Everyone who decides to start journaling runs into this question within about five minutes, and the internet is unhelpfully split on it. One camp insists that writing by hand is the whole point. The other cannot see why you would use anything other than the device already in your pocket.

Both are right about their own experience. Here is what each one is genuinely better at, so you can pick on the basis of how you actually live rather than on how you would like to imagine yourself.

What paper does better

It slows you down. Handwriting is slower than typing, and that is its central advantage. You cannot write as fast as you think, so you have to choose what matters. A lot of people find they write more thoughtfully by hand for exactly this reason.

There is no screen and nothing else on it. A notebook cannot show you a notification. Nothing in it is competing for your attention, and nothing is one tap away from your email. For journaling before bed in particular, this is a real benefit.

It feels like an object. A shelf of filled notebooks is a different thing from a folder of files. If part of the appeal is the physical artefact — the handwriting changing over the years, the coffee ring on one page — then paper is not sentimentality, it is the actual point.

It cannot be hacked, synced or leaked. Your notebook is as secure as wherever you keep it. For some people that certainty beats any amount of encryption.

What a digital journal does better

It is with you. This is the decisive advantage, and it is not close. The best moment to write is usually not the moment you are sitting at a desk with a notebook — it is on the bus, in a waiting room, at 1am, in the ten dead minutes before a meeting. Your phone is there for all of those. A notebook is at home.

You can search it. Try finding the entry where you first mentioned a particular person in four years of handwritten notebooks. Now try typing their name. Searchability is what turns a journal from a pile of writing into something you can actually learn from, and paper simply cannot do it.

It cannot be lost. Notebooks get left in taxis, damaged, and thrown out by other people. A synced journal survives a lost phone.

It holds more than words. Photos, voice notes, locations and links can sit inside an entry. For travel journals and for recording events, that context is often more evocative later than the writing is.

It is private in a way paper is not. A notebook is only private as long as nobody opens it, and the people most likely to open it are the people you live with. That is a real constraint on honesty — plenty of people write a slightly performed version of their life in a notebook, because some part of them knows it could be read. A journal behind a password does not have that problem.

It never runs out. No last page, no finding a matching notebook, no deciding whether something is worth the space.

So which should you choose?

Be honest about the practical question rather than the romantic one: when are you realistically going to write?

If the answer is “sitting down at home, deliberately, in a quiet half hour” — paper will serve you well, and you will probably enjoy it more.

If the answer is “whenever I get a moment, which could be anywhere” — go digital. The most common reason journaling fails is not the medium, it is that the journal was not there when you had something to say.

A few specific cases make the decision easy:

• Travel journal — digital. Your phone is with you and so are your photos.
• Dream journal — digital. You can type in the dark without getting out of bed, and dream memory does not survive looking for a pen.
• Journaling for anxiety — digital, mostly for the privacy. You need to be able to write the version you would not want anyone to read.
• Gratitude journal — either. It is short and you will do it at the same time each day, which suits a notebook.
• A journal you want your children to read one day — paper, without question.

You can also do both

This is what a lot of long-term journal writers end up doing, and it is not a cop-out.

Keep a notebook for the slow, deliberate writing — the long Sunday entry, the thinking-out-loud. Keep a journal app for everything that happens away from your desk: the fragments, the photos, the 1am entries, the things you want to be able to search for later.

They are not really competing. One is for reflecting and the other is for catching things before they are gone, and most lives have room for both.

If you want to try the digital side, the simplest approach is to pick something that stays private by default and works the same on your laptop and your phone, so the journal is genuinely always there.

Try Goodnight Journal

The part that actually matters

Nobody has ever abandoned journaling because they chose the wrong format. They abandon it because the journal was not to hand, or because writing in it started to feel like homework.

Pick whichever one you will have with you tonight, and write a paragraph. You can always switch — and if you do, you will know a great deal more about what you want from a journal than any comparison could have told you.

For help getting started, see our three foolproof tips for starting and keeping a journal, or browse the 10 types of journals to work out what you want to keep.