4 Gratitude Apps to Use With Friends, Compared

The best gratitude app to use with friends depends on how you want to share. Gratitude Plus suits you if you want private Circles with comments and a public feed, Orca if you mostly share photos and video, and With Gratitude if your friends all have iPhones and you don’t want to pay. We built Graceup, the fourth app in this list, so we put it where it fits and say what the other apps do better.

Gratitude apps with friends compared in one table

All facts come from each app’s US App Store page, its description, its release notes or its official site. Prices are from the US App Store, in US dollars, and were checked on November 7, 2026.

App	Yearly price	Public community	Private groups	Affirmations	Widgets	Platforms
Gratitude Plus	$39.99	Yes, a public feed	Yes, Gratitude Circles	Yes	Yes	iPhone, iPad, Android
Orca (formerly Happyfeed)	$39.99	No, posts are never public	Yes, Pods	Not described	Yes	iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Android, web
With Gratitude	Free, no in-app purchases listed	Community bubbles	Yes, private bubbles	Not described	Yes	iPhone
Graceup	$29.99	Yes, the Explore feed	Yes, up to 50 people per group	Yes, more than 2,500	Yes	iPhone, iPad, Android

“Not described” means the app’s official pages don’t mention the feature. It doesn’t prove the app lacks it. Gratitude Plus lists several yearly prices in the App Store, so we give the one from its description.

Why share gratitude entries with friends?

Telling other people about good things seems to add to the good feeling. Shelly Gable and colleagues published four studies on this in 2004. In two of them, people who told others about their positive events had more positive feelings and well-being on those days, beyond the effect of the event itself. The benefit was larger when the other person responded with enthusiasm. These studies measured sharing in general, not an app.

If you’d rather share without an app, our guide on how to practice gratitude every day has a dinner habit where everyone names one good thing from their day.

What to check before you pick a gratitude app with friends

Before you invite anyone, check four things:

1. Who sees each entry. Some apps send everything to the group, others let you choose per entry between private, group and public.
2. Whether your friends have the same phone. With Gratitude is iPhone only. The other three apps are on iPhone and Android.
3. What your friends can do with your entry. All four apps have reactions. Gratitude Plus and With Gratitude also describe comments.
4. What the group costs. Groups are free in Graceup, With Gratitude and Gratitude Plus. Gratitude Plus says Circles are free and its family plan upgrades everyone in the Circle to Premium. Orca’s free plan lets you post every day.

Gratitude Plus, for Circles with comments and a public feed

Gratitude Plus combines private groups with a public feed. Its website describes Circles as private gratitude groups for your partner, family or closest friends: only people you invite can see a Circle, and members read, react and keep a streak going together. Release notes from 2026 add comments in Circles, an activity feed for comments and reactions and a weekly reflection in each Circle.

Outside your Circles, the App Store description lists a public feed where you can send messages of encouragement to people around the world. The app also has a private journal, affirmations, mood tracking and insights such as your most frequent words.

The description gives the subscription prices as $10.99 a month and $39.99 a year. The website mentions a Circle Family Plan for two to five people, and the App Store lists a family plan for $89.99. The app has a 4.9 rating from about 21,000 ratings.

Gratitude Plus suits you if you want to talk about each other’s entries, not only react to them, and if you also want a public feed and mood tracking.

Orca (formerly Happyfeed), for photos and video in private Pods

Orca is the new name of Happyfeed and focuses on photos, short videos and sharing. Your posts are private by default and, according to the description, never posted publicly. Pods are private groups where you send only the photos, videos and text you choose, and members reply with emoji reactions. The description suggests Pods for couples, friends, family and long distance relationships.

Orca’s website adds that you can follow close friends or send a post to anyone as a link. Orca has widgets for shared memories, needs an account and has a web version.

You can post on any number of days for free. Orca Plus costs $39.99 a year or $3.99 a month and adds up to ten good things a day, up to four photos per post, 30-second videos and export. The app has a 4.8 rating from about 4,100 ratings.

Orca suits you if your group shares mostly photos and video and you never want anything to be public.

With Gratitude, free bubbles for friends on iPhone

With Gratitude is built around sharing. You create private “bubbles” to share your gratitude lists with close friends and family. Release notes describe a feed of everything shared across your bubbles, reactions and comments, and a widget that shows your friends’ latest entries and photos. Other people’s recent lists stay blurred until you share your own. Community bubbles let you practice with a larger group, and the release notes say a host can run one for more than 100 members.

The App Store page lists no in-app purchases, and the description calls the app “simple, free”. With Gratitude is only for iPhone. Its last update came out on June 6, 2025, and it has a 4.8 rating from 417 ratings.

With Gratitude suits you if everyone in your group has an iPhone and you want to share daily lists without paying.

Graceup, for small private groups and a public feed without your name

We built Graceup for writing one good thing a day in about 30 seconds and sharing some of those moments. You create a private group for your partner, friends or family and invite people with a link or a code. A group can have up to 50 people. For each entry you choose who sees it: only you, the public Explore feed or one or more of your groups. In a group, your name and photo are visible only to its members, and people react to each other’s moments.

In Explore your name and profile photo are never shown. You can react to a moment, save it or send a private message to the person who shared it. Graceup also has a daily streak, a monthly jar of entries, more than 2,500 affirmations in 19 categories, reminders and widgets.

The free plan includes one entry a day, groups, the Explore feed and 20 affirmations a day. Premium costs $29.99 a year or $6.99 a month, with a seven-day free trial, and adds unlimited entries, photos and video, monthly recaps and On this day.

Graceup is new and doesn’t have any App Store ratings yet. It doesn’t describe comments inside groups, and it has no mood tracker. It suits you if you want a short daily entry, a free private group and the choice to share each moment with a different group.

Gratitude Plus vs Graceup for sharing with friends

Gratitude Plus and Graceup are the two apps in this list with both private groups and a public feed. Gratitude Plus has comments in Circles, a weekly reflection for each Circle and mood tracking, and about 21,000 people have rated it.

Groups are free in both apps, and Graceup Premium costs less, $29.99 a year instead of $39.99. Each entry can go to a different group, and your name never appears in the public feed. Pick Gratitude Plus if you want to comment on your friends’ entries and track your mood. Pick Graceup if you want a lower price and a quick daily entry. For a closer look at just these two apps, read our side-by-side comparison of Graceup and Gratitude Plus.

Is there a free gratitude app to use with friends?

Yes. With Gratitude lists no in-app purchases, but it only works on iPhone. Graceup includes groups in its free plan on iPhone and Android, and Orca lets you post every day for free. Gratitude Plus is also free to download, and its family page says Circles are free. Premium adds unlimited daily entries, mood tracking, cloud backup and more.

For apps that work well on your own too, see our comparison of the best gratitude journal apps for iPhone.

We built Graceup as a gratitude journal for iPhone and Android that takes about 30 seconds a day. You write one good thing, keep your streak and can share moments with a small private group.

Photo: Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash