Trakt alternative

No VIP tier. No item caps. No account.

If the 2025 price change is what sent you looking, here is the honest position: Stadu cannot scrobble. What it can do is track everything without a subscription, a cap or an account.

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The honest version

Stay on Trakt if

Scrobbling is the whole point. Plex, Kodi, Jellyfin and Emby can mark things watched automatically — Stadu has nothing like it and logging is manual.
You want your history synced across devices and readable by other apps via the API.
You use the recommendations, calendars and progress tracking for ongoing shows.
You are on iPhone.

Move to Stadu if

You do not want a subscription, and you do not want to discover the free tier has new caps.
You log deliberately rather than automatically, and would rather it be private.
You want books, games, concerts, places and trips in the same place as films and TV.
You want your history on your phone, exportable, with no account attached to it.

Stadu vs Trakt

	Stadu	Trakt
What you can log	Films, TV, books, games, concerts, places, trips, life events	Films and TV
Automatic scrobbling	No — every entry is added by hand	Yes — Plex, Kodi, Jellyfin, Emby
Free-tier limits	None. Log as much as you like	Capped watchlist, lists and list items; limits tightened in 2025
Subscription	None	VIP subscription; pricing roughly doubled in 2025
Account	None	Required
Cross-device sync	No — single device, plus a backup file you move yourself	Yes
Where your data lives	On your phone	On Trakt’s servers
Platforms	Android (iOS planned)	Web, iOS, Android, plus a public API

Competitor details checked against their own sites in September 2026. Prices and limits change — follow the links before deciding.

What actually changed in 2025

In February 2025 Trakt announced tighter limits for free accounts and a VIP price increase of roughly 100%. The changes drew a lot of anger, and a fair amount of it was about the principle rather than the amount: people had spent years building a watch history inside limits that then moved.

Trakt has since published further limit changes for 2026 covering watchlist size, number of lists, items per list, ratings and history. If you are on the free tier it is worth reading their current limits page before assuming your setup still fits.

The part where Stadu loses

Trakt's killer feature is that you do not have to do anything. Plug it into Plex, Kodi, Jellyfin or Emby and your watch history writes itself. For a heavy watcher that is not a convenience, it is the entire value.

Stadu cannot do this. There is no scrobbling, no media-server integration and no API — every entry is added by hand, by searching for a title. If you watch four episodes a night, manual logging is not going to survive contact with reality, and you should stay where you are.

Stadu suits the other kind of logger: the person who wants a record of the things that mattered, not a complete transcript of everything that played.

What you get instead

No subscription, and no ceiling. There is no watchlist cap, no limit on lists, and no tier that unlocks the feature you already wanted — because there is no tier at all.

And the scope is wider. Trakt is films and TV. Stadu puts films and TV next to the books, games, gigs, places and trips from the same year, on one timeline anchored to your birthdate. The Year in Review then counts all of it, not just the screen time.

Private by construction

Trakt stores your history on its servers, which is what makes sync and the API possible. Stadu has no server, so there is nothing to sync and nothing to sign in to — the trade is exactly that. Your history lives on your phone and exports to a backup file you own.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a Trakt alternative without a subscription?

Stadu is free with no subscription, no paid tier and no limits on how much you log. The important caveat is that it cannot scrobble — every entry is added manually — so it suits deliberate logging rather than automatic watch-history capture.

Did Trakt raise its prices?

Yes. In February 2025 Trakt announced tighter free-tier limits and a VIP price increase of roughly 100%, taking effect in mid-2025. Further limit changes for 2026 have since been published on their forums.

Can Stadu scrobble from Plex or Jellyfin?

No. Stadu has no media-server integration and no API. If automatic scrobbling is what you need, Trakt remains the tool for it.

Does Stadu sync between devices?

No. Stadu is local-first with no account or cloud, so your data lives on one device. You can export the whole Lifeline to a backup file and restore it on another device manually.

Does Stadu track TV episode by episode?

Stadu tracks a show as an entry rather than as an episode-by-episode progress tracker. If per-episode progress across ongoing series is central to how you watch, Trakt does that better.

No tier. No cap. No account.

Films and TV, alongside everything else your year contained.