The Best Book Tracking Apps in 2026: booksense vs StoryGraph vs Fable vs Hardcover vs Bookmory vs Bookly

TL;DR: Six apps, six different jobs. Want the habit machinery (timed sessions, streaks, leagues, live reading tables) with a social layer on iOS: booksense, our own app, and the pick when consistency rather than cataloguing is the problem. Want deep stats and mood-based recommendations: The StoryGraph. Want book clubs and reading with friends: Fable. Want the most complete Goodreads replacement on the web: Hardcover. Want a quiet, private log: Bookmory. Want a solo reading timer: Bookly. Literal, a former contender, appears to be dead, and we explain why below.

Book tracking apps multiplied after readers started looking for a way out of Goodreads, and the market has now sorted itself into camps. Some apps are stats engines. Some are book clubs. Some are private journals. One or two are habit trackers wearing a library on top.

That sorting is good news, because it means the question is no longer “which app is best” but “which app is best for the way you read.” This comparison covers booksense and the five most-discussed trackers of 2026, with a feature matrix up front and an honest section on each, including where every one of them falls short. Every claim links to the app’s own documentation or a named review, checked in July 2026. Features and prices change, so verify on the day you sign up.

If your starting point is “I want to leave Goodreads,” read this alongside our Goodreads alternatives roundup and the migration guide for moving your data. If you only read on an iPhone, we test eight iOS trackers, including widgets, Apple Watch, and offline behaviour, in the best book tracking app for iPhone.

First, a eulogy: what happened to Literal

Literal deserved better. The design was lovely, the Goodreads importer was the smoothest in the category, and for a while it looked like the indie answer.

It is now, as far as anyone can tell, gone. The Android app was unpublished from Google Play on February 5, 2025, the last app update shipped back in August 2022, and the team’s public channels went quiet years before that, a slow fade documented by Creativerly. Recent App Store reviews describe the app simply failing to load, with one reader reporting three years of tracking lost.

No official shutdown notice exists, which is exactly the problem. We are not including Literal in this comparison, and we would not start a library there today. Its slot goes to Bookly, a timer-first tracker that is very much alive. Consider Literal a reminder of the one question to ask any tracker before you commit: can I get my data out?

The comparison matrix

The matrix below covers the eight standard comparison points (tracking, stats, import, social, clubs, habit features, platforms, price) plus the habit-side rows where booksense concentrates its effort. It scrolls horizontally on smaller screens.

Feature	booksense	The StoryGraph	Fable	Hardcover	Bookmory	Bookly
Platforms	iOS only	Web, iOS, Android	iOS, Android, partial web	Web, iOS, Android	iOS, Android	iOS, Android
Price	Free download; optional Elite membership	Free; Plus $4.99/mo or $49.99/yr	Free to download; no reader subscription advertised	Free; Supporter $4.99/mo	Free with ads; Premium $3.49/mo or $30.99/yr	Free (10-book cap); Pro from $4.99/mo, $29.99/yr
Goodreads CSV import	Yes; parsed on-device, keeps ratings, reviews, and read dates	Yes, reportedly Plus-only now	Yes (CSV beta plus direct account import)	Yes (also imports StoryGraph)	Yes, with manual status assignment	Recently added, early reports call it rough
Core tracking (statuses, DNF)	Yes, statuses plus custom shelves	Yes, including DNF	Yes, list-based	Yes, including DNF	Yes, including “Gave Up” and rereads	Yes
Ratings granularity	Stars	Quarter and half stars	Stars	Half stars	Stars	Stars
Reading stats	Per-book stats and charts, pace, streak history	Deep; the category benchmark	Reader summaries, monthly recaps	Goals plus a Year in Review	Monthly and annual graphs, spend tracking	Speed, session infographics
Mood tags and content warnings	No	Yes, community-sourced	No	No	No	No
Recommendations	Suggested books from your library, plus what friends are reading	Yes, mood and pace based	Club and community driven	Community driven	No	No
Book clubs / group reads	Live reading tables, challenges, group tournaments	Buddy reads (8 people), readalongs (up to 1,000)	Core feature; 100,000+ clubs	Lists and community discussion	No	No
Social feed and follows	Yes, feed, follows, comments	Light	Yes, club feeds and threads	Yes, follows and activity	No, deliberately private	No
Reading timer and timed sessions	Yes, core feature	No live timer (goals can use hours)	No	No	Yes	Yes, core feature
Streaks	Yes; Elite adds streak freeze and vacation mode	Yes, opt-in and customisable	Daily streaks	No	Reading calendar	Yes
Reading goals	Books, pages, or minutes per period	Books, pages, or hours	Yes	Yearly goal	Yes	Daily, monthly, yearly
Notes: share as image, spaced review	Page-anchored notes as shareable image cards, resurfaced with spaced review	Notes and reviews	Highlights and club posts	Reviews and lists	Journal with OCR text capture	Quotes and word lists
Challenges and tournaments	Yes, both	Community challenges	Club challenges	Prompt lists	No	No
Leaderboards and leagues	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Leveling system	70-level reading journey	No	No	No	No	No
Live reading tables (read together in real time)	Yes	No	No	No	No	No

Three patterns worth noticing before the app-by-app detail. First, the timer split: StoryGraph, Fable, and Hardcover track what you read, while Bookmory, Bookly, and booksense also track the sitting itself. Second, the social split: Bookmory and Bookly have no community at all, Fable is almost entirely community, and the rest sit in between. Third, the import column: if carrying a decade of Goodreads history matters to you, five of these six will take the file, with only Bookly’s still-rough importer as the question mark.

booksense: the habit-and-social pick

Best for: readers whose real problem is consistency. It covers the ground the other five are each known for (session stats, a real library, a social feed, group reads), and its habit and gamification stack (streaks, leagues, tournaments, a 70-level journey, live reading tables) is the deepest in this comparison by some distance.

Full disclosure first: this is our app, so weigh this section accordingly. The honest positioning is that booksense is the one app in this comparison that combines the two camps. It takes the session machinery of Bookly and Bookmory (a reading timer at the center, with every book building a log of timed sessions and per-book stats) and adds the social layer those apps refuse: a feed, follows, comments, and competition. Underneath sits a full tracker: a library with statuses and custom shelves, ratings and reviews, barcode scanning, and category browsing, with book pages built from merged Google Books and Open Library data. Your Goodreads history comes along too: the CSV import is parsed on your phone rather than uploaded, keeps your ratings, reviews, and read dates, and backdates imported reads so they land as history rather than a feed flood.

The habit stack runs deeper than streaks alone. There are reading streaks with a streak freeze and vacation mode for Elite members, goals set in books, pages, or minutes per period, challenges and tournaments, leaderboards and leagues, and a 70-level reading journey that turns long-term consistency into visible progression. The most distinctive feature is live reading tables: you sit down at a table and read in real time alongside other readers, which turns a solitary habit into a quiet shared session. No other app in this comparison has an equivalent. Notes are page-anchored, shareable as clean image cards, and resurfaced later through spaced review, which is our answer to the forgetting curve problem. Readers on the app have logged over 480,000 minutes of reading, finished more than 12,000 timed sessions, and taken over 16,000 notes. booksense is free on the App Store, with an optional Elite membership on top.

Honest limits, and there are real ones. booksense is iOS-only; Android and web readers are out, full stop. It is early-stage and the community is small next to StoryGraph’s five million signups or Fable’s three million users. There is no Kindle sync, no mood tags or content warnings, and the catalog-and-review depth of a ten-year-old platform is not there. If your priority is a web-browsable archive you can reach from any device, pick StoryGraph or Hardcover, and genuinely, our migration guide will help you do it. If your priority is reading more this year than last year, that is the problem booksense was built for, and our deeper look at what makes a reading habit app work explains the mechanics.

The StoryGraph: the stats-first all-rounder

Best for: readers who want the deepest tracking and data-driven recommendations, and the most credible single Goodreads replacement.

The StoryGraph was founded by Nadia Odunayo in 2019 and passed five million user signups as of January 2026, per Wikipedia’s sourced entry. That scale matters: reviews, content warnings, and mood data are community-generated, so a bigger community means better data on more books.

The core loop is rating and tagging. You rate with quarter and half stars, tag books by mood and pace, and the recommendation engine works from that texture instead of a single star number. Community-submitted content warnings come in three severity levels, which no other app in this comparison offers at all. This Splendid Shambles’ long-running review covers the whole feature set well. Social features exist but stay quiet: buddy reads for up to 8 people, readalongs for up to 1,000, and community challenges with book, page, or hour goals, all on the free tier.

StoryGraph Plus runs $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year and adds advanced stats, custom charts, and roadmap voting. One recent change to watch: current import guides report that the Goodreads import now sits behind Plus rather than the free tier. Check the pricing page before you commit to a migration, and read our step-by-step on exporting your Goodreads library first either way.

Honest limits. There is no live reading timer; time exists as a goal unit, not a stopwatch. Streaks do exist, added in 2023 and pleasantly flexible (one page a day, 20 minutes every three days, 1,000 pages a week), but they are off until you switch them on in Preferences, and the habit tooling stops there: no leaderboards, no sessions, nothing that nudges you to actually sit down and read tonight. The StoryGraph tells you, in beautiful detail, what you have read. It is far less interested in whether you read today. The interface also has a learning curve; the density that stats lovers praise is the same density casual users bounce off. We compare it against Goodreads head-to-head in StoryGraph vs Goodreads.

Fable: the book club app

Best for: readers whose reading life is social, and anyone who wants a low-effort club with spoiler-safe discussion.

Fable is the community pick, and the numbers back it: when Everand, a Scribd company, acquired Fable in June 2025, Publishers Weekly reported roughly three million users hosting more than 100,000 book clubs. Clubs are the product: threaded, spoiler-gated discussions pinned to sections of the book, plus lists, reading goals, daily streaks, and shareable monthly recaps around them. Fable also tracks TV shows, which is either a delight or clutter depending on your taste. It is free to download, and its site advertises no reader subscription.

Migration in is easy. Fable accepts a Goodreads CSV through a beta importer and, more unusually, offers a direct import that signs into your Goodreads account and pulls lists and reviews without a file.

Two things a fair comparison has to name. In January 2025, Fable’s AI-generated year-end reader summaries produced racist and bigoted output, including telling a Black reader to “surface for the occasional white author,” as Literary Hub and others documented. Fable apologized and removed the AI features involved, including the summaries and the 2024 wrap. The response was fast and the features are gone, but the episode is part of the record. Second, the acquisition: Fable now lives inside Scribd’s Everand. The stated plan is to keep the services separate, and there may be upside in stability. Readers who left Goodreads specifically to escape big-platform ownership should at least know the independent era is over; our piece on who owns Goodreads explains why that question keeps coming up.

Honest limits. Tracking depth is thin next to StoryGraph: no mood data, no content warnings, coarser stats. Streaks exist but the habit tooling stops there, with no timer and no session log. Fable is where you talk about books. It is not where you get the richest record of reading them.

Hardcover: the modern Goodreads replacement

Best for: ex-Goodreads readers who want their whole archive on a fast, ad-free web app with a real community.

Hardcover launched in 2021 as a deliberately Amazon-free alternative and runs on web, iOS, and Android. Bookwise’s 2026 review covers the essentials: statuses including DNF, custom lists, follows and activity feeds, an active Discord, and a Spotify-Wrapped-style Year in Review. The import story is the best in class on breadth: Goodreads, StoryGraph, Italic Type, and generic CSV are all accepted, and imported history feeds your stats retroactively.

Pricing is friendly. The core app is free with no book cap and no ads; the optional Supporter tier at $4.99 a month exists mostly to fund development, per the same review, rather than to gate features. That funding model, everything important free and the paid tier as patronage, is increasingly rare and worth rewarding.

Honest limits. The book catalog is smaller than Goodreads’ or StoryGraph’s, so niche editions sometimes need manual fixing after import. The Goodreads import is a one-time transfer, not a sync; a live two-way sync remains a feature request on Hardcover’s own roadmap. And like StoryGraph, Hardcover is an archive-and-community tool, not a habit tool: no timer, no streaks, no session tracking. It answers “what have I read and what did I think,” not “did I read today.”

Bookmory: the private journal

Best for: readers who want a quiet personal log with zero social pressure.

Bookmory is the introvert of the group, and proudly so. Headway’s February 2026 review describes it as a private alternative to social-heavy trackers: no feed, no follows, no one watching. What you get instead is a tidy personal system: a reading timer, a calendar view of your reading days, barcode scanning, customizable tags, monthly and annual graphs, and one genuinely unusual stat, a running total of what you have spent on books. The journal is the standout feature; you can photograph a page and extract a quote with OCR instead of typing it out.

It runs on iOS and Android. The free tier carries ads and a few caps; Premium at $3.49 a month or $30.99 a year removes ads and adds cross-device sync and full stats. That undercuts every other subscription here. There is even a workable migration path: Bookmory accepts a Goodreads CSV through its settings menu, though you assign each book’s status by hand afterwards, which gets tedious past a small library.

Honest limits. The privacy is total, which means the accountability is zero. No community, no recommendations, no challenges, no one to notice whether you showed up. For some readers that is the entire appeal. For readers whose habit needs witnesses, it is the dealbreaker.

Bookly: the solo timer

Best for: solo readers who want session timing, speed stats, and a nudge system without any community.

Bookly has been the timer app for years. You start a timer when you open a book, and the app builds everything from that: reading speed, time-to-finish estimates per book, session infographics, daily and monthly goals, streaks, and achievement badges. Ambient sounds (rain, cafe noise) play inside the app while you read. Headway’s 2026 review sums up the positioning bluntly: it is definitely not for the social reader, and it does not pretend to be.

The catch is the free tier. It caps you at 10 books total, and once you hit the cap the app stops accepting new titles, which makes free Bookly a trial rather than a tracker. Pro runs about $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year with a 7-day trial. A Goodreads importer arrived recently, and early reports describe it as rough, so treat it as a bonus rather than a migration plan.

Honest limits. Beyond the book cap, Bookly shares Bookmory’s structural gap: everything is solo. Streaks and badges push against your own history, but there are no leaderboards, no groups, no shared anything. If external accountability is what keeps your habit alive (and for many readers it demonstrably is), Bookly’s machinery only goes halfway.

How to actually choose

Ignore feature counts. Ask what breaks your reading, then pick the app that fixes that specific break.

• “My problem is consistency, not cataloguing.” booksense: timer, streaks, goals, leagues, live tables, and notes that come back to you. Start it alongside a realistic reading goal.
• “I read more when I read with people.” booksense for real-time shared sessions and competitive accountability, if you are on iOS. Fable for structured clubs and discussion.
• “I finish books but forget them, and I want data.” The StoryGraph. Nothing else comes close on stats, moods, and content warnings.
• “I want out of Goodreads with my history intact.” Hardcover or The StoryGraph. Both import well; Hardcover keeps more free, StoryGraph has the bigger community and richer data.
• “I want a private log and no audience.” Bookmory, and its Premium is the cheapest subscription here.
• “I want to time my reading, alone.” Bookly, budgeting for Pro, because the 10-book free cap arrives fast.

Running two apps is also a legitimate answer, and common: one for the archive (StoryGraph or Hardcover) and one for the daily habit. The archive app holds your history. The habit app gets opened every day.

FAQ

What is the best book tracking app in 2026?

There is no single winner, because the apps solve different problems. booksense is the pick if the goal is reading more, not just tracking: timed sessions, streaks, leagues, and live reading tables on top of a full tracker, with a social layer, on iOS. The StoryGraph is the best all-round stats and discovery platform. Fable is the best book club app. Hardcover is the most complete Goodreads replacement for people who want their archive on the web. Bookly and Bookmory are strong solo timers.

Which book tracking apps can import a Goodreads CSV?

booksense, The StoryGraph, Hardcover, Fable, and Bookmory all accept the Goodreads export file, and Bookly added an importer recently. booksense parses the CSV on your phone rather than uploading it, keeps your ratings, reviews, and read dates, and backdates imported reads so they land as history rather than a feed flood. Recent guides report that StoryGraph now places the import behind its paid Plus plan, so check its pricing page before committing.

Is The StoryGraph better than Fable?

They are built for different readers. The StoryGraph is stronger on tracking depth: quarter-star ratings, mood and pace data, content warnings, and detailed stats. Fable is stronger on community: it hosts more than 100,000 book clubs with spoiler-safe discussion threads. Track alone with heavy stats, pick StoryGraph. Read with a group, pick Fable.

What happened to the Literal book app?

Literal appears to be defunct. The app was unpublished from Google Play in February 2025, its last update shipped in 2022, and recent App Store reviews report it no longer working. Nothing official was announced, but we no longer recommend starting a library there. StoryGraph, Hardcover, and Fable are the closest replacements.