Reelist vs Letterboxd

Letterboxd and Reelist are different tools that happen to share a subject. Letterboxd is the film diary: what you watched, when, and what you had to say about it. Reelist is the ranking: one ordered list of every film you have seen, built by comparing two at a time. Running both is the normal thing to do, not a compromise.

What Letterboxd is

Letterboxd is the film diary, and after more than a decade it is very good at being one. Thirty million people log what they watched and when, which makes it the closest thing film has to a shared record of what everyone is actually watching this week.

The parts people love are not accidents. Reviews sort by likes, which turned the review box into a stage and produced one of the funniest rooms on the internet, with a genuinely serious critical culture sitting right underneath the jokes. Lists are a real form there, annotated and followed and argued over. And the four favorites on a profile are the best identity object any film app has shipped: four posters that tell you more about a person than a paragraph would.

None of that is what Reelist does, and we would not try. If what you want is a diary and the community that grew around it, Letterboxd is the answer and has been for years.

What Reelist is

Reelist is the ranking. You log a film with one tap for how you felt about it, which puts it in one of three bands, and then you answer a short run of head to head questions: which of these two did you like more. Five answers at most, and the film has its place in one ordered list of everything you have seen. A tie is a real answer, and so is a skip when a pair is genuinely too close to call.

The score is the part you never have to invent. Your band sets the range a film can score in, and where it lands inside that range is decided by the comparisons you already answered, on a 0 to 10 scale with one decimal. Move a film in your list and its number moves with it, so the score can never disagree with your own order. That is the whole reason the product exists: star ratings ask you to invent a number and then quietly pile most of your films onto the same two values.

Because the list is a real order rather than a pile of scores, other things fall out of it. You get a taste match with each person you follow, worked out from the films you have both ranked. You get a predicted score for films you have not seen, drawn from members whose taste actually matches yours. And you get an answer to what to watch tonight that is not just browsing.

Where they genuinely differ

The honest summary is that one of these is built around the act of logging and the other around the act of ordering, and almost every difference below follows from that.

Which one you should use

If you want the film diary and the social universe around it, use Letterboxd, full stop. Nothing on this page is an argument against that, and a ranking app is a poor substitute for a place where people write.

If the itch is different, if it is I want my films in an order I actually believe in, that is the thing Letterboxd has deliberately never tried to give you, and it is the only thing Reelist does. A list you would defend, a number that came out of your own answers, and a straight reply when someone asks what you would put on tonight.

Plenty of people will do both, and the split is obvious once you try it: log the film where you write about it, and settle where it sits where you rank. The two habits take about a minute between them, and neither one is trying to replace the other.

We built Reelist because we kept wanting an order and kept refusing to invent one. If that is not a thing you have ever wanted, Letterboxd is a wonderful place to spend your time, and we mean that. If it is, the mechanic behind the ranking takes about two minutes to understand and rather less than that to try.