Reflectly

Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Reflectly

A curated collection of the 3 best self hosted alternatives to Reflectly.

Reflectly is a guided journaling and mood-tracking app for recording daily reflections and prompts, tracking mood trends, and generating basic insights and statistics to support user self-awareness and mental wellness.

Alternatives List

#1
Journiv

Journiv

Self-hosted private journaling app with mood tracking, prompt-based writing, media uploads, analytics, and powerful search for full data ownership.

Journiv screenshot

Journiv is a privacy-first, self-hosted journaling application designed to help you capture entries, track mood, and reflect over time while keeping full control of your data. It combines a clean writing experience with organization, search, and insights.

Key Features

  • Rich journal entries with a minimal, distraction-reduced UI
  • Mood tracking with visualizations and trend insights
  • Prompt-based journaling to help start and maintain a writing habit
  • Media uploads attached to entries
  • Tags and multiple journals to organize different areas of life
  • Advanced search across entries, media, and metadata
  • “On This Day” resurfacing of past entries for reflection

Use Cases

  • Personal daily journaling with mood tracking and long-term insights
  • Maintaining separate journals for work, travel, or personal growth
  • Searching and revisiting past moments using tags and full-text search

Limitations and Considerations

  • The project is in beta and under active development; breaking changes may occur, so regular backups are recommended

Journiv is a strong fit for privacy-conscious users who want an owned, self-managed journaling workflow. Its mood tracking, prompts, search, and analytics make it useful both for quick daily entries and longer-term reflection.

770stars
24forks
#2
DailyTxT

DailyTxT

Encrypted diary and journal web app with client-side encryption, markdown editor, file uploads, searchable entries, multi-user accounts and PWA support.

DailyTxT is a self-hosted encrypted diary and journal web application that encrypts user data before writing it to server storage. It provides a responsive web UI with a markdown editor, file attachments, tagging and search while keeping each account's data encrypted with per-user keys.

Key Features

  • Client-side encryption workflow using ChaCha20-Poly1305 for stored data and Argon2id for deriving keys
  • Per-user encryption keys and backup-key mechanism for password recovery; admin cannot read user plaintext
  • Markdown editor with live preview and custom entry templates
  • Encrypted file uploads (images automatically detected) with a 500 MB per-file limit
  • Full-text server-side search across entries, tags and filenames
  • Tagging, calendar navigation, read/distraction-free mode and per-user statistics (GitHub-like activity graph)
  • Export entries (including uploaded files) to HTML and data stored as JSON files (no external database required)
  • Multi-user support with an admin panel for user management and temporary open registration
  • Responsive design and PWA support for mobile/home-screen installation

Use Cases

  • Personal encrypted journaling where entries and attachments are stored encrypted on a self-hosted server
  • Small teams, families or groups needing separate user accounts with per-account encryption and admin-managed access
  • Portable, long-term archival of journal data stored as readable JSON files and exportable to HTML

Limitations and Considerations

  • Search requires server-side access to decrypted data for indexing; the project does not provide full end-to-end searchable encryption
  • Data is stored as JSON files rather than a database; this favors portability but may affect scaling and performance for very large installations
  • Authentication stores a derived key in an http-only cookie for API calls; administrators should follow best practices for TLS and host hardening

DailyTxT is focused on privacy-minded journaling with practical features like search, attachments and export while keeping user data encrypted at rest. It is suitable for users who want a portable, self-hosted diary with per-account encryption and straightforward deployment via Docker.

420stars
37forks
#3
Perfice

Perfice

Perfice is a local-first self-tracking app (Svelte + TypeScript) to record arbitrary metrics, set goals, view correlations, export data, and optionally sync via a backend.

Perfice screenshot

Perfice is an open-source, local-first self-tracking platform that lets you track arbitrary metrics (sleep, mood, habits, etc.), set goals, and surface correlations between metrics. The client is a web app (Svelte + TypeScript) with an optional backend for account sync and integrations.

Key Features

  • Trackables: define and record any metric or event with flexible value types
  • Automatic correlations: compute and surface relationships between metrics to reveal patterns
  • Goals: create and monitor goals across multiple trackables
  • Local-first storage: primary data storage and calculations use browser storage (IndexedDB) for privacy and offline-first use
  • Exportability: export and import data in CSV and JSON formats
  • Mobile support: packaged for Android via a native WebView wrapper (Capacitor) for on-device use
  • Optional backend & sync: user accounts, multi-device synchronization and integrations are supported via an optional server
  • Customizable UI and workflows, built with modern web stack for easy theming and extension

Use Cases

  • Personal habit and behavior tracking to discover what affects mood, sleep, or productivity
  • Wellness monitoring and correlation analysis for sleep, exercise, and mood patterns
  • Quantifying progress toward goals and visualizing metric trends over time

Limitations and Considerations

  • Multi-device sync and account features require deploying and configuring the optional backend; the backend is not required for single-device local use
  • As a local-first app using browser storage, very large datasets may be constrained by the client environment and browser IndexedDB limits
  • Mobile distribution relies on building the native wrapper; additional steps and tooling are needed to produce store-ready mobile packages

Perfice is suited for users who want a privacy-conscious, extensible self-tracking tool with built-in insights and goal support. It balances a local-first experience with optional server-backed sync for multi-device workflows.

392stars
23forks

Why choose an open source alternative?

  • Data ownership: Keep your data on your own servers
  • No vendor lock-in: Freedom to switch or modify at any time
  • Cost savings: Reduce or eliminate subscription fees
  • Transparency: Audit the code and know exactly what's running