Dailies vs Motivation

The short answer

Choose Motivation if you want it on an Apple Watch, if you read in a language Dailies does not offer, or if a streak is the thing that keeps you coming back. It has 1.1 million ratings and a 4.8 average, and it is the safer download by a wide margin.

Choose Dailies if you care what the quote looks like and want real control over it, if you want the topics cut finer than a category, or if you would rather not be told when the next line is coming. It also has no ads at any tier and no sign-in.

What is the same

More than either side’s marketing suggests. Motivation’s listing describes thousands of quotes sorted by category, and Dailies’ library is in the same range rather than a fraction of it. Both keep working once installed, both send a handful through the day, and both carry the current line on a Home Screen and a Lock Screen widget. Both let you change the background, typeface and colors, favorite a line, share it as an image, and write your own. Both are free to install with a paid tier on top.

At a glance

Making it yours

This is the clearest gap, and it runs in Dailies’ favor. Motivation offers themes, fonts and colors, and puts background photo customization behind premium. Dailies treats the look of the quote as the main thing you tune, and gives you a sheet with three tabs: background, a large set of photographs grouped by landscape (mountains, forest, sea, desert, night) alongside a handful of plain gradients; fonts, a wide range running from a book serif through a typewriter to a handwritten scrawl, with a size slider; and effects, a set of quiet motion overlays (drifting dust, fireflies, snow, mist, meteors, embers) painted over the photograph.

Everything previews live on a real quote as you tap, and nothing needs saving. A selection from each tab is free, chosen from across the range rather than clustered at one end, so a free install does not look like a demo. Premium opens the rest, along with your own photographs and your own solid colors behind the words.

Motivation wins one corner of this: its widget customization is extensive and it advertises thousands of combinations. But the effects have no equivalent on its listing at all, and in Dailies the styling follows the quote everywhere it appears.

Streaks and the Watch

Two things Motivation has that Dailies does not.

Streaks. Motivation counts consecutive days and shows you the run: its App Store screenshots lead with a one-week streak and a row of ticks. If a number going up is what gets you to open an app, that is a real feature and Dailies has nothing like it. Dailies does not count your days on purpose: the quote arrives whether or not you show up, and a broken streak is a reason to stop rather than to start.

Apple Watch. Motivation runs on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and in iMessage. Dailies is iPhone and iPad. If you want a quote on your wrist, the comparison ends here.

And in the other direction, languages: Motivation ships in fourteen, Dailies in English, Spanish, French, German and Simplified Chinese, with very nearly the whole library translated rather than just the menus.

When it reaches you

Both apps send quotes through the day, and both carry the current one on a widget. The difference is who picks the minute.

Motivation lets you set reminders through the day, and the number you can have is one of the things premium raises.

Dailies asks how many you want, which hours you are happy to hear from it, and which days, then picks the moments inside that window itself, without telling you in advance. A quote at 9:00 every morning becomes furniture within a week; a quote somewhere between 9:00 and 18:00 stays a small surprise much longer. Quotes carry a time-of-day label too, so a line written for the end of a day does not turn up over breakfast.

Every reminder is scheduled locally, so the whole app works in airplane mode.

What it costs, and the ads

Motivation is free to download with ads, and its listing shows ten in-app purchase price points between $3.99 and $47.99: what a heavily tested paywall looks like from outside. Premium removes the ads and adds unlimited reminders, all themes and categories, and custom photo backgrounds.

Dailies has one product: a yearly subscription with a free trial, priced in your currency and shown in full before you confirm. No monthly, no lifetime. It opens the full background, typeface and effect library, your own photos and colors, and the rest of the quote library.

The structural difference is the free tier. Motivation’s is ad-supported, so removing ads is something you buy. Dailies carries no ads at any tier, which is also why its free tier is narrower: the free version is the trial, not the ad-funded edition.

On data, Motivation’s App Store privacy card lists purchases, user content, search history, identifiers and usage data as used to track you across other companies’ apps and websites. Dailies has no sign-in anywhere, favorites stay on the device, and the library ships inside the app, so reading a quote sends no request to anything. It does collect product analytics, written out in the privacy policy.

App Store prices in this category change often and are frequently tested. Check the listing before you buy.

Which one to pick

Motivation is the bigger, safer, more widely proven app, and on languages and devices it is not close. Dailies is for the reader who wants the same daily line aimed more precisely, looking the way they chose, arriving without an appointment.

Questions

Sources

Motivation’s rating count, size, languages, age rating, device support, privacy card and feature list were read from its US App Store listing on 21 September 2026, version 7.1.0; the streak and widget claims come from the screenshots on that listing. Its ten in-app purchase price points were read from the same listing in the App Store app on 8 September 2026. Dailies is described from the shipping build, in words rather than figures: its library, free tier and delivery limits move with every release, so a number here would go stale.

More comparisons: Dailies vs I am, Dailies vs ThinkUp, Dailies vs Motivate.