A Day One alternative for morning pages
Day One is one of the best general journaling apps around, and it has been for over a decade. You can add photos, it records the place and the weather, you can keep several journals side by side, and at the end of the year you can print them as a book. If you want a record of your life, it's hard to beat.
Morning pages are a different kind of writing. You don't record your day. You empty your head: three pages, or about 750 words, written straight after waking, without stopping, rereading or fixing. The point isn't the archive. Most of what you write is noise, and that's fine. Out of My Head is built only for that.
A life journal vs. a daily brain dump
A good life journal asks you to choose: what happened, which photo, which tag, which journal does this belong to. Those are good questions for a diary and bad ones at 7 a.m. when you're trying not to think. Morning pages work best with fewer choices: one page per day, today's date at the top, and a goal.
If you want to dig into the difference, we wrote a longer piece on morning pages vs. journaling.
Side by side
| Out of My Head | Day One | |
|---|---|---|
| What it's for | Morning pages: one page a day, written without stopping. | A general journal for your whole life. |
| While you write | Only your text. Menus fade after the first word. | A full editor with formatting, photos, tags and metadata. |
| Entries | One page per day, plus an optional evening page. | As many entries as you like, across several journals. |
| Media | Text only, by design. | Photos, video, audio, drawings, location and weather. |
| AI | None. No AI reads your pages. | Gold plan: Daily Chat, Entry Highlights, Go Deeper and Title Suggestions. |
| Goal | 750 words or a timer, say for 20 minutes. | Not built around a daily goal. Check their site. |
| Privacy | Your pages are just for you. No AI reads them unless you ask. | Takes privacy seriously. Check dayoneapp.com for details. |
| Books | Your year as a printable book or PDF in Pro. | Printed books as a paid add-on. |
| Price | Free forever, or Pro at $4.99/mo or $39/yr. | Silver $49.99/yr, Gold $74.99/yr, billed annually. |
Based on public information about Day One as of November 2026. Features and prices change, so check dayoneapp.com before deciding.
Choose Out of My Head if
- You want to do morning pages and keep them separate from your life journal.
- A full editor with photos, tags and journals is too much choice first thing in the morning.
- You want a word goal or a timer that tells you when you're done.
- You'd rather pay monthly, or not at all: the free plan has no time limit and needs no card.
- You write in a browser on any computer, or in Polish.
Stay with Day One if
- You want to record your days with photos, places and memories you'll reread.
- You keep several journals (travel, family, work) and like them in one app.
- You want native apps for iPhone, Mac and Android.
- You'd like a printed hardcover book of your journal.
Plenty of people use both. Day One for the life you want to remember, morning pages for the thoughts you want out of your head.
What writing here feels like
You open the site and there's a page with today's date. You can start typing even before you have an account. After the first word, the menu fades. No toolbar, no spellcheck underlining, no photo button. As you write, the background warms up, and it brightens for a moment at your goal.
If you want a little structure, you can add a heading, a divider, a to-do or a timer without leaving the keyboard. To-dos from all your pages gather in one list in Pro, which is handy when the pages keep reminding you about the same errand. If nothing comes, a greyed-out first line waits on the blank page; more are in our prompts.
New to the method? Start with the guide to morning pages. Comparing more apps? See our roundup of morning pages apps.
Try one page tomorrow morning and see which kind of writing you need. Open a blank page →