Resource Review · Christian Journaling Apps
Stones
A quietly excellent Christian journal built around one image — the pile of stones Israel set up at the Jordan to remember what God had done — and most of the rest of the app earns that opening promise.
- Editor rating
- 4.2 / 5
- Starting price
- Free, then around $3.99/mo or $29.99/yr
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- iOS · Android
- Developer
- Stones Devotional, Inc.
- Launched
- 2023
The verdict
Stones has quietly become the favorite of Christians who journal less for self-analysis and more for remembering. The app is smaller than Psalmlog and narrower than Echo Prayer, but the memorial-stones framing gives every entry a job to do — and that focus is the whole point.
Try Stones ↗Opens stonesapp.com
Stones is a Christian journaling app named after Joshua 4, where the Israelites pulled twelve stones from the Jordan riverbed and stacked them on the bank so future generations would ask what they meant. The whole product is built around that one verse. Every entry is treated as a "stone" — a small, dated marker of something God did, said, gave, or answered — and the app is designed so you can come back years later and walk the pile.
It is not a habit tracker. It is not a Bible-study app. It is not a CBT-style mood journal dressed up in Christian language. It is the thoughtful person's reflection journal — quiet, slow, photo-and-voice-friendly — and the design choices line up unusually well with the metaphor. You open the app, tap a stone, write or speak or photograph what happened, and the entry lands on a timeline that does not ask you to optimize anything.
Stones is also small. The team is small, the feature list is small, the price is small, and the audience — at least the audience that loves it — is small. That is part of why this review exists: the app does one thing, does it carefully, and stops. Whether that is enough depends entirely on what you want a journal to do. Below is the long-form picture: what works, what is missing, where it sits next to Psalmlog and Echo Prayer, and who should actually install it.
✓ The good
- Genuinely distinctive framing — the memorial-stones metaphor is not branding paint, it shapes the entire UX and gives reflective writing a clear purpose
- Multi-modal entries — text, photo, and audio recordings live inside a single stone, which makes capturing something on a busy day actually realistic
- Answered-prayer tracking that respects the pile — prayers can be marked answered later and re-surface in the timeline as new stones
- Calm, slow design — no streaks, no leaderboards, no daily-goal nagging, which is rare in this category
- Daily prompts that lean reflective rather than therapeutic — "what did God provide this week" rather than "rate your mood 1–10"
- Lifetime export — you can export your entire journal to PDF or plain text, even on the free tier, so your stones never get locked inside the app
- Reasonable price — the paid tier is meaningfully cheaper than Hallow or Dwell and unlocks the features most journalers will actually use
✗ Watch out
- No web or desktop version (yet) — the app is mobile-only, which makes long-form typing harder than it should be
- No Bible integration — you cannot tap a verse in the app and attach it to a stone; you copy and paste from another app
- Search is shallow — you can search entry text, but tags, photo OCR, and audio transcript search are limited or missing
- Free tier caps total stones — the limit is generous enough to test the app but tight enough that committed users will hit it
- Small community and small team — updates ship slowly, and there is no large library of prompts, plans, or community content to lean on
- No shared journals or family pile — every journal is private, which is right for most use cases but a real gap for couples or parents who want to remember together
Best for
- Reflective journalers who want a purpose-built memorial journal
- People who pray for specific things and want to track answers over time
- Anyone who prefers voice or photo entries to long typed paragraphs
- Christians coming out of a hard season who want to mark what God did
Avoid if
- You want a full Bible app with reading plans and verse search
- You journal primarily on a laptop or desktop
- You need shared journals for a spouse, small group, or family
- You want a CBT-style mood and mental-health tracker
What Stones is
Stones is a Christian reflection-journal app for iOS and Android, built around the imagery of Joshua 4 — the twelve memorial stones Israel set up at the Jordan crossing so children would later ask what they meant. Each journal entry is a "stone": a dated, taggable marker that can include text, one or more photos, and an audio recording. Stones live on a vertical timeline, group into milestones, and can be tied to prayer requests so an unanswered ask can be revisited months later and marked answered when it is.
The app is mobile-only, freemium, and intentionally narrow. There is no Bible reader, no reading-plan engine, no community feed, no AI chat. The pitch is closer to a Field Notes pocket notebook than to YouVersion. Stones launched in 2023, is updated by a small independent team, and as of writing sits in the high-4-star range on both app stores with a small but unusually devoted review base — which tracks with what the product is actually trying to do.
Why the Joshua-4 crowd prefers Stones
The single biggest practical difference between Stones and a general Christian journal — Psalmlog, Day One with a faith template, a Moleskine — is that the metaphor is load-bearing. Stones does not ask you to journal; it asks you to mark. There is a difference. A journal entry can be anything: a vent, a list, a sermon recap, a complaint. A stone is, by definition, a thing worth remembering — a provision, a healing, a closed door that turned out to be mercy, an answered prayer, a verse that landed at the right moment. The UI quietly enforces the difference. Prompts say "what did God do this week," not "how are you feeling." Entries are tagged with categories like provision, answered prayer, encouragement, conviction.
In practice this turns out to be more useful than it sounds. Most journalers do not lapse because journaling is hard. They lapse because they do not know what they are journaling for. Stones gives the act a job: build a pile your future self — and, in the language of Joshua 4, "your children" — can walk. People who love Stones tend to describe it the same way: it is the first journal they actually came back to a year later and read.
The memorial-stones metaphor: the distinctive theological framing
Joshua 4 is one of a handful of Old Testament passages explicitly about institutional memory. Israel crosses the Jordan, the priests stand in the dry riverbed with the ark, twelve men pull twelve stones onto the bank, and Joshua tells them why: so when your children ask, you can tell them what God did here. Stones takes that passage as a product spec. Every entry is a stone. Every stone has a date, an optional tag, an optional photo, an optional voice note, and a body. Stones can be grouped into "piles" — the app's word for what most journals would call notebooks or collections — and a pile can be themed around a season, a relationship, a prayer, or a year.
The framing matters because it solves the blank-page problem. Most journaling apps open to either a blank screen or a generic prompt; Stones opens to a question shaped by the metaphor — what did God do, what did He provide, what did He say, what are you remembering. The app is not trying to be a daily devotional, and it is not trying to be a mood tracker. It is trying to be a memorial. That is a narrower goal than most apps in this category attempt, and the narrowness is the feature. Whether or not the underlying theology of remembrance matches your tradition, the UX consequence is the same: you write less, you write more honestly, and you re-read more.
Photo + text + audio entries: capturing a stone when typing is too much
Each stone can hold all three media types in a single entry. You can write a paragraph, attach two or three photos, and add a short voice note, and they all live on the same dated card. The voice recorder is good — clean, no time limit on the paid tier, basic auto-transcription on the latest version — and the photo handling supports both camera roll and live capture. Audio entries are stored locally and synced to the cloud (the team is explicit that recordings are not used to train any model), which matters for an app where people may be speaking aloud about hard things.
This sounds like a small thing. In practice it is transformative. Most journaling lapses happen on the days you most need to journal — the day a parent is diagnosed, the day a job offer comes through, the day a long prayer is finally answered — because typing 400 words on a phone is too much. A 45-second voice memo is not too much. A photo of the hospital window with a one-line caption is not too much. Stones is one of the few faith-shaped journals that treats multi-modal capture as a first-class workflow rather than a premium add-on, and that single choice is probably why its retention numbers are as good as they are.
Milestone markers + answered-prayer tracking: the pile, walked backward
Two features turn Stones from a pretty journal into an actual memorial. The first is milestone markers — a way to flag certain stones as bigger than the rest, so they show up as larger nodes on the timeline and in the year-in-review export. Milestones are user-defined; common ones include births, deaths, baptisms, conversions, moves, the start and end of hard seasons. The second is answered-prayer tracking. Any stone can be tagged as a prayer request; when an answer comes — yes, no, or something else — you open the original stone, mark it answered, and add a new stone linked to it. The timeline shows both: the ask, and the answer, with the gap between them visible.
The combination is the closest any app in this category gets to the actual Joshua 4 mechanic. You can scroll back six months and see that the thing you were begging God for in November was answered in February — and the answer is sitting on the same timeline as the ask. For users who pray about specific things over long arcs (health, work, prodigal family members, infertility), this is the feature that earns the subscription. It is also the feature that quietly differentiates Stones from prayer-only apps like Echo Prayer, which track requests well but do not function as a general journal.
Pricing
Free
$0
Unlimited reading of existing stones, capped number of new stones (around 30 active at a time as of writing), text-only entries, daily prompts, and PDF export. Enough to live in for weeks before you decide.
Stones+
Around $3.99/mo
Unlimited stones, photo and audio entries, answered-prayer tracking, milestone markers, custom prompts, and Face ID lock. The tier most paid users land on.
Stones+ Annual
Around $29.99/yr
Same feature set as monthly Stones+, billed yearly. Works out to roughly $2.50/mo — the balanced default and the tier the team obviously wants you on.
Lifetime
Around $99 one-time
Single purchase, no subscription. Not heavily advertised inside the app, but available — worth it if you already know you want to journal in Stones for years.
Pricing is one of the things Stones gets cleanly right. The free tier is not a trial — it is a permanently usable, slightly limited version of the app. You can journal in it forever as long as you stay under the active-stones cap and stick to text-only entries. That makes it possible to actually evaluate the product before paying.
Stones+ at around $3.99/mo or $29.99/yr is the tier most paid users land on, and it unlocks the features that matter — unlimited stones, photos, audio, answered-prayer tracking, milestones, custom prompts, and Face ID lock. The annual price works out to roughly $2.50/mo, which is meaningfully cheaper than Hallow or Dwell and competitive with the cheapest tier of most general journaling apps.
The lifetime tier (around $99 one-time as of writing) is the underrated option. It is not advertised aggressively inside the app, but it is there in settings, and for journalers who already know they want this to be their long-term home it pays for itself in roughly three years. Most users do not need lifetime. People who already have a five-year-old paper journal probably do.
There is no family plan and no shared-journal tier, which is the most visible pricing gap. If you and a spouse both want piles in Stones, you each pay separately, and there is no way to share entries across accounts.
Where Stones falls behind
No desktop or web version (yet). This is the gap most committed users hit first. Stones is mobile-only, and writing a long entry on a phone is workable but never great. The team has said web is on the roadmap; as of writing there is no public timeline.
No Bible integration. You cannot tap a verse in Stones and attach it as scripture; you copy and paste from YouVersion, Olive Tree, Gospel Library, or wherever you read. For a Christian journal this is a real omission. Most users work around it by pasting the verse text into the stone body, but a tap-to-attach reference would be the obvious next feature.
Search is shallow. You can search entry text, and tags help, but there is no photo OCR, audio-transcript search is limited to the most recent recordings, and there is no cross-pile search filter. For a pile that grows for years, search will be the bottleneck.
No shared or family journals. Every pile is private to a single account. Couples and parents who want a joint memorial — common ask in user reviews — currently have to keep mirrored journals on two phones or use a screenshot workflow.
Small team, slow ship cadence. Stones updates land every few months rather than every few weeks. That is fine for a stable app, but it means feature requests can sit for a long time, and the prompt library is much smaller than what you would find in a YouVersion-scale product.
Stones vs. Psalmlog vs. Echo Prayer
These three apps look similar from the outside — small, faith-shaped, journal-adjacent — and they are not actually interchangeable.
Different strengths. Stones is the memorial journal: built around remembering what God did, multi-modal entries, milestones and answered-prayer tracking on a single timeline. Psalmlog is the broader Christian journaling app: larger feature set, more prompts, Bible-passage attachment, deeper search, and a more general "journal your walk" framing without the Joshua-4 spine. Echo Prayer is narrower than either — it is a prayer list and reminder system that happens to log answers, not a journal you would write a 200-word reflection into.
If you want to remember, Stones. If you want to journal your daily walk in a more conventional way and have it work on both phone and laptop, Psalmlog. If you mostly want a prayer list that nudges you, Echo Prayer. The honest case for Stones over the other two is the metaphor: it is the only one of the three where the product is shaped by a single passage of scripture, and for users who connect with that framing it is the difference between an app that gets opened twice a month and an app that gets opened daily.
The bottom line
Stones is a small, focused, quietly excellent Christian journal that earns its 4.2 by doing one thing carefully. The memorial-stones framing is not paint — it shapes prompts, tags, milestones, and the answered-prayer loop, and the multi-modal capture means it actually gets used on the days that matter. The gaps are real: no web version, no Bible integration, no shared journals, and a small team that ships slowly. They are real gaps, but they are worth knowing about going in rather than dealbreakers. For reflective journalers who want a pile they will walk a year from now, Stones is the most thoughtful option in the category.
Alternatives to Stones
Psalmlog
Broader Christian journaling app with Bible-passage attachment, deeper search, and a more general daily-walk framing. The better choice if you want a conventional faith journal that also works on more than just a phone.
Echo Prayer
Prayer-list app focused on reminders and answer tracking. Narrower than Stones — it does not function as a general journal — but excellent at the specific job of keeping a prayer list alive.
Hallow
Catholic-rooted guided-prayer app with reflection prompts inside its sessions. Not a journal at heart, but worth looking at if you want a structured daily practice rather than a memorial.
Glorify
Devotional-and-worship app with light journaling features baked in. Better as a daily devotional than as a long-term journal, but useful if you want one app to do both jobs at a shallow depth.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Stones free?
- There is a permanent free tier that supports text-only entries up to a generous cap of active stones, daily prompts, and PDF export. The paid tier — Stones+ at around $3.99/mo or $29.99/yr as of writing — unlocks unlimited stones, photo and audio entries, answered-prayer tracking, milestones, and custom prompts. A lifetime purchase around $99 is also available in settings.
- Is Stones tied to a specific denomination?
- No. Stones is non-denominational Christian. The prompts and framing draw on Joshua 4 and on common Christian language about provision, prayer, and remembrance, and the app does not assume any particular tradition. Users from Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and Latter-day Saint backgrounds use it without friction.
- Does Stones have a web or desktop version?
- Not as of writing. Stones is mobile-only on iOS and Android. The team has said a web version is on the roadmap but has not given a public release date. Long-form typing on a phone is the main practical limitation users mention.
- How private are my entries?
- Entries are encrypted in transit and at rest, the app supports Face ID and passcode lock, and the team is explicit that audio recordings are not used to train any model. Entries are stored in the developer cloud so they sync across your own devices; there are no shared-journal features, so nothing is visible to anyone else by default.
- How is Stones different from Psalmlog?
- Psalmlog is a broader Christian journaling app — more prompts, Bible-passage attachment, deeper search, more general framing. Stones is narrower and built specifically around the memorial-stones metaphor, with milestone markers and answered-prayer tracking on a single timeline. Stones is the better fit if you want a memorial; Psalmlog is the better fit if you want a daily walk-journal.
- Can I export my journal if I stop using the app?
- Yes. Stones supports PDF and plain-text export of your full journal, including on the free tier. That is unusually generous for the category and is the right answer to the lock-in question: whatever you write in Stones can leave Stones.
- Is Stones a good fit for someone in a hard season?
- It can be. The memorial framing — looking back to mark what God did — tends to work better for people who want to remember than for people who want to process moment-to-moment. If you are looking for a CBT-style mood and mental-health tracker, Stones is not that app. If you are coming out of a hard season and want to mark what carried you through it, it fits unusually well.