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.
People looking for Letterboxd alternatives or apps like Letterboxd usually need one of four different jobs done. Decide which matters to you before moving a diary: social reviews, automatic tracking, private reflection, or recommendations based on your own ratings.
The options at a glance
Five alternatives plus Letterboxd itself as the baseline—not six alternatives. We make Kinolog, so our own entry is disclosed here. The comparison is about jobs, not an invented universal score or a claim that we purchased and tested every service. Verify current plans and platform support using each product’s own documentation.
Swipe the comparison sideways to see each service’s trade-off, not just its main strength.
| Service | Best for | Trade-off to know |
|---|---|---|
| Letterboxd | Social film reviews, friends and public lists. | Not a full episode-by-episode TV or automatic scrobbling tracker. |
| Kinolog | A private film diary whose ratings shape Taste and recommendations. | No public social feed or automatic player tracking. Predicted stars require Plus. |
| Trakt | Movies and television history with supported player scrobbling. | A richer tracking setup; check each player integration before relying on automation. |
| SIMKL | Cross-platform movies, TV and anime tracking via supported apps. | Automatic coverage depends on the particular player or service connection. |
| Criticker | Taste compatibility and predicted ratings informed by many film rankings. | Best suited to people prepared to rate enough films for statistical evidence. |
| iCheckMovies | Working through curated and canonical movie lists. | List completion, not personal diary notes or a pre-watch rating prediction. |
If you only want to move a Letterboxd history into a private diary, see our ZIP import and preservation checklist before committing to any new product.
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 at its core, but it is not fair to say it has no privacy controls: its official FAQdocuments private lists and watchlists. If you want a diary without a social profile, followers or an activity feed, however, that is a different job. A private movie diary gives your half-formed opinions and rewatches room to exist without an audience. That’s the corner Kinolog lives in. Choose the community when you want conversation; choose a private-first tool when reflection is the point.
“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. They track returning TV series, which Letterboxd says it does not fully support yet (although some limited series and TV films appear there). 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”
If you need a personal prediction rather than a social discovery feed, two different fixes exist. Criticker attacks it with statistics: rank enough films and its taste-compatibility engine predicts your score for anything. Kinolog’s personalized recommendationsdraw on your diary and explain picks against films you rated, with a 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.
Which one should you choose in five minutes?
Make a small test rather than relying only on feature lists. Pick one recent film you watched, one you would rewatch, and one you want to see next. In each candidate tool, see whether you can record your watch and rating, rediscover the rewatch and act on your next-film decision without learning a whole new workflow. The tool you can repeat after a tiring day is likely the tool you will keep.
This is an editorial comparison of publicly documented capabilities, not a hands-on laboratory benchmark or a claim that every app was installed and tested. If your goal is simply recording films rather than replacing Letterboxd, start with our guide to tracking the movies you have seen.
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.
If your choice is specifically between Kinolog and Letterboxd, the side-by-side comparison covers the features and trade-offs in detail. The movie diary app page explains what imported history becomes after the move.
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 offers powerful social, filter-based and similar-film discovery too, as its official FAQ explains. Its approach is different from a personal pre-watch star prediction based on your own ratings.
A note on TV
Letterboxd is centered on film, though its catalog includes some limited series and television films. For people who want systematic episode and series tracking, that difference is often 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.