Letterboxd alternatives in 2026: an honest guide

Letterboxd earned its place. It made logging films feel like taste-making, its reviews are a genre of their own, and if your movie life is social, following critics, reading friends, building public lists. There is no real replacement and you probably shouldn’t look for one.

But “Letterboxd alternative” is one of the most-searched phrases in this corner of the internet, and the people typing it usually mean one of four more specific complaints. It’s worth knowing which one is yours, because the right tool is different for each.

The options at a glance

Six tools worth knowing, and the one job each is actually best at. None of them is “better than Letterboxd” in general; each is better at something specific.

• Letterboxd, the social film network. Best for friends, reviews and public lists. Free; Pro around $19/yr removes ads and adds stats.
• Kinolog, a private diary with recommendations that cite your own ratings. Best if you want the diary to give something back. Free; Plus $2.99/mo.
• Trakt, automatic scrobbling from media servers and apps, and it covers TV. Best if logging by hand is the chore.
• SIMKL, automatic tracking across streaming services, film and TV. Best for breadth with minimal effort.
• Criticker, statistical taste-matching. Best if you will rank hundreds of films and want a predicted score for everything.
• iCheckMovies, canonical list completionism. Best if ticking off the 1001-films list is the hobby.

The rest of this guide is organised by complaint, because that is how people actually arrive at the question. Find yours and the answer follows.

“I want my diary to be private”

Letterboxd is a social network first: profiles are public by design, and the pleasure of it is performance. You rate a film partly knowing others will see. If that performance is the part you’ve stopped enjoying, what you want isn’t a better Letterboxd, it’s a private movie diary: somewhere your half-formed opinions and embarrassing rewatches don’t need an audience. That’s the corner Kinolog lives in. No public pages, no followers, no feed. And other private-first trackers make the same trade.

“I want it to track everything automatically”

If logging itself is the chore, look at Trakt. The long-standing standard for scrobbling what you watch from media servers and apps, or SIMKL, which leans into automatic tracking from streaming services. Both also cover TV, which Letterboxd famously doesn’t. The trade is texture: an auto-logged history tells you what you watched but rarely what you thought, and years later the note is the part you’ll want.

“I want better recommendations”

Letterboxd’s recommendations are its weakest muscle, popularity does most of the lifting. Two different fixes exist. Criticker attacks it with statistics: rank enough films and its taste-compatibility engine predicts your score for anything. AI-based tools attack it with language, including Kinolog, where recommendations read your actual diary (ratings, notes, even your own words) and have to explain every pick against films you rated, with a permanent “never again” list they cannot cross. We wrote up how AI movie recommendations actually work, including when not to trust them.

“I just want lists and completionism”

If your joy is checking films off canonical lists. They-shoot-pictures, national cinemas, a director’s complete works, iCheckMovies has been doing exactly that for over a decade, and does it better than a diary app ever will.

What actually moves when you switch

This is the part most comparison posts skip, and it is the part that decides whether a switch sticks. A Letterboxd export is a ZIP of CSVs, and how much of it survives the move varies enormously by destination. The files that matter:

• diary.csv, every watch with the date you actually saw it, your rating, and whether it was a rewatch. The date is the piece people most often lose, and it is the one that makes a diary a diary rather than a list.
• reviews.csv, your written reviews. Years later this is the part you will actually want back.
• ratings.csv, your ratings to the half-star, including films you rated without logging a date.
• watchlist.csv, what you meant to get to.
• likes/films.csv, the hearts. Not a rating, and worth having precisely for that reason: plenty of people heart films they never rated.
• profile.csv, your four favourite films, hand-picked to represent you. The strongest single taste statement in the whole export, and the file most importers ignore.

Ask any app you are considering which of those it reads. Kinolog imports all six, keeps half-star precision, preserves your original watch dates rather than stamping everything as imported today, and sends titles its film database cannot identify to a review queue instead of guessing. There is a step-by-step walkthrough of the import if you want to see what happens before you commit.

Does it have to be one or the other?

No, and for the first month it probably should not be. Both directions export cleanly, so running Letterboxd for the social side and a private diary for the recommendations costs you nothing but a few seconds of double-logging, and after a month you will know from your own use which one you open first. That is a better basis for a decision than any guide, including this one.

The questions worth asking before you move

Switching diaries is cheap to start and expensive to undo badly. Five questions separate the apps that will still suit you in a year from the ones that will not:

• Does it import my watch dates, or just my ratings? An import that stamps every film as watched today throws away the timeline, and the timeline is what makes a diary worth keeping. It is also what lets an app tell you anything about when you watch what.
• Does it keep half-stars? Rounding 3.5 to 4 sounds trivial until you realise it has quietly rewritten years of your own judgements.
• What happens to a title it cannot identify? The right answer is a review queue you can resolve. The wrong answer is a silent guess, and you will not find out which one you got until you notice the wrong film in your diary.
• Can I get everything back out? Not a screenshot, not a partial CSV. If the export is worse than the import, you are renting your own history.
• Is my diary private by default? Some people want an audience and some have stopped enjoying having one. Both are fine; the important thing is that it is a choice you made rather than a default you inherited.

Why “alternative” is usually the wrong word

Search volume being what it is, every app in this space writes a page claiming to be the Letterboxd alternative, and almost all of them are describing a different product doing a different job. Letterboxd is not primarily a diary, it is a place where the diary is the raw material for a social feed. Take away the audience and much of what makes it good goes with it.

So the useful question is not “what is like Letterboxd”, it is “which part of Letterboxd am I actually here for”. If it is the writing and the friends, no alternative exists and the honest advice is to stay put and pay for Pro. If it is the record, the thing you will still want in ten years, you want an app that treats the diary as the product rather than the feedstock. If it is the recommendations, you want something that reads the diary back, and Letterboxd has never claimed to do that.

A note on TV

Letterboxd does not do television, and for a lot of people that is the actual complaint behind “letterboxd alternative”. If your watching is mostly series, Trakt and SIMKL are the honest answers here, a film diary that bolts on TV as an afterthought serves neither well.

Whatever you choose, keep your data portable

The one non-negotiable in 2026: your diary should survive the app. Letterboxd exports cleanly (Settings → Data → Export), and any tracker worth moving to imports that file and exports its own. Kinolog does both, a decade of history imports in one upload, and everything exports back out as JSON or Letterboxd-compatible CSV, any time. A diary is a long-term document; treat lock-in as a dealbreaker.

And if none of the four complaints above is actually yours? Stay on Letterboxd. It’s a good product made by people who love movies. The point of an alternative is a different set of trade-offs, not a lesser copy of the same ones.