Best Trading Journals of 2026

You blow an eval on a Tuesday afternoon. Trailing drawdown catches you, the account locks, and three weeks of work evaporates in about 40 minutes.

Now try to reconstruct it. Which entry started the slide? Were you already down on the day before that MNQ scalp, or did the CL trade do the real damage? Was this the third Tuesday in a row you gave back the morning?

Most traders can’t answer. Not because they’re careless, but because the data lives in six different places: two Tradovate accounts, one on Rithmic, a copier dashboard, and a memory that’s doing its best.

That’s the actual job a journal does for a prop trader. It isn’t about feeling organized. It’s about being able to answer “what happened” when a rule breach costs you a funded account.

Here’s the thing most journal roundups miss: nobody in this game is trading one account. You’re running five evaluations and two funded accounts at minimum, often through a copier, with minis on the leader and micros on the followers. So the question isn’t which journal has the prettiest dashboard. It’s which one tracks all of it without forcing you up two pricing tiers.

Quick verdict

• Edgewonk if you’re running multiple prop accounts and don’t want account limits dictating your subscription. One price, no tiers, and the futures platform list is the deepest here.
• TradeZella if you want a purpose-built prop firm dashboard and the cleanest interface in the category, and you’re fine paying for the tier that unlocks multi-account.
• TraderSync if you trade across a lot of different brokers and want Level II replay data on your futures fills.
• Tradervue if exit quality is your problem and you want to know exactly how much you’re leaving on the table.
• TradesViz if you want the deepest analytics per dollar and don’t mind an interface that’s function over form.
• Stonk Journal if you’re starting out, want zero cost, and can live with manual entry.

How they compare

1. Edgewonk

Edgewonk’s supported-platforms page is titled “Supported brokers, prop firms & platforms,” and that framing turns out to be accurate rather than marketing.

The futures side is the deepest list in this roundup. NinjaTrader 7 and 8, Tradovate, Rithmic Pro, CQG, Sierra Chart, Quantower, MultiCharts, MotiveWave, Optimus Flow, Jigsaw Trading, ATAS, TradeStation, and Trade Navigator all import. TopstepX is listed directly. On the MetaTrader side, Edgewonk names FTMO, E8 Funding, Funded Next, Funding Pips, The 5ers, Goat Funded Trader, Bright Funded, Alpha Capital, and Maven, with auto-sync available for other MT4 and MT5 prop firms. If your platform isn’t on the list, there’s an Excel import as a fallback.

Pricing: $169 per year, single tier, all features included Accounts: Unlimited journals, unlimited accounts, unlimited trades Markets: Forex, stocks, futures, crypto, options, indices, commodities Trial: No free tier. 14-day money-back guarantee instead

That pricing structure is the reason it sits at number 1 here. There’s one plan. Everyone gets everything. If you’re running eight funded and evaluation accounts, you pay $169 a year, same as the person running one. Compare that to the tiered model everywhere else, where account count is the lever that pushes you up a plan, and the math gets lopsided fast for anyone deep in the prop ecosystem.

The Portfolio page follows from that: all your journals in one dashboard with combined performance statistics. When you’re running the same setup across four firms, seeing them aggregated and separately is the whole point.

Analytically, Edgewonk leans toward behavior rather than raw stats. The Tiltmeter tracks how often you break your own rules and how disciplined you’re being over time. There’s a Trade Management Optimizer, MFE and MAE reporting, best exit analysis, drawdown analysis, losing streak analysis, and a psychology analysis section. Every Sunday an automated edge finder runs a performance and mistake scan across your journal. You can track missed trades, which sounds minor until you realize how many prop traders fail evals by hesitating on the setups that actually work.

Session report cards and setup checklists round it out. 20 custom tag categories and 6 screenshots per trade give you enough room to tag a futures strategy properly without hitting a wall.

Now, the limitations, because they’re real. There’s no monthly plan. You commit to a year or you don’t use it, and the 14-day refund window is your only way to evaluate it, which means you’re putting money down before you know if you like the interface. TradingView imports are restricted to paper trading only, so if TradingView is your execution front-end through Tradovate, you’ll be importing from Tradovate rather than TradingView. And there’s no backtesting or trade replay. Edgewonk is a journal, full stop, not a journal plus a simulator.

Whether that last one is a con depends on you. If you already run replay in Sierra Chart or NinjaTrader, paying a second tool to duplicate it is money burned.

Choose Edgewonk if: you’re managing several prop accounts and you want the account count to stop being a pricing decision.

More Insights: Edgewonk review

2. TradeZella

TradeZella is the name most US prop traders already know, and it’s earned that partly by building for them directly. There’s a PropFirm Sync dashboard for tracking finances and progress across every prop account, and it’s included on every pricing tier, not gated behind the top plan.

On integrations, the futures picture is specific and worth reading carefully. NinjaTrader, Tradovate, and Rithmic R Trader all support auto-sync plus file upload. TopstepX and Project X are file upload only. That distinction matters more than it sounds: if you’re on a TopstepX or Project X account, you’re exporting and uploading rather than letting fills flow in automatically. Across the whole platform, TradeZella lists 500+ broker and prop firm integrations.

Pricing runs on three tiers, and the account limits are the dividing line:

• Essential, $35/month. 1 account. No trade replay. 500 AI credits monthly, no AI agents. 10 backtesting strategies.
• Pro, $59/month. 50 accounts. Unlimited trade replay at 1-second resolution with AI insights. 1,500 credits, agents included, 10 automated AI backtests monthly, unlimited strategies.
• Ultra, $99/month. Unlimited accounts, 3,000 credits, 100 automated backtests, priority support.

Annual billing is available on all three at a lower effective monthly rate.

Real talk: Essential is not a prop trader’s plan. One account connection means one account. The moment you’re running a second evaluation, you’re on Pro at $59 a month, which is $708 a year against Edgewonk’s $169. You’re paying for genuine additional capability, so it isn’t a rip-off, but you should go in knowing which tier you’ll actually land on.

What you get for that: backtesting against 11+ years of historical data at 1-second chart resolution covering stocks, futures, crypto and CFDs. Trade replay with Time & Sales and Level II data. Zella AI with agents that auto-tag trades and run session reviews without you asking. Zella Scale and best exit analysis, MFE/MAE statistics, running P&L and drawdown, commission and fee handling, and 300+ drilled-down reports.

The interface deserves its reputation. It’s the cleanest thing in this category, and for a tool you’re supposed to open every single evening, that matters more than a feature list suggests. There’s a learning curve on the analytics depth, though. A lot of numbers arrive at once.

Choose TradeZella if: you want prop firm tracking as a first-class feature and you’ll use the replay and backtesting enough to justify the Pro tier.

3. TraderSync

Breadth is the pitch here. TraderSync connects with over 700 brokers and trading platforms, which is the widest net in this roundup, and it’s the right answer if your accounts are scattered across firms that other journals haven’t gotten around to supporting.

Three tiers, and again the accounts line is what to read:

Plan	Monthly	Annual	Accounts
Pro	$29.95	$269.52	5
Premium	$49.95	$449.52	Unlimited
Elite	$79.95	$719.52	Unlimited

There’s a 7-day free trial across the board, which is more than Edgewonk or TradeZella offer and lets you actually look at the thing before paying.

Pro at 5 accounts is a reasonable starting point for a prop trader in a way that TradeZella’s Essential isn’t. Five accounts covers a decent evaluation stack. Once you’re past that, Premium at $49.95 goes unlimited, and unlimited at that price is competitive.

The backtester supports CME futures alongside US equities, equity options, crypto and forex, so you can stress-test an ES or NQ strategy inside the same tool you’re journaling in. Level II data is available for US stocks, options and futures, which is genuinely uncommon in a journal and useful if you’re trying to work out whether a fill was bad execution or just a thin book.

TraderSync also runs AI insights over your trade history rather than making you go looking for patterns yourself.

If there’s a knock, it’s that the platform is broad rather than pointed. It serves equities traders, options traders and futures traders with the same feature set, which means nothing about it is specifically shaped around evaluation rules or trailing drawdown the way TradeZella’s prop dashboard is.

Choose TraderSync if: your accounts are spread across a lot of different brokers and you want Level II on your futures fills.

4. Tradervue

Tradervue has been at this longer than most, and it shows in what it chooses to be good at.

The standout is exit analysis. Tradervue calculates the potential P&L on each trade against certain rules and gives you an exit efficiency figure. Closer to 100% means you captured more of what the move actually offered. If you’ve ever suspected you’re cutting winners early, this is the feature that either confirms it or clears you, and it’s the single most useful diagnostic in this whole roundup for a futures scalper.

Two paid tiers, both simpler than the competition:

Silver, $29.95/month. Unlimited trade imports, unlimited trading accounts, unlimited mentors and mentees, broker sync, advanced reporting, 1 GB image storage.

Gold, $49.95/month. Everything in Silver plus trade exit performance analysis, max potential P&L analysis, commission and fee support, and 5 GB image storage.

Unlimited trading accounts on both tiers is the detail prop traders should notice. Tradervue doesn’t use account count as an upsell lever at all, which puts it alongside Edgewonk on that specific point. Futures are supported on both plans, and the platform syncs with 100+ brokers.

There’s a free plan, but it caps you at 30 trade imports per calendar month. That’s a look-around allowance, not a workable journal for anyone trading actively.

The mentor and mentee system is worth flagging if you’re in a trading group or paying for coaching. You can grant someone access to your trade history and get feedback against real data rather than a screenshot you cherry-picked.

Worth knowing before you commit: the commission and fee support sits on Gold, not Silver. For futures traders that’s not a nice-to-have. Commission drag on micros is a meaningful share of your P&L, and a journal that isn’t netting it out is telling you a flattering version of your results.

Choose Tradervue if: you want to know how much money your exits are costing you, and you want unlimited accounts without a premium tier.

5. TradesViz

Most analytics per dollar. That’s the honest summary.

The free tier gets attention, so let’s be precise about it: TradesViz Basic is free forever with 3,000 executions per month and 1 trading account, but it covers stocks only. Futures aren’t included. If you found this page looking for a free futures journal, Basic won’t do it.

Futures live on the paid plans:

Pro, $19.99/month ($14.99/month billed annually). Stocks, stock options, futures, futures options, forex, crypto and CFDs. Unlimited imports. 10 trading accounts. 7-day free trial.

Platinum, $29.99/month ($22.49/month billed annually). Same asset coverage, 20 trading accounts, plus a real-time screener, the Universal Simulator, exit analysis and options flow.

Pro at $19.99 with 10 accounts and futures options support is the best raw value on this page. Ten accounts covers most working prop setups, and futures options are handled properly rather than bolted on.

The catch, and every reviewer who’s covered this platform lands in the same place, is the interface. TradesViz gives you an enormous amount of data and doesn’t do much to help you decide what to look at first. If you like building your own dashboards and digging through hundreds of charts, that’s a feature. If you want the tool to point at the problem, it’s friction, and friction is what kills journaling habits.

Note also that exit analysis sits on Platinum rather than Pro, so the diagnostic Tradervue puts on its middle tier costs you the top tier here.

Choose TradesViz if: you want maximum analytical depth for under $20 a month and you’re comfortable finding your own way around.

6. Stonk Journal

Free, and more capable than “free” usually implies.

The free plan carries unlimited trades and unlimited accounts, covering stocks, options, futures, forex, crypto and indices. No trial period, no credit card, no trade caps. Core features are all there: stats, calendar, risk rules, multi-account tracking, trade setups and share links.

One detail matters more than the rest for this audience. Stonk Journal states that futures are handled with proper contract multipliers. That sounds like a small thing until you’ve watched a journal report your MES P&L as though a point were worth $50 instead of $5. Getting the multiplier right is table stakes, and it’s not universal.

The Pro plan adds an AI coach, CSV import and an all-accounts roll-up.

So what’s the limitation? Broker sync isn’t available yet, it’s on the roadmap. On the free plan you’re entering trades by hand, and CSV import requires Pro. If you’re taking 15 trades a day across six accounts, manual entry will not survive contact with reality. You’ll stop doing it inside two weeks.

For a trader taking 2 or 3 selective trades a day, or someone who genuinely can’t justify a subscription yet, it’s a real option rather than a consolation prize.

Choose Stonk Journal if: you’re not ready to pay for a journal and your trade frequency is low enough that manual entry is survivable.

What actually matters when you’re on an evaluation

Most journal comparisons rank on analytics depth. For prop futures traders that’s the wrong first filter. Here’s what actually determines whether a journal survives in your routine.

Account count, before anything else. Work out how many accounts you’ll realistically be running in six months, then price the tier that covers it. This flips several rankings. TradeZella at Essential is $35 for one account, but a prop trader needs Pro at $59. TradesViz Pro handles 10 accounts for $19.99. Edgewonk, Tradervue and TraderSync’s upper tiers don’t cap accounts at all. Pricing a journal on its entry tier when you’ll never use the entry tier is how people end up paying $700 a year by accident.

Contract multipliers on micros. If a journal treats MES like ES or MNQ like NQ, every number downstream is wrong. Win rate survives, but expectancy, average win, drawdown and risk-to-reward all break. Confirm this before you trust a single report.

Auto-sync versus file upload, per platform. This is where the detail gets specific and most pages stay vague. TradeZella auto-syncs NinjaTrader, Tradovate and Rithmic R Trader, but TopstepX and Project X are file upload only. That’s not a dealbreaker, it’s a workflow change. Uploading exports from six accounts every evening is a chore you will eventually skip, and a journal you skip is worth nothing.

Commission handling. Prop firms don’t treat commissions identically. Two firms can charge different rates on the same micro contract, which means identical trades produce different net results across your accounts. If your journal is showing gross P&L, your per-account comparison is fiction. Tradervue puts commission support on Gold. Edgewonk and TradeZella include it across the board.

Whether you can see how close you got. Trailing drawdown is what kills evals, and it kills them quietly. What you want is the ability to look back at a session and see your intraday low water mark, not just where you finished. Drawdown analysis, running P&L and MFE/MAE reporting all get you there from different angles. Edgewonk, TradeZella, TraderSync, Tradervue and TradesViz all report on some combination of these.

The habit test. Look, the best journal is the one you’ll still be filling in eight weeks from now. Depth is worthless if the interface makes you dread opening it. That’s the strongest argument for TradeZella’s interface and the strongest argument against TradesViz for a lot of people, and it has nothing to do with feature counts.

FAQ

Are there any futures brokers with free trading journals included?

Some futures platforms include basic trade reporting, but that isn’t the same as a journal. Reporting tells you what your P&L was. A journal tells you why. If you want free, Stonk Journal covers futures with correct contract multipliers on its free plan and tracks unlimited accounts, though you’ll be entering trades manually. TradesViz has a free tier, but it’s limited to stocks, so it won’t help with futures.

What’s the best free trading journal for futures?

Stonk Journal, on the basis that its free plan actually supports futures with proper contract multipliers and doesn’t cap your trades or accounts. TradesViz’s free tier is stocks only. Tradervue’s free plan allows 30 trade imports a month, which most futures day traders will exhaust in a week. The tradeoff with Stonk Journal is manual entry, since broker sync isn’t available yet.

Do you need a trading journal to pass a prop firm evaluation?

Not formally, no prop firm requires one. Practically, evaluations are won and lost on consistency rules, daily loss limits and trailing drawdown, all of which are pattern problems. If you can’t see that you lose money after 1pm, or that Fridays are your worst day, or that your rushed entries account for most of your drawdown, you’ll keep repeating it. A journal is how those patterns become visible.

Can a trading journal track multiple funded accounts separately?

Yes, though this is where pricing tiers bite. Edgewonk includes unlimited accounts at a single price. Tradervue includes unlimited accounts on both paid plans. TraderSync goes unlimited from its Premium tier and allows 5 on Pro. TradeZella allows 1 account on Essential, 50 on Pro and unlimited on Ultra. TradesViz allows 1 on the free plan, 10 on Pro and 20 on Platinum. Check the number before you check the features.

Does a trading journal handle MES and MNQ correctly?

It depends on the tool, and it’s worth confirming rather than assuming. Stonk Journal states directly that futures are handled with proper contract multipliers. The paid platforms here all support futures as a first-class asset class. If you’re running minis on one account and micros on another through a copier, import a handful of trades and check the P&L against your broker statement before you build any conclusions on the data.