Backloggd Review: The Best Game Tracker? I Tested It for 6 Months

I’ve tried every game tracker that exists. Backloggd is the one I kept coming back to for six months, and the one I eventually left.

The 30-Second Verdict

Backloggd is the best free game tracker if you want community and reviews. It’s the worst one if you want your backlog to help you decide what to play tonight. Beautiful library. No decision engine.

It’s genuinely free, and I mean that with no asterisk, which is rarer than it should be. Nothing you need sits behind a paywall.

What Six Months Actually Looked Like

Numbers first, since “I tested it” means nothing on its own.

I logged 61 games over six months. Wrote 14 reviews, most of them short. Built four lists, one of which I still use. Followed 23 people and got followed by fewer, which is the correct ratio for someone who mostly lurks.

I entered roughly 180 games by hand across two sittings. I gave up on the rest of my Steam library somewhere in the low hundreds and told myself I’d finish later. I never finished later.

Month one was great. The novelty of seeing my collection as cover art carried me through the tedium of typing it in, and reading other people’s reviews of games I’d just finished became a real habit. Month three was the peak. My log was current, my lists were useful, I was checking the feed most days.

Month five is where it fell apart, and it wasn’t a decision. My last three sessions went unlogged, then five, then I stopped opening the site. By month six the account was a snapshot of a person who’d stopped updating it.

That failure mode is the whole review. Everything below explains why it happened.

What Backloggd Gets Right

The UI Is Genuinely Good

Open Backloggd next to HowLongToBeat and the gap is embarrassing. One looks like a product somebody designed this decade. The other looks like a 2011 database with a search box bolted to the front.

The Letterboxd influence is obvious and unapologetic. Grid view of cover art. Five-star ratings in half-star steps. Written reviews. An activity feed showing what the people you follow just finished. Backloggd took the movie-logging format and pointed it at games, and it turns out that format was always going to work here.

The grid is the part that got me. Seeing 200 games as cover art instead of 200 spreadsheet rows changes how you feel about your own collection. My library went from a source of low-grade dread to something I’d open on purpose.

They’ve kept shipping, too. October 2025 brought redesigned game pages and a “game editions” system that finally collapses the six versions of Skyrim into one entry instead of six. December added custom covers, so you can swap out ugly regional box art for the version you actually like. In April 2025 the log editor got rebuilt.

Small stuff. It compounds.

The Community Is Real

This is the part a competitor can’t clone in a quarter.

Backloggd passed 650,000 registered users at the end of 2025, and the developer’s year-end numbers say more about the site than the headcount does. In 2025 alone: 31.5 million games logged, 1.5 million reviews written, 285,000 lists created, 4.8 million journal entries. That isn’t a directory sitting there. That’s a place people go.

The lists are the underrated feature and I’ll die on this hill. Someone has already built “games you can finish in a weekend,” “cozy games with no fail states,” “PS2 games that deserve a remaster.” Human curation with a point of view beats a recommendation algorithm for me every time. When I want to find something to play, I’d rather read a stranger’s themed list than a Metacritic average.

The review culture holds up as well. Not review-bomb culture. People write two paragraphs about how a game landed for them at a specific moment in their life, and a lot of it reads better than what gets published professionally.

If you want the social layer, there’s no real second option. This is the moat.

One honest caveat on the community: it skews toward people who are very online about games. Big releases and cult favorites are covered thoroughly, and reviews thin out fast once you get into older sports titles, licensed kids’ games, or anything that shipped quietly. My Zombicide board game shelf gets nothing at all, which I’ll come back to.

It’s Free, With No Catch

I need to correct something that gets repeated in a lot of tracker roundups, including an earlier version of this very article: there is no “Backloggd Pro” tier at $25 a year. That figure is made up and it’s everywhere.

Here’s the real structure. Every functional feature is free. Logging, ratings, reviews, lists, folders, journaling, backlog and wishlist, following people, filtering. The only paid option is a $3 per month Backer tier on Patreon, and it buys you an ad-free experience, a badge next to your name, an all-time stats page, and early access to betas. Cosmetics and numbers. Nothing that changes what the tool can do.

That Patreon is why the site has momentum. The developer went full-time on Backloggd in January 2025 funded by it, which explains a 2025 feature list that reads like a team’s output.

Now hold that next to GG, which wants $4.99 a month before it’ll let you duplicate one of your own lists. Backloggd giving away the whole product makes the rest of this category look silly.

What Backloggd Gets Wrong

There’s No Mobile App

Backloggd’s own FAQ, updated in February 2026, answers this in one line. No app. The mobile site is optimized for phone screens and that’s the entire offering.

Here’s what that meant in practice for me. I’d finish a session at 11 PM, put the controller down, and think “I should log that.” Logging it meant getting a browser open and typing. So I’d decide to handle it tomorrow at my desk. Tomorrow at my desk, I was working.

I didn’t quit Backloggd in any dramatic way. My log drifted three weeks behind and stopped being true, and a tracker that isn’t current isn’t a tracker. It’s an old photo.

To be fair to the mobile site: it’s fine. It scales properly, the grid reflows, nothing is broken. That’s a different thing from being fast. Logging a session on a phone means loading the site, finding the game, opening the log editor, and tapping through fields that were designed for a mouse. Call it 45 seconds when an app would take ten.

Forty-five seconds sounds like nothing. It’s the exact amount of friction that turns a nightly habit into a weekly one, then into nothing.

An iOS app sits on the public roadmap with no date attached. Until it ships, this is the one thing standing between Backloggd and every person who plays games on a couch and owns a phone.

You Can’t Import Your Library

Second correction, and this one’s bigger: Backloggd has no Steam import. No PSN, no Xbox, no Switch, no GOG, no Epic either. There are no automated imports at all.

I want to be precise, since half the internet says otherwise. Backloggd pulls its game data from IGDB, so every game exists and search works well. Getting those games into your collection is you, at a keyboard, one at a time.

A GitHub request for storefront imports has been open since December 2022. Auto-import sits on the roadmap. It hasn’t been built.

If you own 40 games, this is one evening with a podcast on and it’s fine. If you’ve been buying games since 2009 across two consoles and three PC storefronts, it’s a data-entry project you will abandon halfway through. I abandoned it twice. The second time I made it to the letter G.

This is the quiet reason a lot of people bounce off Backloggd before they ever see the good part. The social layer only pays off once your library is in there, and getting your library in there is the hardest thing the site asks of you.

It Tracks Games. It Doesn’t Help You Pick One.

This is the real limitation, and nobody writes about it since it isn’t a missing feature. It’s a missing purpose.

Backloggd is excellent at recording what already happened. What you own, what you finished, what you rated, what you thought. It’s a permanent record of your gaming life and it’s a lovely one to keep.

It’s close to useless at 8:40 on a Wednesday when you’ve got an hour and twenty minutes and no idea what to open.

There’s no completion-time estimate for a game you haven’t started. Backloggd added time-played averages in October 2025 pulled from what users log, which is a record of time already spent, not a forecast of what a game will cost you. Nothing in the product looks at the window you have tonight. Nothing knows your mood, or what you bounced off last week, or that you’ve got a 6 AM alarm.

The Discovery Engine deserves a mention here, since it’s the closest thing to a counterargument. It launched in beta in 2025 and recommends games you might like based on your ratings. That’s a “what should I buy next” tool, and it’s a decent one. My problem was never finding another game to want. My problem was 200 games I already owned and 90 minutes.

Backloggd is a museum of your collection. Well lit, thoughtfully arranged, genuinely worth walking through. Museums aren’t where you go to get something done.

That’s the gap that made me build SavePoint. I wanted something that looks at the shelf I already own, knows how much time I’ve got tonight, and just tells me. Different product, different job. I’m not going to pretend Backloggd failed at a job it never signed up for.

One Note On Fairness

Backloggd is one person. A developer who goes by JackBros started it in August 2018, shipped 1.0 a year later, and went full-time in 2025 on Patreon support.

That context belongs in any honest review. The feature pace is what one funded developer can do, and the 2025 record says he did a lot. It cuts the other way too. There’s a single point of failure here, and when he changed the ratings system to weighted averages in April 2025 it went out fast enough that he publicly called it controversial and admitted he’d shipped it without enough feedback first. Saying that out loud is more than most companies manage.

Who Should Use Backloggd

• You want a social platform first and a tracker second. The reviews and lists are the actual product. Logging is the price of admission to the conversation.
• You like writing about games. If you’ve ever wanted a Letterboxd for your playthroughs, this is that, and it’s the only one with an audience already in it.
• You’re fine entering games by hand. Small library, or genuine patience.
• You want a free tool that isn’t holding a feature hostage. Increasingly rare.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

• You want to log from your phone. No app, and not soon.
• You want to be told what to play tonight. Wrong tool. Not a flaw in it, just a mismatch.
• You own games across three or more platforms. Manual entry will beat you before the fun starts.
• You play tabletop too. Backloggd is video games only, sourced from IGDB. Your board game shelf needs a different home.

The Verdict

Backloggd is the best game tracker for people who enjoy tracking. It’s not the best for people who want their tracker to help them play.

I still have my account. I still read the lists. I’d hand it to anyone who wants a place to think out loud about games, and I’d tell anyone whose real question is “what do I play tonight” to keep looking.

If you want the version of this fight where the other side has real playtime data, read HowLongToBeat vs Backloggd. If the missing mobile app is your dealbreaker, the GG app review covers the only tracker that solved that one. And for every tracker worth using in one place, start with the Letterboxd for Games roundup.

Got a backlog bigger than your free time? Come argue about which tracker is best in our Discord.