Trading journals that are actually free in 2026

Search for a free trading journal and you'll get twenty results that all say yes. Open them: three ask for a card before the second minute, two call three days of access "free", and the rest do give you a permanent account, capped at a number of orders you'll pass within the week. The word doesn't mean the same thing twice. This page records what it covers at each provider, with figures read in their own pricing pages on 15 August 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 and the number of orders imported per month.
• Automatic broker sync on a free plan exists elsewhere too: TradesViz ticks it on its 0 € tier. We are not the only ones, we are among the few.

The three meanings of "free"

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 most common 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. Edgyx advertises "3 days free trial, no commitment, cancel anytime" on its French homepage. TradesViz offers seven days on its paid tiers. 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.

Three days is short for a trading journal. A journal's value doesn't show over three sessions: it appears once thirty or fifty trades are in it and the statistics start describing your behaviour rather than noise. A three-day 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 caps at 30 imported orders a month and 1 tracked account. TradesViz opens a Basic tier at 0 €, free forever, with 1 trading account and 3,000 executions a month. TraderWaves advertises an Essential plan, free forever, no credit card needed. 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: nobody reaches that discretionarily, only through automation. 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 and never expires. It's a serious way to start, and plenty of profitable traders began there. Its limit isn't power, it's re-entry: every trade has to be typed again, and that's exactly what stops during the weeks you trade the most, which are the weeks with the most to teach you. A journal abandoned after six weeks costs more than a subscription, it costs you the measurement. What a spreadsheet can and cannot do is compared line by line here.

The table, recorded on 15 August 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.

What the word usually hides: broker sync

This is the feature that decides whether your journal survives three months of use, and it's also the one free plans most often reserve for paying users. The reason is economic and entirely understandable: keeping a MetaTrader or cTrader account connected costs the provider infrastructure every day, including for someone who may never pay.

Hence two families. Those who make sync the paid boundary: you keep your journal for free, but you fill it by hand or by file import. And those who include it on the free plan while capping it to a single account, which is what TradesViz and Tradoshi do today. 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 among the few, we are not alone.

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 and everyone suits you. Between 30 and 300, the 30-order plans drop 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? Almost every free plan stops at a single account, across all providers.
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, the Oshi Score and the discipline score.

What it doesn't include, deliberately: Oshi, the AI coach, which burns credits with every answer, and any account beyond the first. Those are the only two items that cost us per use. Everything else is computation over data we already store, so charging for it wouldn't be justified.

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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