Letterboxd alternative for movie tracking: LaterRex vs Letterboxd

Which one you want depends on what else you track

Letterboxd is where you go to write about movies in public and read what everyone else thought. LaterRex tracks movies just as closely, and it holds your shows, your books, your games and your albums in the same library, with the recommendations your friends send you attached to them. Your Letterboxd library imports easily, with your watchlist, your watched movies, your ratings and the dates you watched them.

People look for "Letterboxd alternative" constantly, and they do it because they feel like Letterboxd is missing something. I think that something is the ability to track more than movies.

Everything that isn't a movie has nowhere to go

Say you watch a movie tonight. You log it on Letterboxd, four stars, a line about the ending, and it's saved somewhere you'll still be able to find it in ten years.

Then on Thursday you finish a series you've been watching for six weeks, and nothing happens. There's nowhere to put it. Same with the book you're halfway through and the game you've been playing since March. Your movies get a proper home and everything else just disappears.

That's why LaterRex exists.

What LaterRex does with a movie

Worth starting here, because people assume movies get watered down in an app that also does games. They don't.

Every watch gets its own journal entry, so a rewatch is a new record instead of writing over the old one. You score out of 10 rather than five stars. Each entry takes private notes or a public review, with a spoiler toggle so nobody gets ruined by accident.

Then the things Letterboxd doesn't do. You can mark a watch as a cinema trip and log the format and the venue, so the movie you saw at home in March and again in IMAX in July keeps both answers instead of one overwriting the other. Your venue stays private. Tap an actor and you get their filmography with ticks on what you've already seen. Anything you're waiting for shows a countdown, and Pro adds a reminder on release day and an event in your calendar. You can put your own poster on anything. And there are no ads anywhere in it, on the free tier or the paid one.

The one I'd actually point at is who sees your reviews. Write one and the friends you're connected to can read it, and when you're looking at a movie yourself you can see what they made of it before you press play. Not strangers. The people whose taste you already know well enough to argue with.

What Letterboxd does well

Letterboxd made reviewing movies quick and easy, and it built the biggest movie community on the internet doing it. You watch something, rate it, write two lines while it's fresh, done in seconds. It started in Auckland in 2011 and passed 28 million members across more than 190 countries by April 2026, with nearly 900 million movies logged in 2025 alone. We're nowhere near that yet.

That scale is the real thing it has and we don't. There are reviews sitting under almost every movie ever made, including the obscure ones, and you won't find that in LaterRex because there are far fewer of us. If reading strangers is a big part of why you open Letterboxd, that's worth knowing before you move anything.

It doesn't do TV, books or games

Letterboxd is movies only, and that's on purpose. Their help centre says returning TV shows aren't supported at the moment and that they're working on it as a future platform extension. There's an old exception for miniseries and TV movies that came over from TMDB years ago, which is why a Black Mirror episode will occasionally show up in a movie diary. Books, games, anime series and podcasts were never part of it.

Two smaller ones. Your stats sit behind Pro, at $19 a year, so the year-in-review numbers everyone posts in January are a paid feature. Ours are paid too, so call that one a draw. The free tier also carries third-party ads, which Pro removes, and we don't run ads on either tier.

If what you want is one dedicated app covering movies and TV together, with episode tracking, that's Trakt and it's been doing that job for years. We import from Trakt as well, so trying it and changing your mind later costs you nothing.

Where LaterRex fits

What LaterRex is, really, is that same diary pointed at everything else as well. The series you finished gets an entry. So does the novel, the game, the album you had on repeat in March. One library, one search, and a free evening where the choice is in front of you rather than spread across four apps that have never heard of each other.

Anime lives in there like anything else, as shows and movies, and search knows the shorthand, so jjk and aot and hxh all get you where you're going without typing the whole thing out.

Recommendations work the opposite way round from a review. A review goes out and waits for whoever finds it. A recommendation is addressed to someone: you save the thing the second they say it, their name stays on it, and they get told when you finish so they can come back at you about it. There's a feed of what your friends have been watching and reading too, newest first, with nothing choosing the order but when it happened. No strangers in it. Closer to a group chat about taste than a social network.

What actually comes across from your export

Go to letterboxd.com/settings/data and click Export Your Data. It's free and it works on a free account. Unzip what you get and hand LaterRex three of the files inside: watchlist.csv, watched.csv and ratings.csv. Your watchlist becomes your Backlog, your watched movies get marked Watched, and every title is matched against the movie database rather than dumped in as text, so what lands is a real library with posters, years and cast attached.

Your ratings come across doubled, five stars onto our ten-point scale, so four and a half stars arrives as a 9. Duplicates between the three files sort themselves out, and a movie sitting in both your watchlist and your ratings ends up Watched with its rating rather than stuck in your Backlog.

Your watch dates come with them, which matters more than it sounds, because a library claiming you watched 600 movies today isn't really your library. Yours arrives as a diary, in the order it happened.

Tags and likes are the two things that stay behind. Everything you'd actually miss comes with you. The import itself is free and not behind the paid tier, and you can run it again later without duplicating what's already there.

Letterboxd vs LaterRex at a glance

Which one's for you

Keep Letterboxd if the public writing is the point. If you like posting reviews where strangers read them, and the comments under a movie are half the reason you open it, that isn't something we're trying to replace.

Come to LaterRex if you want your movies tracked properly and everything else in the same place. If your shows live in a second app, your games in a third, your books in a fourth, and the movie your friend recommended last month is gone because you never wrote it down anywhere. Movies get the same care here as everything else rather than a tick in a box, and you get the parts Letterboxd doesn't do: cinema trips with the format and venue, scores out of 10, reviews your friends actually see, a feed of just the people you know, and no ads on any tier.

There's one more thing worth saying. Twenty-eight million people is part of why Letterboxd moves carefully now. We're at the opposite end: small, new, still being built, and the people using it are the ones deciding what gets added next. Ask for something and there's a decent chance it turns up in the app a few weeks later. If you want the longer version of the argument, I wrote about tracking everything in one app when it launched.

Frequently asked questions

Does Letterboxd track TV shows?

Not returning series. Their help centre says returning TV shows aren't supported at the moment and that they're working on this as a future platform extension. A handful of miniseries and TV movies sit in the database for historic reasons, which is why the occasional show turns up and confuses everybody. LaterRex tracks full shows, season by season and episode by episode, anime included.

How do I move my Letterboxd library to LaterRex?

Export your data from letterboxd.com/settings/data, which works on a free account, unzip it, and hand LaterRex the watchlist.csv, watched.csv and ratings.csv files. Your watchlist becomes your Backlog, watched movies get marked Watched, and your ratings are doubled onto the ten-point scale, so four and a half stars arrives as a 9. Your watch dates come across with them. Tags and likes are the only things that stay behind, the import is free, and running it again later won't duplicate anything.

Is LaterRex free?

Yes. The core app is free, including the whole Letterboxd import. Pro is $2.99 a month, $24.99 a year or $99.99 as a one-off, and it adds the stats charts, extra journal entries for rewatches, release-day reminders and calendar events, and lifts the three-list and three-tag limits. The free version holds up on its own, and there are no ads on either tier.

Which should I pick if movies are all I track?

Both handle movies properly, so it comes down to what you want out of it. Letterboxd if you want your reviews out in public where strangers read them and reply. LaterRex if you want scores out of 10, cinema trips logged with the format and venue, reviews the friends you're connected to can actually see, and no ads on any tier. And on the day your shows, books or games need somewhere to live, LaterRex is already holding them.