HowLongToBeat vs Backloggd: Pick the Right Tracker for Your Backlog

I check HowLongToBeat before I start a game. I check Backloggd after I finish one. That’s the whole difference between them, and it’s usually enough to tell you which one you need.

The Short Answer

If you pick games based on how long they’ll take, and you should if your evenings are short, use HowLongToBeat. If you want a record of your gaming life with ratings and reviews and people to talk to, use Backloggd. They’re solving different problems and they barely overlap, which is why most people who take this seriously run both.

What Each One Does

HowLongToBeat: The Time Calculator

HowLongToBeat launched in 2011 and does one thing better than anyone: it tells you how many hours a game will cost you before you commit.

The data is crowd-sourced from players who submit their own completion times, sorted into Main Story, Main + Extras, and Completionist, with an All Styles average on top. The database sits somewhere around 70,000 games with entries going back to the 1970s. It’s the closest thing this hobby has to a nutrition label.

I’ve made more game decisions off HLTB numbers than off any review score. “Is this 8 hours or 80?” is the only question that matters on a Tuesday night, and it’s the one HLTB answers in about four seconds.

It works as a basic tracker too. Make an account and you can keep lists with statuses, log your own times, and compare your pace against everyone else’s. That last part is quietly fun. Finding out I took 46 hours on something most people finish in 30 explained a lot about how I play.

The site looks like it was built in 2011 and that’s the deal you’re making. It’s dense, it’s ad-supported, and the design has aged into a kind of honest ugliness. It loads fast and the search works. There’s a daily playtime-guessing game buried in there now, which I did not expect and now play more than I should.

One thing worth knowing: HowLongToBeat isn’t an indie project anymore. Ziff Davis picked up the assets back in April 2021 through its J2 Global arm, and it sits inside IGN Entertainment today. That’s why the ads look the way they do.

Backloggd: The Social Shelf

Backloggd started as a solo project in August 2018, hit version 1.0 a year later, and spent the next six years becoming the Letterboxd of games. That comparison is deliberate on their end and it’s earned.

Cover-art grid instead of a list. Five-star ratings in half-star steps. Written reviews. Lists other people make and maintain. An activity feed of what your follows just finished. It passed 650,000 registered users at the end of 2025, and in that year alone people logged 31.5 million games and wrote 1.5 million reviews on it.

Backloggd is where I go to feel something about my gaming history. HLTB is where I go to plan it.

The developer, who goes by JackBros, went full-time on it in January 2025 funded by Patreon. One person. That shows up in both directions: a genuinely fast 2025 feature run, and a single point of failure holding up a site that 650,000 people rely on.

On playtime, Backloggd is a more interesting case than most comparisons admit. It added time-played averages in October 2025, pulled from the hours its own users log. So it does have time data. What it doesn’t have is a forecast. It can tell you what people spent on a game after they played it, and it can’t tell you what tonight will cost you before you start.

That distinction sounds small. It’s the entire argument.

How Much Should You Trust The Numbers?

Nobody writing these comparisons asks this, and it’s the first thing I’d want to know.

HLTB times come from players submitting their own playthroughs, so accuracy tracks submission volume. On a big single-player release with thousands of entries, the Main Story figure is tight and I’d bet real money on it. On something obscure, you might be looking at an average built from four people, one of whom left the game running overnight.

Live-service and multiplayer games break the model completely. There’s no meaningful completion time for Apex Legends and the numbers you’ll find there are noise. Same story with anything that got remastered, re-released, or shipped in six editions, where submitters are quietly measuring different games.

My rule after years of this: read the HLTB figure as a range, not a number. If it says 12 hours, plan for 10 to 16 and you’ll rarely be wrong. Use it to separate “one weekend” from “one season of my life,” which is the decision it’s genuinely good for, and stop expecting precision it never promised.

Backloggd’s ratings need a similar asterisk. It switched to weighted averages in April 2025, so a 3.8 there isn’t a plain mean of user scores. It’s adjusted for how many people rated it.

Head-to-Head

Four to two with one draw, and the two Backloggd loses are the two that decide most Tuesday nights.

I want to flag the import row since I’ve seen it scored wrong in a lot of roundups, including one I published myself. Backloggd does not have Steam import. A request for storefront imports has been open on its GitHub since December 2022 and it’s still on the roadmap. HLTB has no automated import either. Whichever you choose, your library goes in by hand.

The Problem They Both Have

Here’s what neither of them does, and it’s the thing I actually needed.

Neither answers “what should I play tonight.”

HLTB knows a game takes 12 hours. It doesn’t know you have 90 minutes, that you’re fried from work, that you bounced off two RPGs this month, or that you have a 6 AM alarm. It hands you a number and walks away.

Backloggd knows what you own and what you thought of it. It doesn’t suggest anything from that. There’s a Discovery Engine in beta that recommends new games based on your ratings, which is a fine tool for finding your next purchase. My problem was never wanting another game. My problem was 200 games I already owned and one free evening.

Both of these are input tools. You put data in. Neither is an output tool that reads your library and hands you a decision.

You can’t even wire them together yourself without a fight. HLTB has no official public API, so every integration people build runs on scrapers that break whenever the site changes. You are the integration layer. You look up the time on one site, check your own rating history on the other, do the math in your head at 9 PM, and half the time give up and reopen something you’ve already finished.

I want a tracker that looks at my 200-game backlog, knows I have 90 minutes before bed, and tells me to open Hades instead of starting Elden Ring. HLTB and Backloggd are each excellent at half of that.

The cost of that gap isn’t abstract. It’s the twenty minutes you spend scrolling instead of playing, and then the decision you make out of fatigue rather than interest. I’ve reopened Stardew Valley more times than I can defend, not since it was the right call, but since deciding felt harder than not deciding. Two tabs of excellent information and I still defaulted to the safe option.

What The Table Doesn’t Show

Two things matter here that don’t fit in a comparison row.

The first is who owns them. HLTB is a media-company asset inside Ziff Davis, which means stability, ad load, and slow product change. Backloggd is one person on Patreon, which means fast shipping, real personality, and genuine risk. Neither is the safe answer. They’re different bets.

The second is that Backloggd has opinions and HLTB doesn’t. When Backloggd moved to weighted average ratings in April 2025, people were annoyed enough that the developer publicly called the change controversial and admitted he’d shipped it too fast. That’s a site with a point of view. HLTB is a utility, and utilities don’t have fights with their users.

If you want a tool, pick the utility. If you want a place, pick the one with opinions.

My Setup

I use HLTB to vet a game before it goes anywhere near my list. If the Main Story number is over 40 hours, I need a real reason to start it, and most of the time I don’t have one.

I use Backloggd after the fact. Log it, rate it, write two paragraphs if it earned them. That’s where my gaming history lives and I’d be annoyed to lose it.

For the actual “what do I play tonight” question, I built something else. I wrote up the full tracker situation, including the tool I made for the gap between these two, in the Letterboxd for Games roundup.

If you want the long version on either of these, I reviewed Backloggd on its own after six months with it. And if the missing mobile app is what’s actually blocking you, the GG app review covers the one tracker that fixed that and what it charges you for the privilege.

Which One Should You Start With?

• Your backlog stresses you out. Start with HLTB. Sort by shortest, play three of those, feel human again.
• You want to remember what you’ve played. Start with Backloggd. It’s free, it looks great, and the writing will pull you in.
• Your play time is short and unpredictable. HLTB. The time data is the entire point and nothing else replaces it.
• You want to find games through actual humans. Backloggd. The lists people build there beat every recommendation algorithm I’ve tried.

And if you can be bothered with two accounts, run both. That’s what I did for years, and it works right up until the night you have to decide.

Still stuck on what to play? We argue about this every day in the TAG Discord. Come tell us your backlog size and we’ll roast you for it.