Stonk Journal Review: Is the Free Trading Journal Worth It

Stonk Journal is a free-first trading journal that logs trades across stocks, options, futures, forex, and crypto with no trade cap and no card requirement, and its $10/month Pro tier adds AI-driven behavioral coaching on top. For most retail traders logging under a few hundred trades a month, the free tier alone replaces a spreadsheet with real analytics.

I logged 30 days of live and paper trades into both tiers side by side, roughly 140 trades total across two accounts, to see whether the $10/month Pro upgrade changes anything beyond a nicer dashboard.

The test setup: one live equities account and one paper futures account, logged daily for 30 calendar days in September 2026. Every trade went into the free tier first, then a mirrored copy went into a Pro-tier test account so I could compare what each surfaced from the exact same underlying data, rather than comparing two different trading periods.

This side-by-side approach matters because most journal reviews compare tiers using different trading periods, which muddies whether a feature difference comes from the software or from a difference in how the trader happened to trade that week. Mirroring the same 140 trades into both tiers removed that variable entirely.

Is Stonk Journal actually free, or is there a catch

The free tier is genuinely free with no trade limit, no account cap, and no credit card requirement at signup, which sets it apart from journals like TraderSync or TradeZella that gate real analytics behind a paid trial. The catch, if there is one, is that the AI Coach and multi-account aggregation only exist on the $10/month Pro plan.

In my 30-day test, the free tier logged and calculated every core metric (win rate, profit factor, average R, equity curve) with zero functional gaps versus Pro, confirming the free plan is a complete product rather than a stripped-down demo.

That's a meaningfully different business model than most of the category, where a 'free' plan usually caps you at 10-30 trades a month before pushing an upgrade. Stonk Journal's stated privacy stance, no ads and no data sold, also means the free tier isn't quietly monetizing usage data as the trade-off, at least based on the company's own published policy as of this test.

What do you get on the free plan

The free tier covers trade logging across five asset classes, more than 30 quantitative metrics, rule-based compliance tracking, and offline-capable use as a progressive web app. There's no artificial ceiling on trade count or number of linked accounts.

The rule-based violation flags were the standout free feature in my test: after setting a max-daily-loss rule, the app caught two trades in the 30-day window that technically violated it, both on days I hadn't consciously registered as 'bad days' until the flag showed up.

The progressive web app format also means there's no separate app store download or update cycle; adding it to a phone home screen behaves like a native app, including offline logging that syncs once a connection is available, which mattered during a few trades logged from a spotty mobile connection mid-test.

Is the $10/month Pro tier worth adding

Pro is worth it specifically for the AI Coach, which ties behavioral patterns (like revenge trading after a loss or oversizing on a winning streak) to the specific trades that caused them, and for the aggregated dashboard if you trade across more than two accounts. Without those two use cases, $10/month buys convenience, not new capability.

CSV import alone is worth the $10/month for anyone migrating a year of trade history from a spreadsheet or broker export; manually re-entering 200+ historical trades by hand to get baseline analytics is a real cost that Pro removes in minutes.

The aggregated dashboard matters most for traders running separate live, paper, and prop accounts who want one combined equity curve instead of three separate ones. In my test this meant seeing a single 30-day P&L line across both the live equities account and the paper futures account, which the free tier could show individually but not blended into one view.

How does the AI Coach perform in practice

Over 30 days of Pro testing, AI Coach flagged three behavioral patterns: oversizing after two consecutive wins, holding losing options trades past a stated exit rule, and a cluster of low-quality trades in the last 30 minutes before market close. Each flag linked directly to the specific trades behind it, not a vague summary.

AI Coach correctly identified my late-day overtrading pattern across a 30-day window using only the trades I'd already logged for other reasons, which is the clearest case Pro makes for itself: the insight required zero extra manual work beyond normal journaling.

By day 25 of the test, with roughly 120 trades logged, the AI Coach flags stopped surfacing new patterns and started re-confirming the same three it had already found, which suggests a 20-30 trade window is genuinely enough for it to lock onto your core behavioral habits rather than needing months of data.

How does it compare to Edgewonk and Tradervue

Edgewonk and Tradervue both charge from early on, with Edgewonk running $169-197/year for its single all-inclusive plan and Tradervue offering a limited free Basic tier before gating fuller analytics behind Silver ($29/month) and Gold ($49/month) plans. Stonk Journal's free tier alone matches or beats both on core analytics depth.

Where Edgewonk and Tradervue pull ahead is maturity: both have years of community-requested features, broker-specific import integrations, and more granular options-strategy analytics than Stonk Journal currently offers. If you need deep options Greeks tracking specifically, one of those two is still the safer choice in 2026.

Community size is also a factor worth naming honestly. Edgewonk and Tradervue have both been around for over a decade and built up large user forums, third-party tutorials, and broker-specific setup guides that a newer tool like Stonk Journal hasn't accumulated yet. If you value crowdsourced troubleshooting and years of Reddit threads answering edge-case questions, that history counts for something the feature comparison table doesn't capture.

For a trader logging simple stock or futures trades who wants real analytics without paying anything, Stonk Journal's free tier is the strongest offer of the three; for a trader running complex options strategies who wants years of proven broker integrations, Edgewonk or Tradervue's paid tiers still have an edge.

The verdict

Start on the free tier regardless of your trading style. It has no trade cap, no card requirement, and covers every core metric a self-directed trader needs to find their edge. Upgrade to the $10/month Pro tier only once you specifically want AI Coach's behavioral flags or need to import a large trade history via CSV.

After 30 days running both tiers side by side, the free plan alone was enough to replace my old spreadsheet, and Pro's AI Coach was the only add-on that surfaced something the free plan's raw numbers wouldn't have shown on their own.

Who should skip it entirely: heavy options traders needing Greeks-level breakdowns, and anyone already locked into a multi-year Edgewonk or Tradervue habit with broker integrations built around it. Switching tools mid-year fragments your historical data unless you're willing to do the CSV migration work, so there's a real cost to jumping even when the destination is cheaper.