The Best DBT App: What Each One Costs, and What It Does With What You Type
Every "best DBT apps" list I can find was written by someone who has never had to fill one in on a bad night. They rank on features. Nobody asks the question that actually matters, which is: when I type that I wanted to hurt myself today, where does that sentence go?
A DBT diary card is the most sensitive document you will ever keep. Urges, self-harm, substance use, suicidal thoughts, scored daily, with dates. If you would not post it, you should probably know whether the app is posting it.
So this comparison is built on what can be checked rather than what can be felt: published App Store privacy labels, Google Play data safety declarations, real UK prices, and when each app was last actually updated. I have not lived inside all four for a month and I am not going to pretend I have. What follows is the paperwork, which nobody else bothers to read.
Checked in September 2026. Labels are self-declared by developers and can change, so if you are reading this much later, the method matters more than the table: open the App Store listing, scroll to App Privacy, and look before you type anything real into it.
The table
| Calm Harm | DBT Coach | DBT Pal | DBT Diary Card & Skills Coach | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Made by | stem4, a UK charity | Resiliens Inc. | Benjamin Fox | Durham DBT, Inc. |
| UK cost | Free, no in-app purchases | £10.99 a month, or £54.99 for six months | £5.99 a month, or £39.99 a year | £4.99 once |
| Health data collected, per Apple | None declared | Health, plus name, email, phone | None declared | No details provided at all |
| Play data safety | Shares device IDs with third parties. Collects location, personal info, device IDs. Data cannot be deleted | No sharing with third parties. Collects personal info and health. Encrypted in transit, deletion on request | Not on Play | Not on Play |
| Last updated | December 2025 | Actively updated | June 2026 | October 2019 |
| Store rating | 4.3 on iOS, 4.0 on Android | 4.5 on iOS, 3.7 on Android | Too few to be meaningful | 3.4 on iOS |
Four things in that table are worth more than the rest of this article.
1. The one most clinicians recommend was abandoned in 2019
DBT Diary Card & Skills Coach, from Durham DBT, is the app that gets named in therapy rooms and in every forum thread. It costs £4.99.
Its last update was 28 October 2019.
And where the App Store shows a privacy label, this listing instead says the developer "has not provided details about its privacy practices and handling of data to Apple", with a note that they will be required to provide them when they next submit an update. Apple made those labels mandatory for new submissions in December 2020. So that sentence is not a privacy finding as such. It is a date stamp. It means nothing has been submitted since.
This is not an accusation. It may well store everything locally and do nothing untoward at all. But you are being charged for software that has had no security patch in nearly seven years, and the honest position is that nobody outside Durham DBT can currently tell you what it does with your data, including Apple.
2. The polished one is £131.88 a year and it reads what you write
DBT Coach is the slick one. Video lessons, animated skill guides, and an AI coach called Diya, which recent release notes confirm you can now switch off in Settings.
The AI is the thing to think about. An AI coach cannot respond to what you wrote without your words leaving your phone. And accordingly, its Apple privacy label declares Health & Fitness data, plus name, email address and phone number. Its Google Play declaration says the same: personal info and health data collected, encrypted in transit, no sharing with third parties, deletion on request.
Credit where it is due, that is a transparent and reasonably responsible set of answers. Nothing there is sinister. But be clear about what you are agreeing to. Your diary card becomes a record on someone else's server, attached to your email address, in a company that can be sold, breached, or wound up.
On price: £10.99 a month is £131.88 a year. The six month plan works out at about £110 a year. For most people that is more than a private therapy session, spent on a diary card and some videos.
3. Calm Harm is free and genuinely good, and its Android label is worse than its iOS one
Calm Harm is from stem4, a UK mental health charity, and it was built with a clinical psychologist using DBT principles. It is free, with no in-app purchases, which for an app aimed at people in acute distress is a deliberate and decent choice.
It is also not a diary card. It is a distress tolerance app. You press the button when the urge is on you, pick how long you can hold out, and it gives you something to do for that time under headings like Comfort, Distract and Express Yourself. That is the "getting through without making it worse" module of DBT, done well, and nothing else.
Here is the uncomfortable bit, and I am including it because leaving it out would make this article the same as all the others. Its iOS privacy label declares only anonymous usage data. Its Google Play data safety declaration is materially different: it says the app may share device or other IDs with third parties, may collect location, personal info and device IDs, and that data cannot be deleted.
That is very likely an analytics or advertising SDK on the Android build rather than anything to do with your activity choices, and small charities routinely fill these forms in more cautiously and less precisely than large companies do. But the two declarations do not match, and you deserve to know that before you install it rather than after.
4. DBT Pal is the current pick if you want a proper card in an app
DBT Pal is the only one of the four that is both a real diary card and actively maintained, with updates through 2026. Its privacy label declares no health data at all, only usage and crash data.
Two honest caveats. It has very few ratings, so there is not much of a track record to lean on. And the same solo developer publishes an injection tracker for Ozempic and testosterone, which is not a criticism of the code, but it does tell you this is a one person operation rather than an organisation with a compliance department. Judge that how you like. Sometimes one careful person is better.
So which one
Depends entirely on what you need it for, and the honest answer for most people is more than one.
- For the 2am urge, when you need something to do for the next fifteen minutes: Calm Harm. Free, built for exactly that, and you do not have to type anything into it.
- For a daily card you will take to therapy: DBT Pal if you want it on your phone, or the free one below if you would rather nothing left your device at all.
- If you want to be taught the skills and you have the money and you do not mind your entries being processed on a server: DBT Coach is genuinely well made. Turn Diya off if you would rather it did not read your writing.
- The £4.99 one: I would not buy it today. Not because it is bad, because it is unmaintained.
The free one that stays on your phone
I built a DBT diary card for this site, so treat this paragraph as what it is.
What it does that the apps do not: everything you write stays in your own browser on your own device, there is no account, no email address, no server, nothing to subscribe to, and it prints to a single sheet you can hand to a therapist. It pairs strong urges against the skills you used, which is the first thing a DBT therapist actually looks at.
What the apps do that it does not: they can send you a reminder at 9pm, they live behind an icon on your home screen, and they will survive you clearing your browsing data. Mine will not, which is why there is a save-a-backup-file button on it, and why I would rather tell you that now than have you find out in three months.
If you want reminders and an icon, buy DBT Pal. That is a real advantage and £39.99 a year is not silly money for it. If what you want is a card you fill in every night that no company anywhere holds a copy of, use mine.
The thing that actually decides whether any of this works
Not which app. Whether you fill it in on the good days.
A card with only the bad days in it shows a person in permanent crisis. A card with every day in it shows the shape of a week, and the shape is the information. It is what lets a therapist see that Tuesday was survivable, and it is what lets you see, months later, how many times you wanted to do something and did something else instead.
Pick whichever of these you will actually open tonight. That is the whole selection criteria. The rest is paperwork, and I have now read it so you do not have to.
If you are working through the skills from a book alongside this, the best DBT workbooks are compared here, and if you are waiting for a programme to start, here is how to get DBT on the NHS.
Nothing here is medical advice, it's lived experience, meant to sit alongside real support, not replace it. If you're struggling, please see the support resources. If you're in crisis in the UK, call Samaritans free on 116 123, or dial 999 in an emergency.