Wayfeel vs How We Feel: two ways to check in
Written by Jack, founder of Wayfeel
Credit where it's due. How We Feel is free, built by a nonprofit with serious emotion science behind it, and it is probably the best app that exists for learning to name what you're feeling with precision. If your goal is a richer emotional vocabulary, it's hard to argue with. This page won't try.
But naming a feeling and being seen feeling it are two different needs. That's where these two apps split.
The core difference
How We Feel helps you find the exact word for your feeling in private; Wayfeel puts one of five feelings on an anonymous map where people near you can quietly witness it.
On Wayfeel you drop Angry, Sad, Neutral, Happy, or Overjoyed where you are. Your location is fuzzed before anything is stored, and for 24 hours people nearby can see the pin and send one of four silent reactions: a Hug, Fire, Gratitude, or a Fist Bump. No comments, no DMs, no follower counts. Nobody can reply. They can only let you know they saw. Five feelings is the opposite of a rich vocabulary, and that's on purpose: the check-in has to be fast enough to do on a bad night, and simple enough that a stranger's pin needs no translation.
Side by side
| How We Feel | Wayfeel | |
|---|---|---|
| Approach | A private emotional-vocabulary tool. You check in by finding the precise word for what you're feeling, then log it for yourself. | An anonymous check-in on a real map. You drop how you feel where you are, and it lives there for 24 hours. |
| Social layer | Private by default. Your check-ins are for you, not an audience. | Silent witnessing. For 24 hours, people nearby can send one of four wordless reactions: Hug, Fire, Gratitude, or Fist Bump. No text comments ever, no DMs, no followers. |
| Anonymity model | Personal and private, tied to your own use of the app. | Anonymous even though it is shared. Your location is fuzzed before a pin is stored, your identity is decoupled from your feelings, and no real names appear unless you choose one. |
| Emotions model | A large, research-based emotion vocabulary, built to help you name feelings with real precision. This is its superpower. | Five fixed feelings: Angry, Sad, Neutral, Happy, Overjoyed. Deliberately small, so checking in takes seconds. |
| Insights | Personal patterns and reflections on your own check-ins over time. | Free: 7-day history and a weekly summary. Premium adds forever history, deeper insights, a personal heatmap, mood zones, and a monthly Wrapped. |
| Price framing | Free, built by a nonprofit. Genuinely rare and genuinely admirable. | Free tier: 5 drops a day, the full adaptive map, and all four reactions. Premium is $9.99/mo and only adds depth. Seeing people around you is never paid. |
Pick How We Feel if
You want to get better at naming emotions, you value the research pedigree, and you want all of it for free from a team with no reason to monetize your feelings. It is a genuinely excellent private tool, and if precision of language is what you're after, it's the one to get. It's also available today, which matters.
Pick Wayfeel if
You already know what you feel. What you don't know, at 2am, is whether anyone else within a mile feels anything at all. Wayfeel is built for that second question. You check in with one of five feelings, you see anonymous pins from people nearby, and maybe a stranger sends a hug with no strings and no conversation attached. It trades vocabulary for witness. Whether that trade makes sense depends entirely on which loneliness you have.
Where Wayfeel is at
Straight talk: Wayfeel isn't in the app stores yet. It's in development with an open waitlist, so right now How We Feel is the one you can actually download. If a witnessed check-in is the thing you've been looking for, the waitlist below gets you in first when it opens.
Weighing more options? See how Wayfeel compares to Daylio, or read the full roundup of Daylio and How We Feel alternatives. Or head back to the Wayfeel homepage for the whole picture.