Bearable vs TapDiary: Which Symptom Log Fits?

Bearable vs TapDiary: Which Symptom Log Fits?

Look for a symptom tracker and Bearable comes up often. It is a well-made app, and it aims at a different point than TapDiary does. Both record how your body is doing, but one goes for depth and the other for speed.

Bearable: a health tracker that watches the factors too

Bearable gathers symptoms, mood, medication, sleep and energy into a daily record. You rate each symptom, log the factors alongside it, like what you ate or how long you slept, and it later reports the relationships between them. It is designed for someone managing a long-term condition who wants to dig into what moves it.

TapDiary: a recorder that catches the moment

With TapDiary you make one button and tap it. The time and the count attach themselves, and you add a short note if you want one. There is no field for severity or factors. Those go in the note, or nowhere at all.

They are built around different amounts of typing

Bearable's flow is to fill in several fields at the end of the day. It has to be, or the factor analysis has nothing to work with. TapDiary's flow is to spend one second at the moment something happens. It has to be, or the times are wrong.

Neither is better. Fill it in at night and the times blur; tap only in the moment and the factor data never accumulates.

When Bearable fits

If you want symptoms tied together with sleep, meals, medication and mood to find out what affects what, Bearable fits. This is the case where you are willing to spend a few minutes a day entering data, and want correlation reports in return.

When TapDiary fits

If your records keep breaking off, TapDiary fits. The more fields there are, the more days go missing, and enough missing days make any analysis meaningless. You are choosing to get when and how many times exactly right instead.

Headache comes, tap the headache button. Take the pill, tap the medication button. That is the whole thing, which is why you are still doing it two months later.

Accounts and data

TapDiary has no account and no server, so the records sit on your device. They leave only as a CSV, when you press export. If you want cloud sync it goes through iCloud, and that is your own account.

Which one to choose

Bearable if the goal is to dig into the factors, TapDiary if the goal is to keep recording at all. Filling two months with TapDiary first, then moving to Bearable if you find you really do need the factor analysis, is a reasonable order. It fails less often than the other way round.

	Bearable	TapDiary
Focus	How symptoms and factors relate	What, when, how many times
Entry	Several fields, once a day	One button, in the moment
Severity and factors	Dedicated fields	Free text in the note
Account	Required	None
Platforms	iPhone, Android	iPhone, Android