Write about your day. Mention someone once with @, and every moment you share gathers on their page, in your own words. Free on Mac, iPhone and iPad.
Get Ember on your iPhoneScan with your iPhone or iPad camera to open it on the App Store.
Free on the App Store for Mac, iPhone and iPad. Needs macOS 15 or iOS 18.5 or later.
Live, not a screenshot: Elizabeth Bennet's archive, an imagined Ember journal inspired by Pride and Prejudice.
Years of Day One or Apple Journal entries come in with their dates, photos and places. Then type one name, and every entry about that person gathers on their page.
On iPhone or iPad In Day One, go to Settings ▸ Import/Export and export a journal as JSON, then choose the .zip it saves. On iPhone or iPad In Journal, open All Entries and tap More (…) ▸ Export ▸ Export, then choose the AppleJournalEntries file it saves.
Played with Elizabeth Bennet's sample journal. Read the full guide Read the full guide
Ember never guesses between them. You see every entry with the name and tick only the ones about this person. The rest stay as you wrote them, ready for whoever they're about.
Type any name you write for them, like Mum, a nickname or a surname, and choose them. Ember adds it to their names, and those entries gather on the same page. Each one keeps the word you wrote.
Years of entries, and finding one person still means searching their name and hoping.
Streaks and nagging turn a quiet habit into homework.
An account to sign into, AI reading along, and your own words behind an export paywall.
Coming from Day One, Apple Journal or Diarium? Ember imports your entries and finds the people in them.
Ember isn't a diary with a contacts list bolted on. People, worlds and stories are part of how you write, so the connections happen as you type, not in an afternoon of setup.
Write in Markdown, the way you would in a notebook, with songs, voice memos and photos in the entry. Open someone's page years later and every moment you shared is still there.
Each person you mention gathers every moment you've shared: entries, stories, places, how you met. Worlds keep the circles of your life apart, like family, work or college, and a story can span years.
All your people on one living map, clustered by world. Nodes glow where a connection is warm and dim where it has gone quiet, so a single glance tells you where life is flowing.
You don't remember your life by keyword. You remember who was there, roughly when, maybe where. Type it just like that, and Ember reads it back as people, places, times and topics, then walks you through that stretch of your life.
A memory belongs to everyone who was there. Turn an entry or a story into a card and send it in Messages, or save it as a small book with your photos and words. It's all made on your device: nothing is uploaded, and there's no watermark.
Ember is local-first. What you write stays on your device, and with Ember Plus it syncs through your own private iCloud, encrypted by Apple. There's no Ember server and no account, so there's nothing for us to read. Export it all as open, documented JSON whenever you like.
Quoted word for word from App Store reviews.
When you write about someone, the entry goes onto their profile, so you can scroll back through every moment you've shared or written about them in order.
Really love that when I write about my day and tag someone, it gets saved to their page on its own, so all our moments end up together.
Interesting focus and implementation of relationship tracking in the context of a journal. Beautiful design as well. Responsive developer as well.
I'm an avid pen-and-paper journaler, but paper can't show you the big picture over time. Ember can.
The power of creating Stories, to interlink individual journals entries, people from anywhere is a chef kiss 🤌
No AI. Nothing can read my private entries or generate text from them, which is how a journal app should work.
Other journal apps cap your photos, count your journals and charge to export a PDF. In Ember, all of that is free and stays free. Sync and the full theme catalogue are paid, as Plus: that is how one person can keep making Ember.
Plus is optional: sync across Mac, iPhone and iPad, and every theme, for $4.99 a month, $39.99 a year, or $59.99 once. Compare plans
Everything you need to know about Ember. Can't find the answer? Just ask.
Yes. The whole journal is free forever and never expires: unlimited entries, people and stories, worlds, the graph, the feed, sharing, and backup. Plus only adds sync between your devices and the full theme catalogue.
No. Ember is local-first: everything you write lives on your device and syncs with Ember Plus through your own private iCloud, encrypted by Apple. There is no Ember server and no account to create. We use minimal, privacy-friendly analytics to improve the app, but never collect your entries. How your data is kept.
No. No AI writes, summarizes or suggests your words, and no AI reads your entries. If you want to use AI with your journal, export your archive and take it to any tool you choose, on your terms. Why Ember has no AI.
Only if you ask it to. The writing reminder stays off until you turn it on in Settings, where you pick a moment in your day (after dinner, before bed, or a set time) and which days. Once a day at most, it asks who was part of your day, never whether you wrote. No streaks, and nothing happens if you skip a day. Otherwise Ember nudges you toward people, not toward the app: when someone you care about goes quiet, they show up on the Nudge page, and Ember can send a notification if you allow it.
One person, with no investors and no ads. New features come from the people who use Ember, through the feedback board. Read the origin story.
Write in. Every message goes straight to the person who makes Ember.
Free to start. No account, no AI, no catch.
Ember