well-kept trades is worth more than any feature, and losing them puts you back at the start, with curves that no longer say anything.

Practical consequence: choose for what you'll be doing in a year, not this week. If you plan to open a prop firm evaluation in six months, look at the price of the second account now, not just the first. That's where the grids really diverge.

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