Baby Daybook vs Little Steps

Baby Daybook and Little Steps want the same thing. Neither of us thinks a baby tracker should be a subscription. Both of us sell one unlock and then leave you alone. On the point I usually argue hardest, we already agree.

So this page is about what the unlock costs and what the difference buys. Baby Daybook has 3,300 ratings at 4.8 stars and years of work behind it. It is a good app.

Baby Daybook’s lifetime unlock is listed at $59.99, sometimes shown as 40 percent off $99.99. They also sell monthly and yearly plans, from $1.99 up to $9.99 a month depending on the offer you land on, and $9.99 or $59.99 a year.

Little Steps is $4.99. Once. That is not a sale price and it is not an introductory rate.

The gap buys real things. Baby Daybook has an Apple Watch app and Siri Shortcuts, so a feed goes in without your phone leaving your pocket. It has a photo album and milestones. It has exportable reports. Those are whole features Little Steps does not have, and if one of them is why you are reading this, stop here and go get Baby Daybook.

It runs in a browser. Not a companion dashboard, the actual app, at a web address, on the same account and the same data. The night nanny or the grandparent doing Tuesdays opens a link on the laptop or iPad they already own and starts logging. Nobody gets talked through the App Store over the phone. Inviting them is free, on both ends.

Sleep Trail shows its working. Baby Daybook’s App Store subtitle is Personalized Sleep Predictions, so we are both in the same territory here. The difference is what happens when the data will not support a claim. Little Steps refuses: below a few tracked days, mid night, or while the pattern is still too loose, it shows nothing rather than a number. Every window it does show carries the line saying what it was worked out from, so you can judge it instead of trusting it. That is how I was taught to read anything off a chart.

Nights. Between 7pm and 7am the whole app goes to warm candlelight, every screen, buttons in the same places. It sounds like a small thing until you are doing it at 3am with a baby on your shoulder and a partner asleep beside you.

We agree on pricing and overlap on features, so if you are still deciding it comes down to this, and no comparison table has ever been able to hold it.

Baby Daybook is a capable, serious tool with more features than we have. I wanted something my family would not dread opening.

That is what happens when you save a feed. The little round picture on the button grows into the video, some confetti drifts down in whatever colour theme you picked, and it is gone in three seconds. Every one of the nine categories has its own creature and its own clip: a deer for sleep, a hedgehog for diapers, an otter for pumping, a beaver for growth. Custom events get to pick from ten more.

Look at those two clips again. The night one is not the day one with a filter over it. It is the same bear painted a second time, by moonlight, with fireflies. There are two of everything, all the way through, because the app you use at 2am should not be the daytime app with the brightness turned down.

There is a bear in the feeding timer, too. Start a feed and after a moment a cub rises up from behind the timer card, has a look around, and ducks back down. It does nothing. It is not a feature. My wife found it at four in the morning on about day nine and it is the only thing about any of these apps that has ever made her laugh at that hour.

Neither of us declares a Data Used to Track You section, the heading that means following you across other companies’ apps. On that measure Baby Daybook is well clear of the worst of this category, and they deserve the credit for it.

There is still a difference. Their label lists Contact Info under Developer’s Advertising or Marketing, and Analytics collecting contact info, identifiers, usage and diagnostics linked to you. Little Steps has no analytics library in it at all, so there is nothing to declare beyond what the purchase and the notifications need.