Trakt alternative for TV tracking: LaterRex vs Trakt

Which one you want depends on what else you track

Trakt is where your watch history records itself, on every device, in a place a dozen other apps can read. LaterRex runs on iPhone and on the web, tracks your shows just as closely, and keeps them in the same library as your movies, books, games and podcasts, with the recommendations your friends send you attached to them. Your Trakt export imports easily, watchlist, watched, collection and ratings.

Almost nobody searches for a Trakt alternative because they've gone off Trakt. They search because something made them look, a tracker closing down or a new phone or a backlog that got out of hand, and Trakt is the first answer anyone gives. Fair enough, it's the thing everything else plugs into. The question worth asking is whether what you've got is a TV problem or a free-evening problem, because those have different answers.

A complete record of one quarter of your evenings

Say you finish an episode tonight. You tick it, or Trakt ticks it for you, and it lands in a history that'll still be there in ten years. Good.

Then on Thursday you finish the novel that's been on your nightstand for a month, and nothing happens. There's nowhere to put it. Same with the game you've been chipping at since March and the podcast someone keeps telling you to start. One of those has a permanent record down to the minute. The other three have nowhere to go.

That's why LaterRex exists.

What LaterRex does with a show

People might think TV gets watered down in an app that also does books. It's far from true.

LaterRex has proper episode tracking. It knows where you are in every season, opens a show on the episode you're due, and tells you the hours you've put in and the hours still ahead, worked out from real episode lengths rather than guessed. Two episodes to go, 1.4 hours of watch time remaining. Mark off one episode, a season, or a whole show in a few taps, and finished seasons turn green while the one you're in goes orange.

With a notification per show, you'll never miss a new episode landing. You choose when they arrive and which shows get them, so nothing wakes you at 3am because that's when it dropped in California. You can even push upcoming episodes straight into your calendar, if that's how you organise things.

Managing your comfort-show rewatches is just as easy. Start a rewatch and the app does the rest: total watch time, how many times round you've been, episode tracking for each run separately, and notes on every one. That's part of Pro, and so is rewatch tracking on Trakt's side, so if you watch The Thick of It once a year we're both going to ask you for money eventually.

What Trakt does well

Trakt is integrated with the thing you actually watch on. Connect it to Plex, Kodi, Emby, Jellyfin or Infuse, press play, and the episode marks itself watched when you finish. In Infuse it's a toggle in settings. It picks up popular streaming services automatically too, and none of it sits behind the paid tier. LaterRex has nothing like this: you tick the episode yourself. It takes a second and the show opens on the right one, but it's still you doing it. If hands-off logging is the whole reason you track anything, that's the ballgame, and you should use Trakt.

The second is that Trakt is infrastructure. Its API is what Infuse, SeriesGuide, Moviebase, CineTrak, Plex and Kodi all talk to, so your history lives in one place and a dozen other apps can read and write to it. That took years of unglamorous work and nothing else in this corner of the internet has it. Add an Up Next list, a calendar, streaming links through JustWatch, episode comments and public lists, and it runs on the web, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Android and Android TV.

Two things changed this year, both worth knowing before you commit. In February Trakt published new account limits: a free account gets 250 watchlist items, five personal lists of 250 items each, 1,000 list items in total and 10,000 ratings, with VIP raising all of them. Then in July it limited free accounts to one connected community app, its own apps exempt. If your setup is Trakt plus Infuse plus one more thing, that third piece now requires VIP, which is $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year and takes the ads off. Running a data layer for everyone else's apps costs real money, and having now run servers for a much smaller thing, I believe them.

It doesn't do books, games or podcasts

Trakt is movies and TV only.

Which is fine right up until the evening your show is competing with the novel on the nightstand, the game in your Steam library and the podcast a friend keeps pushing. Trakt can only ever help with one of those. So can Letterboxd, so can Goodreads, and if your screens and your reading and your games each live in a different app, that's four places to check before you decide what to do with two free hours.

Where LaterRex fits

LaterRex records the lot, and not as four timelines sitting next to each other. One library, one search, one place that knows what you're in the middle of.

Then there's the half that no amount of logging solves. A complete history tells you what you watched. It has nothing to say about the thing a mate wouldn't shut up about over dinner, which is still the best source of what to watch next anyone has come up with. In LaterRex that arrives as an actual object rather than a memory: their name stays on it, it sits in your list, and they get a nudge when you finish so the conversation carries on. A feed shows what friends have been watching and reading in the order it actually happened, nothing reordered and nothing boosted. No comment wall, nothing public, nothing to perform for.

Lists can stay private, go to a few friends, or get published to the web. There are no ads anywhere in it, on the free tier or the paid one. And there's Rex, our mascot, as hand-drawn collectible art you unlock by actually watching things, plenty of it earned on TV alone, drawn by a real artist and never generated.

What actually comes across from your export

Ask Trakt for your data at app.trakt.tv/settings/data, unzip it, and hand LaterRex the JSON files. It reads them directly, and you can select all of them at once. Your watchlist becomes your Backlog. The watched and collection files arrive marked Watched. Your ratings land on the same ten-point scale you gave them, because Trakt rates out of ten and so do we. Duplicates across the files merge on the way in, and you get a list of what matched and what didn't.

Trakt vs LaterRex at a glance

Which one's for you

Stay on Trakt if the logging should happen without you. If you run Plex or Kodi or Infuse, or you want one record filled in across four devices without touching it, that's the better tool for the job.

Come to LaterRex if "my shows" has quietly become shorthand for everything stacking up in your free time. TV isn't the poor relation here just because books also live in the app, and it's sitting next to the book and the game rather than off in a tab of its own. There's a longer version of that case in the piece on keeping it all in one app.

Plenty of people run both. Trakt as the archive that fills itself in, LaterRex as the thing they actually open on a Tuesday night. Your Trakt history doesn't have to stay behind either way.

Frequently asked questions

Does LaterRex track what I watch automatically, like Trakt does with Plex or Infuse?

No. There's no automatic detection of what you're playing. You mark episodes yourself, one at a time, a whole season at once, or everything up to a point, and a show always opens on the episode you're due. If hands-off logging is what you need, Trakt does it properly and you should use Trakt.

How do I move my Trakt history to LaterRex?

Export your data from app.trakt.tv/settings/data, unzip it, then open LaterRex, go to Settings, choose Import and select the JSON files. Your watchlist becomes your Backlog, the watched and collection files arrive marked Watched, and your ratings come across on the same ten-point scale with no conversion.

Is Trakt free?

Yes, with limits. A free account gets 250 watchlist items, five personal lists of up to 250 items each, 10,000 ratings and one connected community app. VIP is $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year, raises those limits, removes the ads, and adds Year in Review stats, advanced filtering, notes on list items and rewatch tracking.

What should I pick if I do more than just watch TV?

LaterRex. That's what it was built for. Trakt will do a better job of automatically tracking your TV shows but won't help you stay on top of your TBR pile or your gaming backlog. If the automatic logging is the part you can't give up, run both: Trakt as the archive, LaterRex as the one you open on a free evening with no idea what to do with it.