What is Bullet Journal?
Bullet Journal is a multipurpose productivity booster journal-taking method, The journal can be anything from a calendar, a goal tracker, a project manager, activity tracker, to a to-do list.
Originally created by designer Ryder Carroll, Bullet Journal, or as some may refer to as BuJo or Bujo, became the favorite tool for creative people.
In contrast, it is up to you to figure out what and how will you use it.
To learn more about the Bullet Journal method, you need to check out this article: What is Bullet Journal, and how can you use it?
Hamza Musa
Why should you want to consider using Bullet Journal?
It is a productive, practical way to plan, organize, track, and map your tasks systematically with little effort.
Bullet Journal is pretty easy to use and does not require a steep learning curve.
Digitized Bullet Journals
Bullet Journals can be digitized as a computer program, a web app, or a mobile app. Some may argue a digitized form will not be effective as a hard copy, but you would not know until you try, right?.
In this article, we present you with a collection of open-source, free Bujo "Bullet Journal" apps, which you can install, set up, and use freely.
Here is our list
1- Bullet Journal platform
This one is a web-based Bullet Journal platform that comes with an extensive features list. It is ideal for personal journaling, notebook keeping, to-do lists, adding schedules and reminders.
Beyond its rich feature set, It offers several collaboration options for teams and small groups. It also allows the user to create unlimited collections and share them with users.
It offers more than a collaboration option for its users, it offers many user-generated bullet journal templates.
You can install this app using Docker either on your local machine or a remote server.
Here is a video introduction about Bullet Journal Platform
2- Bullet Buddy
Bullet Buddy is a simple straightforward web-based digital bullet journal application. It comes with a clean easy-to-use user interface, index page, daily/ monthly log, and calendar view.
Bullet Buddy is a progressive web application that uses the Vue framework.
It can be installed with Docker either on a local or a remote server.
3- Journapi
Journapi is one of the best apps on this list, because it is simple, comes with a nifty fancy interface, and uses modern technologies and frameworks the TallStack which is a combination of Laravel, Livewire, Tailwind CSS, and Alpine JS.
To have a clear idea about Journapi, you can check its deployed edition, create an account then start adding your journals.
It also offers a headless API with API Key, a command-line interface, and a simple responsive mobile-ready interface.
4- Vue Bullet Journal
Vue is a trending JavaScript framework pro building progressive web apps, mobile apps, and desktop apps.
Here, Vue is used to build this fancy Bullet Journal app, which is packed with features and offers a user system with a simple authentication module.
With this unique app, you can follow your habits, manage your collections, and list and set items easily without having breaking a sweat.
5- RocketLog
RocketLog is an open-source (AGPL-3.0), self-hosted, free digitized Bullet Journal application.
RocketLog comes with a straightforward clean interface, and user registration, authentication module that makes your notes (journals) private.
The system is built using the Laravel PHP framework and supports PHP 8.0.
6- Dijibu
Dijibu is a digitized bullet journal application that aims to provide a simple alternative to analog habit trackers and bullet journal notes.
It is built using React and features a calendar, simple note (journal) adding, a mood tracker, a purchase tracker, and an exercise tracker.
Dijibu is the only project on this list that offers visual charts to track your progress.
However, it is not open-source, even though the source code is published on GitHub.
7- Flamingo Journal
Flamingo Journal is yet another free, open-source personal Bullet Journal that uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Although the project is archived, you can still download and use it on your local machine with the help of a local server.
8- HTML Bullet Journal
In one single HTML file, this Bullet Journal with offers a simple GUI which lists the weekdays, and monthly log, and next month incoming journals.
Unfortunately, it is not designed as a progressive web app and there is no means to save or export your journals
9- Digitized Bullet Journal
An old Node.js Bullet Journal project, which did not receive updates for years. It uses Ember.js which ensures the app's reactivity and usability.
10- Bujo-Fail
Bujo-fail is an open-source web-based Node.js Bullet Journal app. It uses the Express framework, React, and MongoDB.
11- Markdown Bullet Journal
Markdown is a simple lightweight markup language that you can write using any text editor. This project makes use of Markdown as a Python script that allows you to create an organized Bullet Journal markdown file in no time.
12- Online Rails BuJo
A web-based Bullet Journal solution that uses Rails (Ruby on Rails) and React for the frontend. It helps you to record tasks, notes, events and follow everything at home for upcoming events.
13- Thoth
Thoth is a free, Bullet Journal application built with Django, Python, and TypeScript.
You can install it either from scratch or using Docker. The installation instructions are clear, but there is no working demo nor screenshots for how does it look like.
14- MicroBullet (CLI)
MicroBullet is a command-line Bullet Journal (BuJo) application, written in the Go programming language. With it, you can create notes (journals), or tasks with simple commands.
15- Tioga
Tioga is a digital web-based Bullet Journal application, that uses Ruby on Rails, React, and PostgreSQL. Even though it was not updated for more than 6 years, but you can download and use it on your machine with the support of Docker.
16- Progressive Bullet Journal
This one is a free, open-source React-based Bullet Journal application that uses the Bootstrap CSS framework.
It does not come with any clear documentation, but any Node.js or React developer can download and build it easily.
17- Flutter Bullet Journal
Flutter is a trending Dart framework for building mobile, web, and desktop applications. This is an open-source Flutter-based Bullet Journal for Journapi application.
You can download the source code, build it for mobile, or modify it if you are a Flutter developer.
Our recommendation
As you may notice, we listed everything we found, however, some of them are not ready for production or suitable for non-technical users. So, here is our recommendations:
- Bullet Buddy (#2)
- Vue Bullet Journal apps (#4)
- Bullet Journal platform (#1)
Wrapping up
Bullet Journal is a creative productive organization method for busy creative brains. However, it does not have to use hard copy material notes, it can be digitized. Therefore, we covered several BuJo open-source projects which you can download and use freely.
If you know of any other open-source, free Bullet Journal app that we did not list here, let us know.