Comparison
Trading journal: Excel or Tradoshi?
Almost everyone starts on a spreadsheet, and that is a good idea. It is free, it does exactly what you tell it, and it forces you to think about what you want to measure. This page is not here to convince you Excel is useless: it says where it works very well, where it breaks, and when manual entry starts costing you more than a subscription.
Sourced on 2 August 2026
The comparison at a glance
Thirteen lines to decide fast. Everything is detailed below, with sources.
| What is compared | Excel | Tradoshi |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free or included in an office suite | $19.99 to $49.99/mo |
| Flexibility | Total, you build whatever you want | Whatever the product provides |
| Data ownership | The file is yours, offline | Hosted, exportable |
| Trade entry | By hand, one by one | The broker syncs itself |
| Data entry error risk | High, and invisible | The figures come from the broker |
| Commissions and swaps | To copy from the statement | Supplied by the broker |
| Emotional state | A column to fill in, if you remember | Voice check-in, emotion detection |
| Alert when you break your rules | None | Live session (Premium) |
| Sharing with a mentor | Send the file | Free mentor account |
| Backup | Your responsibility | Automatic |
1. The customer offer, plan by plan
Both publishers' three plans, with what each one actually unlocks. Prices are the ones shown on both pricing pages on the day of the survey.
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Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice$0
free, or included in a suite you already pay for- Total flexibility: your columns, your formulas
- Works offline
- The file belongs to you
- No subscription, no dependency
- Manual entry of every trade
- No alerts, no guardrails
Tradoshi
Billed in dollars$19.99/mo
or $199/year ($16.58/mo)- No trade limit
- 3 connected broker accounts
- 600 AI credits per month
- Oshi AI coach on your data
- Discipline score and written check-in
- 500+ reports and Oshi Score
$29.99/mo
or $299/year ($24.92/mo)- 50 accounts, multi prop firm, challenge tracking
- 1,500 AI credits
- Voice check-in and emotion detection
- Prescriptive AI daily reco
- Backtesting (10 strategies)
- Mentor invited for free
$49.99/mo
or $499/year ($41.58/mo)- Unlimited accounts
- 3,000 AI credits
- Live session: in-session guardrails
- Trade Review on the real chart
- Unlimited backtesting
- Priority support
There is no honest price comparison to make here: a spreadsheet is free. The question is not the subscription price, it is the time entry costs and what is lost when you stop doing it.
The calculation that matters is not price, it is time. Count two minutes to properly enter one trade, its fees and its context. At ten trades a week that is more than seventeen hours a year spent retyping what your broker already knows. And that is not the worst part: the worst part is the month you skip, losing the history that would have settled the question.
2. The partner offer, in months of revenue
There is obviously no affiliate program on a spreadsheet. This section is here for creators and educators who recommend tools to their audience.
Our schedule is public and pays from the first customer: 15% for life, 20% at fifteen active subscribers, 25% at fifty-one, on every payment collected.
Comparing two percentages means nothing while the durations differ. The honest unit is months of the referred customer's revenue: it neutralises both the product price and the commission duration. Read it as: for a customer who stays N months, the partner has earned the equivalent of X months of that customer's revenue.
| Program | Stays 6 months | Stays 12 months | Stays 24 months | Stays 36 months |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tradoshi 15% (from the 1st customer) | 0.90 | 1.80 | 3.60 | 5.40 |
| Tradoshi 20% (15 customers and up) | 1.20 | 2.40 | 4.80 | 7.20 |
| Tradoshi 25% (51 customers and up) | 1.50 | 3.00 | 6.00 | 9.00 |
The table reads in months of the referred customer's revenue, the unit that neutralises product price and commission duration.
On our side, the commission lands on every payment collected, with a 30-day holding period and a €500 payout threshold.
3. Mentoring, and who pays for whom
On a spreadsheet, sharing your journal with a mentor means sending a file, then another one next week, and wondering which version is authoritative. Nobody keeps that up for long.
At Tradoshi, the mentor account is free. The student invites their mentor from the Pro plan, and the mentor sees trades, notes and progress live, paying nothing and receiving nothing by email.
This is the most underestimated limit of a spreadsheet. A journal is filled in for yourself, but it becomes useful when someone else looks at it. A file cannot be watched by two people.
How mentoring works at Tradoshi · The offer for educators and schools
4. The full comparison, feature by feature
Every line comes from both public pricing pages, read on the same day. Nothing is pulled from a help centre on one side and a grid on the other: on unequal evidence, a comparison stops being honest. “Absent from the grid” means exactly that, not “does not exist”.
What the spreadsheet does very well
And we should start there, because it is true and many pages like this one skip it.
| What is compared | Excel | Tradoshi |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Zero | $19.99 to $49.99/mo |
| Column flexibility | Total | Fixed structure |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Vendor dependency | None | Yes, data exportable |
| Understanding your own figures | Excellent: you write the formulas | Calculations are explained but pre-written |
Where it breaks
All these lines have the same cause: you do the typing. A spreadsheet knows nothing you have not typed into it.
| What is compared | Excel | Tradoshi |
|---|---|---|
| Getting the trades in | By hand, one by one | Automatic sync, 2,000+ brokers |
| Fees, commissions and swaps | To copy over, often forgotten | Supplied by the broker |
| Entry error | Invisible: one wrong decimal and the whole file lies | The figures come from the source |
| Advanced statistics | To build yourself | 500+ reports, MFE/MAE, R-multiple |
| Prop firm rule tracking | Formulas to write and maintain | Built-in challenge tracking |
| Abandoned after a few weeks | The main risk | Fills itself without you |
What a spreadsheet will never do
These are not missing features, they are things a file structurally cannot do.
| What is compared | Excel | Tradoshi |
|---|---|---|
| Warn you during the session | Impossible | Live session (Premium) |
| Capture your state before the trade | A column, if you remember | Voice check-in with emotion detection |
| Be watched live by your mentor | Successive file transfers | Free mentor account |
| Back itself up | Your responsibility | Automatic |
Look up your broker in our list · See all three plans in detail · Watch the video demo
5. What we concede to Excel
A comparison won on every single line is not a comparison, it is an advert. Here are the points where Excel is ahead, with nothing taken off.
The verdict
A spreadsheet is not a bad tool, it is a tool that depends entirely on your consistency. As long as you fill it in, it does the job. The problem is that almost nobody is still filling it in after three months, and not for lack of seriousness: because entering a trade, its fees and its context takes two minutes, and two minutes after a losing session, nobody takes them. The only real test is this: open your file. If the last row is two weeks old, you do not have a discipline problem, you have a tool problem. And if you take three trades a month, keep your spreadsheet, we are telling you straight.
Frequently asked questions
Is a trading journal in Excel enough?
Yes, if you take few trades and you actually fill the file in. It is free, flexible, and writing your own formulas teaches you your figures. The tipping point is not the number of features, it is the moment entry becomes a chore and you stop.
How much time does manual entry cost?
Count roughly two minutes per trade to enter it properly with its fees and context. At ten trades a week, that is more than seventeen hours a year retyping what your broker already knows.
What is the main risk of a spreadsheet?
Entry error, because it is invisible: one misplaced decimal and all your statistics lie with nothing to flag it. And abandonment, which is even more common: a journal you no longer fill in is worth nothing.
Can I bring my Excel history into Tradoshi?
Yes, file import exists, and broker sync pulls whatever history the broker still holds. You do not start from scratch.
What will a spreadsheet never do?
Warn you during the session when you break your rules, capture your emotional state before you click, and let your mentor watch it live. These are not missing features, they are things a file cannot do.
Compare with another trading journal
Try it, and compare on your own trades
Connect your broker, let your journal fill itself, and judge on your own numbers rather than on a table.
Start for free 7-day trial · then from $19.99/month · cancel in one clickMethod and sources. Every figure attributed to Excel was read on 2 August 2026 on its own public pages, in the served HTML, and not taken from a third-party comparison: . The “absent from the grid” statements were obtained by counting term occurrences in the served page, not by eye. The months-of-revenue values are computed from the published schedules on both sides, month by month, not typed by hand. A publisher's pricing changes without notice, and this one raised all three of its plans overnight on 16 July 2026: when in doubt, the publisher's own page prevails over this one. If you spot a mistake, write to us and it will be corrected with the date. Report an error to us.