How to choose a movie watchlist app
Most comparisons of these apps are a features table. That is the wrong question. They are not competing products — they do four different jobs, and picking well means knowing which job you actually have.
Last updated: 21 August 2026
The four jobs
- Looking a film up. Cast, year, runtime, is it any good. A reference problem.
- Logging what you watched. A diary, a rating, a year in review. A memory problem, and a social one for most people who do it.
- Finding where to watch. Which service has it in your country, and what does it cost tonight. An availability problem.
- Catching what you have not watched yet. The film you saw in a reel at one in the morning. A capture problem — and the only one of the four where the hard part happens somewhere else, inside another app entirely.
Almost every frustration people have with these tools comes from using something built for one job to do another.
What each one is actually for
| Tool | Built for | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| IMDb | Looking things up. The deepest catalogue data anywhere, and a watchlist attached to it. | Heavy for capture. You are searching a title you already know, in an app you had to open on purpose. |
| Letterboxd | Logging and writing about what you watched, with people whose taste you follow. Best in class at this. | Its watchlist is a manual list. Nothing helps you at the moment of discovery, and the social layer is the point rather than a side effect. |
| JustWatch | Availability. Which service carries a film in your country, and price changes. | Answers "where", not "what" — you arrive already knowing the title. |
| Trakt | Automatic tracking of what you play, especially across a media server or several services. Strong series support. | Setup is real work, and its value comes from what you already watched rather than what you nearly missed. |
| A notes app | Nothing, and therefore everything. Free, instant, no account. | You type the title, you look it up later, and it decays into a list of half-remembered names. |
| flixave | Capture. Sharing a reel, post or screenshot into an inbox that identifies the film for you and remembers where to watch it. | No social layer, no reviews, no diary of everything you have ever seen. Deliberately. |
Choosing
Use Letterboxd if the point is what you already watched
If you want a diary, ratings that mean something to you over years, reviews from people whose taste you trust, and a year-in-review that is genuinely fun — that is Letterboxd, and nothing else comes close. We would tell you to use it.
Use IMDb or JustWatch if the question is factual
"Who was in it", "is it worth it", "which service has it" are reference questions. Use the reference tools; a capture app is the wrong shape for them.
Use Trakt if you watch a lot of series across services
Automatic scrobbling and proper episode tracking across a media server is a real problem it solves properly.
Use flixave if you keep losing films you found online
If the recurring failure is that you find something in a reel, a short or a group chat and it is gone by the weekend, that is a capture problem and the others were not built for it. flixave sits in the share sheet: one tap, AI identifies the title, and it is filed with the poster, rating and where it is streaming in your country. No feed, no followers, no ads in any tier.
Questions worth asking before you commit
- How does a film get in? If the answer is "search and tap add", count how many taps that is from inside Instagram. That number is why watchlists stay empty.
- Does it track series by episode? A list holding only a show's name is not tracking.
- Is availability local to you? A US-only availability answer is worse than none in Turkey.
- Can you get your data out? Watchlists take years to build. Check for an export before you start.
- What is it selling? Free with no visible business model usually means advertising or data. Ask which.
Common questions
What is the best app for a movie watchlist?
There is no single best one, because there is no single job. Letterboxd is best for logging and reviews, IMDb for reference, JustWatch for streaming availability, Trakt for automatic episode tracking, and flixave for catching films you find on social media before you lose them.
Is flixave an alternative to Letterboxd?
Not really — it solves the opposite half. Letterboxd is about films you have watched and what you thought of them. flixave is about films you have not watched yet and are about to forget. Plenty of people use both.
Do I need a watchlist app at all?
If a single note in your phone is working, no. It stops working at the point where the list is long enough that you cannot remember which entries you already watched, or where the entries are titles you can no longer identify.