Letterboxd alternatives for ranking movies

Letterboxd is the best film diary there is, and most people looking for an alternative do not actually want to leave it. They want something it was never built to do. Nearly always that thing is one of two: a real ranked list of the films they have seen, or an answer to what to watch next. This page is about the apps that do those two jobs.

What Letterboxd is unbeatable at

Worth saying plainly, because it frames everything below. Letterboxd is a superb record of a watching life. The diary is effortless, the review culture is one of the genuinely great things on the internet, the lists are endlessly inventive, and thirty million members mean every film you open already has an argument happening under it. The Four Favorites on a profile do more identity work than most social networks manage with a whole feed.

If you keep a diary, keep it there. Nothing on this page is an argument for deleting an account.

What to look for if ranking is the itch

"Alternative" is a vague word, so it helps to name the specific things that send people looking:

• Comparison-based ordering. Does the app build an order by asking you to choose between two films, or does it sort your star ratings and leave a hundred of them tied at four stars?
• A score you did not invent. A number derived from a film's position in your own list means something. A number you typed is a guess about a scale that does not exist.
• Taste matching. Can it tell you which of your friends actually shares your taste, rather than which of them logged the same film?
• An answer to what to watch. An averaged rating is a poor recommendation. A prediction built from the people who rank films the way you do is a much better one.
• Useful on day one. Some apps only become interesting after months of logging. A ranking app can be useful immediately, because you have already seen hundreds of films and they are all rankable right now.

The landscape

IMDb is the catalog. Nothing comes close for coverage, credits and release data, and its 1 to 10 rating plus watchlists is a perfectly good personal record at enormous scale. It is a reference work with a rating attached rather than a place to build a considered order.

Trakt is the tracker's tracker. It can log what you watch automatically through your player, keeps excellent stats and history, and is the strongest of this group for television. If you want a complete and effortless record of everything you watched and when, this is the one.

Flickchart is the pioneer of exactly this idea. Since 2009 it has asked film fans which of two movies is better and turned the answers into ranked charts, personal and global. It is a web tool with a long history and a devoted following, and anyone who thinks comparison ranking is a new idea should spend an hour there.

TierMaker and spreadsheets are the folk answer, and the fact that so many people rank by hand is the clearest proof the demand is real. Tier lists are wonderful for sharing and awkward to maintain. Spreadsheets are the reverse: a sheet with one row per film genuinely works, it just cannot remember which comparisons you already answered, so every update is manual.

Beli is the model. It made comparison ranking mainstream for restaurants: a quick liked it, fine, or did not like it, then a few head-to-head choices, then a 0 to 10 score and a predicted score for places you have not been. It is excellent, and it is about restaurants, so for films it is inspiration rather than an option.

Reelist is built for this specific job. You log a film with one tap for how you felt, answer at most ten comparisons against films you have already ranked, and it takes its place in one ordered list of everything you have seen, with a 0 to 10 score that comes out of that position rather than out of you. Follow friends and you get a taste match with each of them, plus a predicted score for films you have not watched yet, drawn from the rankings of members who agree with you. Reviews with spoiler flags sit on top. Films only, iPhone, no ads, no streaks, no leaderboards, and it never ranks people.

So which one

If you want a diary and a place to write, Letterboxd, and it is not close. If you want a complete automatic watch history with strong television support, Trakt. If you want the catalog, IMDb. If you want to lose an afternoon to matchups on the web, Flickchart.

If what you want is a ranked list of your own films, built from comparisons instead of invented numbers, with your friends' taste on top of it, that is what Reelist was made for. It is built to sit alongside a diary rather than to replace one.