Bible Reading Plan Generator Review (2026): Free, No Login

Starting price: Free
Free tier: Yes
Platforms: Web
Developer: John Dyer
Launched: 2020
Updated: Aug 5, 2026

FreePrice

27Interface languages

16Reading-link translations

2 (iCal, CSV) plus browser printWorking export formats

11Third-party press citations

The verdict

The best free tool for one narrow job: turning an arbitrary schedule into a dated Bible reading plan, with word-count-aware day sizing and an iCal export nobody else in this niche offers. Take it if you have a start date and a deadline no published plan matches. Skip it if what you actually need is a voice in your ear each morning, because this hands you a grid and walks away.

Try Bible Reading Plan Generator ↗

Opens biblereadingplangenerator.com

Bible Reading Plan Generator is a single web page. You enter a start date and a number of days, tick the books you want, and it divides those books across those days - then renders the result as a calendar, a plain list, a week grid, a per-book breakdown, or one of two circular charts. There is no signup, no email field, no paywall, no mobile app and no second screen. The footer credits one person: biblereadingplangenerator.com by John Dyer.

That name carries more weight than it usually would for a tool this small. Logos describes Dyer as VP for enrollment and educational technology and professor of theology and sociology at Dallas Theological Seminary, with a PhD from Durham University, author of From the Garden to the City, and a technology creator for more than 20 years whose work has been used by Facebook, Google, Apple and the Digital Bible Society. His own post introducing the current version, from January 2020, describes it as an update to a tool he had built a while back, now with its own domain - so 2020 is a domain date rather than a birth date.

The other unusual thing is the corroboration. The faith.tools listing carries eleven third-party citations, which is more than plenty of funded Bible apps accumulate. Ligonier Ministries names 22 reading plans on its own plans page, then closes the list by telling readers who still cannot find one that works to generate their own - pointing here. Tim Challies puts it first among 12 interesting ways to read your Bible in 2025, writing that it will let you custom-craft a Bible-reading plan that helps you achieve whatever kind of plan you would like to follow this year. Scripture Engagement, the Taylor University catalogue, gives it a full entry, and churches print its output and host the PDFs. A side project that both Ligonier and Challies send readers to is not a typical side project.

What the page does not publish is a single number about itself. No visit count, no plans-generated figure, no download total - not on the site, not in the author's write-up. It has no about, FAQ, privacy or terms page either; those paths return 404 while two Google Analytics properties load on every visit. The export story is also messier than the interface implies, which is worth knowing before you build a year around it.

✓ The good

Any date range, not a fixed template - you supply a start date and a number of days, and the tool divides your selected books across exactly that many reading days. The number field has no minimum or maximum, so 40 days and 900 days are equally valid inputs. Nothing on the page assumes 365.
Days can be sized by words, not chapters - the Divide by control offers Number of Chapters, Words per Chapter and Pericopes, and Words per Chapter is the option that ships pre-selected. That is why a day landing in Psalm 119 does not look identical to a day landing in Psalm 117.
Weekends off is a checkbox, not a workaround - seven day-of-week boxes, Sunday through Saturday. Clear Saturday and Sunday and the readings redistribute across the remaining five days rather than piling up as a backlog.
Four canonical orders, including M'Cheyne - Traditional, Chronological, Alternate (which reorders as Hebrew Tanakh and Gospel Writers) and M'Cheyne, with Old Testament, Deuterocanonical and New Testament each expanding to individual books so you can build a plan out of three specific letters if you want to.
No account, because the plan is the URL - every setting is encoded in query parameters, so distributing a plan to a small group means sending a link. Eight worked samples sit at the top of the page, from Bible in a Year List to New Testament, Weekends Off to a colour wheel.
27 interface languages and clickable references into four sites - readings can be turned into links to Bible Gateway, Biblia, YouVersion or Y'all Version across 16 translations, 11 of them English (AMP, CSB, ESV, KJV, MSG, NASB, NET, NIRV, NIV, NLT, NRSV) plus German, Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian editions.

✗ Watch out

The PDF export does not work - the shipped page contains a Get PDF button whose CSS display is set to none, and it references the jsPDF and html2canvas libraries through scriptx tags rather than script tags, so the libraries the PDF routine calls never load. The author's own 2020 post tells readers to just press print in the browser instead.
iCal is a one-time file, not a subscription - the button builds a bibleplan.ics blob and downloads it. There is no webcal feed anywhere in the code, so revising a plan means deleting the imported events and importing a fresh file rather than watching a calendar update itself.
The generated calendar events are bare - each reading day becomes an all-day event with the reference as its summary, with no reminder and no unique identifier written into the file. If you want a 6am nudge, you add it in your calendar app afterwards.
Progress lives in one browser - the optional tick-box column stores its state in browser localStorage, so ticks survive a page reload but not a different device, a different browser or a cleared cache. There is nothing to sync because there is no account.
No privacy policy on a page running two analytics properties - a Universal Analytics tag and a GA4 tag both load, while /privacy, /terms, /about and /faq all return 404. For a free tool that never asks for your name this is a documentation gap rather than a data grab, but it is undocumented either way.
No published usage figures and visible rough edges - neither the site nor the author states visits, downloads or plans generated, and the language dropdown lists 28 options for 27 unique language codes because Korean appears twice. Both are the marks of a maintained side project rather than a product with a roadmap.

Best for

Readers with a fixed deadline and no matching published plan
Small groups reading one book together over a set number of weeks
Pastors producing a printable congregational plan for a specific year
Non-English readers who want a plan in their own interface language

Avoid if

You need daily commentary or a podcast alongside the reading
You want streaks, badges or an accountability partner
You read on a phone and want a native app experience
You need progress that syncs across devices

What Bible Reading Plan Generator is

A form on the left and a live plan on the right. Five sections drive it: Time Frame (a date picker and a number field), Format, Bible Books, Days of the Week and Options. The plan redraws as you change anything. Bible Books offers Traditional, Chronological, Alternate and M'Cheyne orderings, with Old Testament, Deuterocanonical and New Testament each expandable to individual books.

Everything you pick is written into the address bar, so the plan is the link. Options add a tick-box column, genre section colours, a daily Psalm, a daily Proverb, Old and New Testament overlap, reversal, date removal, overall and per-day statistics, and clickable references into Bible Gateway, Biblia, YouVersion or Y'all Version. Three buttons sit above the plan: iCal, CSV and Print.

It generates the plan nobody published

The entire reading-plan category ships finished artefacts. YouVersion hosts thousands of plans, but you pick one from a catalogue. The Bible Recap is a fixed chronological year with a podcast attached. The Navigators publish printable PDFs. Ligonier lists 22 named plans. Every one of those is a plan someone else designed, and the reason people abandon them in February is usually a mismatch between the plan's assumptions and the reader's actual calendar.

This tool inverts that. You state the constraint first - I have from March 14 to Easter, I read on weekdays only, I want the Gospels - and the schedule is derived from it. John in 40 days on weekdays, split by pericope, is two clicks and a URL. That specific combination does not exist as a published plan anywhere, and it does not need to. Ligonier effectively concedes the point by ending a 22-plan list with an invitation to generate your own.

Words per chapter, not chapters per day

Most Bible-in-a-year plans divide by chapters, which is why some days take four minutes and others take twenty. This tool offers three division methods - Number of Chapters, Words per Chapter and Pericopes - and Words per Chapter is the one selected by default. It ships a word-count dataset for the purpose, so day length is smoothed against actual text volume rather than chapter boundaries.

Pericopes is the more interesting third option: it divides at narrative-unit boundaries, so a day ends where a story ends. Combined with a short book and a short timeframe - the page's own John in 40 Days sample does exactly this - it produces something closer to a study outline than a quota. Neither option is explained anywhere on the page; you have to try them and read the resulting stats.

Six renderings of the same plan

Format offers Calendar, List, Weeks, Books, Circle (Slices) and Circle (Calendar), and these are not cosmetic variants of one grid. Calendar is what a church hands out. List is what you paste into a document. Weeks suits a group meeting on a fixed evening. Books shows how the plan distributes across the canon rather than across dates.

The two circular formats are the ones that get shared: a colour wheel of the whole plan with genre section colours on, legible as a picture of where you are in the story. Show Overall Stats and Show Daily Stats add the arithmetic underneath - chapters, words, per-day load - which is the honest way to discover that a 90-day whole-Bible plan is a large daily commitment before you commit to it.

Export: two files that work and one button that does not

The iCal button assembles a calendar file in the browser and downloads it as bibleplan.ics: one all-day event per reading day, the reference as the event title, optionally an HTML description holding the reading links. That is rare in this category and it puts the plan where you already look every morning. CSV downloads as bibleplan.csv for spreadsheets or a bulletin mail merge.

The PDF button is the interesting one, because it is not there. The markup includes a Get PDF control with its display set to none, and the two libraries it depends on are referenced through malformed script tags browsers ignore, so the code path is dead by design. The site's own social description states the intended route: choose your time frame, format and books, then print it out. Printing works well - the print stylesheet drops the settings rail - and browser print-to-PDF is what those church-hosted PDFs of this tool's output actually are.

Pricing

Best value

Free

Everything the tool does, with no account, no email capture and no usage cap: all six output formats, all four canonical orders, all three division methods, all 27 interface languages, the CSV and iCal downloads, and browser printing. There is no paid tier and no upgrade prompt. The only funding signal on the page is a Support on Patreon link in the header pointing at the author's personal Patreon, and there is no published disclosure of what that raises or what it funds.

Free, with no tier structure to explain. There is no paid plan, no trial, no per-church licence and no feature held back. Every format, language, ordering and export is available on first load without an account.

The only money on the page is a Support on Patreon link in the header, pointing at the author's personal Patreon rather than an entity dedicated to this tool. No target, no total and no breakdown of what it funds is published. Treat it as a tip jar, not a business model.

The real cost is disclosure, not dollars. Two Google Analytics properties load on every page view - a legacy Universal Analytics tag and a current GA4 tag - and there is no privacy or terms page to describe what is collected or retained. Nothing on the page asks for an email address or a name, so the exposure is ordinary web analytics, but it is undocumented.

Continuity is the thing you cannot price here. The site's stylesheet and all nine of its scripts carry a 2025-12-01 cache-busting stamp, which is the most recent maintenance date visible on the page and reassuring as far as it goes. It is still one person's project with no organisation behind it, and if you are a church printing plans annually, keep a copy of the generated file rather than the link.

Where Bible Reading Plan Generator falls behind

No working PDF export. The Navigators, ESV and most denominational plan pages hand you a print-ready PDF; this hands you a hidden button and a browser print dialogue. The output prints cleanly, so the practical gap is small, but a shipped control that cannot fire is a shipped control that cannot fire.

No calendar subscription. The .ics file is a one-time import, not a feed, so a plan you revise in March leaves stale events in your calendar from the version you imported in January. A subscribe-able URL would have been the natural next step and is not present in the code.

No accountability layer of any kind. There is no streak, no reminder, no group, no partner and no notification. The tick-box column is the entire progress feature and it is pinned to one browser's local storage. Every major app in this space treats habit reinforcement as the product; here it is out of scope.

No commentary, audio or explanation. The plan tells you Genesis 12-15 and stops. Readers who abandon plans because they hit Leviticus without a guide are not helped by a better-shaped schedule, and this is exactly the gap The Bible Recap's daily eight-minute episode exists to fill.

No published reach. There is no user count, no plans-generated total and no institutional owner, which makes the tool hard to assess on anything other than its own interface and the eleven outside pages that cite it. For a free utility that is an acceptable trade; for anyone deciding whether to standardise a congregation on it, it is a real unknown.

Bible Reading Plan Generator vs. YouVersion vs. BiblePlan.org

YouVersion is the incumbent and not really the same product. It is free, it is on every phone, and it carries a plan catalogue plus streaks, audio, notifications and social reading. What it does not do is let you define a plan: you choose one someone else built, and if none of the thousands on offer fits your March-to-Easter window on weekdays only, you are stuck adapting yourself to the plan. The generator does the opposite and offers none of the reinforcement.

BiblePlan.org is the closest direct competitor - also free, also a customisable generator, also duration and order and start date - and it does one thing this tool does not, which is email you the day's reading. That is a meaningful advantage for anyone whose failure mode is forgetting. What it lacks is depth: no 27-language interface, no pericope division, no word-count day sizing, no M'Cheyne or Tanakh ordering, no six output formats and no iCal file. If you want the plan pushed to you, use BiblePlan; if you want control over how the plan is built, use this.

Against the fixed-plan publishers the choice is about what fails you first. The Navigators and Ligonier plans are trustworthy, printable and free, and if one of them matches your year there is no reason to generate anything. The Bible Recap wins outright for a first-time whole-Bible reader who needs daily explanation. This tool wins in exactly one situation, and it is a common one: the schedule you can actually keep is not a schedule anyone published.

The bottom line

This is a small tool built well by someone who knows both the subject and the craft, and the eleven outside pages citing it - Ligonier and Challies among them - are earned rather than marketed. It will build a plan to any shape you specify, size the days by word count rather than chapter count, and drop the whole thing into your calendar as an .ics file, which is more than any fixed-plan publisher offers. It also has a dead PDF button, no privacy page, no reminders, no commentary and no progress that follows you to a second device. Generate the plan here, then borrow accountability from somewhere else, because a generator does not read the Bible for you.

Alternatives to Bible Reading Plan Generator

BiblePlan.org 4.4The nearest thing to a direct competitor: another free customisable generator, with duration, order and start date, and it will email you the day's reading. Fewer orderings, no multi-language interface and no iCal file, but the email delivery is a real advantage.

The Bible Recap 4.7A fixed chronological year with an eight-minute daily podcast attached. You give up all schedule control and get the thing this tool cannot supply, which is daily explanation of what you just read.Navigators Bible Reading Plans 4.5Free printable plans from a long-running discipleship ministry, offered as web pages and print-ready PDFs. If one of the published shapes fits your year, this is the simpler route and its PDF export actually works.

YouVersion 4.9The default Bible app, with thousands of prebuilt plans plus streaks, reminders, audio and group reading. You pick from a catalogue rather than defining a plan, but everything the generator lacks in habit reinforcement is here.Ligonier Bible Reading Plans 4.4A curated index of 22 named plans, from 5x5x5 to M'Cheyne to Grant Horner, that ends by pointing readers at this generator. Useful as the reference list to check before you decide no published plan will do.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need an account?

No. There is no signup, no login and no email field on the page. Settings are encoded in the URL, so you save a plan by bookmarking the link or sending it to someone. The only stored state is the optional tick-box column, which uses browser local storage and does not follow you to another device.

What formats can I export?

Two working downloads and printing. iCal produces a bibleplan.ics file with one all-day event per reading day, importable into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. CSV produces bibleplan.csv for spreadsheets. Printing is handled by the browser, and the print stylesheet hides the settings rail, so print-to-PDF is the practical route to a PDF. A Get PDF button exists in the markup but is hidden and its supporting libraries never load.

Can I subscribe to the plan as a live calendar feed?

No. The calendar export is a one-time file download, not a webcal subscription URL, and there is no feed endpoint in the code. Change the plan and you have to delete the imported events and import the new file. The events carry no reminders either, so alerts are added on your side.

Can it do chronological, M'Cheyne, or a whole-Bible year?

Yes to all three. Bible Books offers four orderings: Traditional, Chronological, Alternate (a Hebrew Tanakh sequence for the Old Testament, a Gospel-Writers grouping for the New) and M'Cheyne. A Bible-in-a-year plan is Old Testament plus New Testament across 365 days, shipped as one of the page's sample links. A daily Psalm, a daily Proverb and OT/NT overlap are separate options.

Does it include the Deuterocanonical books?

Optionally. The Traditional ordering lists Old Testament, Deuterocanonical and New Testament as three separately selectable sections, so a plan can follow the Catholic or Orthodox canon or omit those books entirely; the page includes a Deuterocanonical by Book sample. Reviewers write from their own traditions here - Danny Franks, recommending the tool warmly, noted he would not personally include those books in his own quiet times. The tool takes no position.

What languages and translations does it support?

The interface and generated book names come in 27 languages, from Spanish and German to Arabic, Hindi, Javanese, Malayalam, Tamil and both Chinese scripts. Turn on Add Reading Links and the references become links into Bible Gateway, Biblia, YouVersion or Y'all Version in any of 16 translations - 11 English plus German, Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian editions. The tool generates references, not Bible text; reading happens on whichever site you send it to.

Who maintains it, and is it going to disappear?

It is maintained by John Dyer, a professor and technology administrator at Dallas Theological Seminary, as a personal project with a Patreon link. The current version dates to a January 2020 update of an earlier tool, and every stylesheet and script carries a 2025-12-01 version stamp, so it was being touched as recently as December 2025. There is no company or service commitment behind it, so if you are producing plans for a congregation, archive the generated file rather than relying on the URL.

Bible Reading Plan Generator