StoryGraph
reviews and complaints

I really love a lot of aspects of this app’s functionality around reviews since it gives a much fuller picture than a simple star rating. Personally that’s a much bigger draw for me than the ability to give fractional stars, but since they’re there I do also make good use of them. I haven’t made use of the reading challenges yet, but that’s on my list for this year.

There are a few weird things with the design of the app that make it difficult to find things. For some reason, I always have a hard time remembering how to get to my own reviews to look at and edit them. I also have not been able to finish any of the handful of books I started after seeing them on their recommendation engine. Perhaps I just need to get more reading history into it, but the books I’m being recommended all seem to have very mediocre ratings and few to no reviews. On the one hand, it’s nice to not be recommended just a list of NYT bestsellers, but their current recommendation algorithm seems to be swinging too far in the other direction.

I originally heard about this app via Tik Tok, and was most intrigued that you could transfer your entire GoodReads history over easily. It’s not very commonly known, but GoodReads is owned by Amazon, and they don’t need any more money, so this app is a perfect alternative.

The prompts when reviewing each book are more specific and in-depth, so if you so choose you can leave a review as in depth or as minimal as you would like. You can leave quarter stars (.25, .75) as opposed to just half stars. My favorite part is you can log annotations specific to a page or sentence to “annotate” the book or journal your thoughts without needing to physically or through another application.

Also this app gives you very thorough statistics on your reading habits such as genre, page length, books per month, etc. I always love to keep in touch with my habits. It additionally shows you how on track you are to whatever reading goal you have set for yourself!

This app ties all my wants into one and I think it deserves ALL the hype!

I love so many things about this all! I love that you can do half and quarter stars and all the options when reviewing! I love the break down of stats! The main thing I don’t like is that you can’t see whole follows you! This makes me extremely uncomfortable! I also love connecting with people over reading and have friends and being able to interact with them on a site like this I love! I am able to do that on goodreads which I really appreciate and feel like I can create more of a community! I love being able to interact with my friends and see what they are reading and if it’s a book I love I love being able to comment on their update. I know the creators have said they don’t want this to be a social media website which is why they won’t let you see who your friends are. But I think the social aspect of reading is really fun! I truly love this app so much and it has so many amazing features but I really hate that you can’t see who you’re friends are and who is following you. It makes me extremely uncomfortable as a woman.

Love this app. Heard about it on tiktok and decided to switch from Goodreads because Amazon ruins everything. Turns out there were a bunch of features I didn’t know I needed!

The charts about reading patterns are fantastic and have caused me to branch out and read more diversely. The “owned” tag is AMAZING and I love that I can set my recommendations on what to read next to only include what I own. It also helps cut down on accidental re-buys . The “up next” feature in the TBR is the perfect mix of “don’t forget about this book” and flexibility so I don’t feel trapped into reading that book next and then decide not to because “don’t tell me what to do.”

It would be a 5-star review if the app included a dark mode. I read mostly at night, and often on my phone. Switching from my dark mode ereader app to this flashlight of an app is so uncomfortable that I often put it off (and sometimes forget to come back to it). Please, please, please add a dark/night mode that either toggles on in the settings or matches the phone setting. Please?

Love it. I love the fact that I’m not supporting bezos, of course, but also because it’s a very good app. It does a very good job tracking your books in multiple platforms. I’m seeing a lot of people switch over from Goodreads. Here’s why I didn’t give five stars.

I need dark mode.
—> self explanatory

The reviews are kinda weird
—> when you look for reviews on a book, i think it shows them chronologically? I’m not sure how it’s sorted, but it’s not sorted well. I want to be able to see what other readers are saying and not just my friends. Everything about the rating system is so personal and less community-based, which I understand to some degree, but I would still love to have a conversation about why a certain book has certain flaws. Good reads has this feature- you see the top ratings and can see what people are saying, like you can on Amazon or any other site.

font enlarging or something for people with impaired vision would be great

Other than that, this app is amazing, and I’ll continue to fight for individual businesses to beat corporations. I love this app to death though, seriously.

This is definitely one of the top three most used apps on my phone and I can’t say enough good things about it. Importing all my data from Goodreads was so easy to do, the stats are unmatched, the search tools are incredibly advanced, and the ability to pick out your next read based on mood is something you can’t get anywhere else. They’ve just added a new giveaways section which is fantastic as well!

I also love how easy it is to participate in and/or create your own reading challenges! There are so many great ones already on the app and it’s been a great way for me to track specific reading goals I have throughout the year. Combined with the unparalleled amount of stats they provide, I can’t think of any parts of my reading that I can’t track with this app!

On top of all of this, the incredible (and incredibly small) team is so passionate and dedicated to their work on this app and it’s users. They respond to issues ridiculously fast and utilize the help of volunteer librarians to keep the book data up to date and accurate. I truly can’t name an app that I’ve ever had a better experience with overall!

Going to need a lot of work to adequately compete with goodreads. The stats are great, but that’s about the only improvement. The interface is confusing, and certain pages can only be accessed by several unintuitive clickthroughs. The look of the whole thing just feels outdated as well. The fact that everything, including going “back” to a page, scrolls from the right is just weird. There are lots of covers, page info, and correct editions missing from this database, and searching editions by ISBN has yet to actually work correctly for me. Importing from goodreads made a mess of all of my information; thankfully I don’t have a large library so it only took an hour or so to manually update all of the books that inexplicably were marked as being audiobooks. (The edition noted on goodreads appears to have been fully disregarded in some cases). The reading tracking also needs work. It automatically marks ALL pages as being read on the final day of reading unless you manually track throughout. And it has to be *throughoutbecause there seems to be no way to back date entries, it will only allow me to add one “journal entry” per day, even if I update it to be for a day last week.

If the app’s developers read this, I’m begging you to fix the navigation.

Every time the user navigates anywhere in the app, a new page is pushed onto the top of the navigation stack. The stack is then never cleared unless the user decides to press the back button or swipe back from the left however many times they navigated to a new screen. This leaves the navigation stack open to becoming infinitely large, the performance concerns of which are critical (not to mention an odd and confusing user experience.)

Each time a user presses an icon on the bottom tab bar the selected page should replace the previous page in the stack instead of just being pushed on top of it. Navigation via the bottom tab bar should also not include the directional animations as they imply the user is going down a level into the app instead of to a new page at the same level.

One more nitpick is that when the menu drop down is open the user shouldn’t be able to scroll the page behind the drop down.

I use StoryGraph and appreciate the features it provides, but these design issues make the app unusable. If these problems are resolved I will happily change my review. Until then I am going to stick with the website.

I just realized almost all reviews are within past couple of days so there is my evidence :)

The app has a simple streamlined also uncluttered interface. I like the general minimalist aesthetic which plays a big part for continued use as a new user. I am impressed with the recommendations as I have been building a small ‘library’, online or offline. The books fall neatly into the niches I am currently focusing on while bearing surprise factor to expand on my own list. This is a gem for sure.

I guess it really depends on the longevity of those apps, growth potential, user base…Last Goodread replacement seems to be out of the cyberspace before I get to check it out (after I first learned about it some years ago)…At least I am a front runner for this one!

So maybe share some findings, 1st, the app doesn’t stay signing in, so it’s a bit inconvenient having to type credential every time. 2nd the Current On…section is like a young adult gold mine, pretty irrelevant to my reading selection. So no idea what’s the algorithm behind…

Question is if I start to add data to this, how long will they stay on? Also how good is the archive the app is searching? How solid is the search/display algorithm? The order of the search results are quite interesting…

Not a review yet bc I just got the app but the icon is not a great sign. It’s nearly the same as the one for BOOKSHELF.

Update:

After using the app for a bit I wanted to update with actual feedback. So far I think the app is clean and smooth as it should be. Not a ton of clicking or tapping around to do things. There’s plenty of thought in making certain things easy (such as tagging a book that’s in the results list of a search instead of having to tap the title and enter the book and tag it and then go back).

Adding goodreads was pretty smooth (shout out to the fast customer service rep who explained to me what I was doing wrong.)

Adding lots of ratings and reviews in at once could probably be more streamlined but that’s not a thing people need to do often (maybe think about what students do at the end of a semester after reading a ton of books? Some ability to mass tag and date.)

The recommendations seem to be very astute. I like the ability to pick things I DON’T want to read and even mark authors as “not interest” (though books with dual authors need a specific button for each author on the recommended results page. Just bc i dislike/distrust one author doesn’t mean I have an opinion on their coauthor. They just have bad taste in friends.

Life-changing sounds dramatic, but between StoryGraph and Libby, I’ve rediscovered my love of reading and read almost 200 books since I started on StoryGraph a little over a year ago, from finishing maybe 2 books per year before that. Multiple aspects of StoryGraph - helpful graphs or fun reading challenges helped remind me that I feel better when I do more reading than watching TV.

Things StoryGraph is great at, versus other platforms you might be considering:
1. Not full of ads. Clean, pleasing aesthetic.
2. You don’t have to pay to have a useful, functional experience.
3. You can engage with the community aspects as much or as little as you want.
4. Content warnings include enough categories to be useful, and the community can submit additional warnings, which you can browse in a spoiler-free way.
5. The graphs are fun and useful in learning more about your own reading habits, and may encourage you to read more if that’s your thing.
6. It’s Black-founded and run, not owned by a certain megacorp.
7. Migration from GoodReads is easy, if you’re worried about losing your past data!

Cons: It’s a newer app, with a small but incredible team, so there are some small bugs, but they’ve been incredible at responding to suggestions and adding features.

The most recent redesign looks great! Thank you, StoryGraph!

I love the functionality of this app for myself, however I think it could use improvements in the social area and the aesthetic areas. It’s very clean and easy to read which is great, but the app could benefit from more “photogenic” layouts like letterboxd. People love sharing screenshots of their top movies or their recently watched movies paired with the movie posters, and it gets people to download the app. I would like to be able to share what I’m doing on StoryGraph in an aesthetically appealing way so that more of my friends want to get the app and join in on the fun updates to profiles so that they display more reading stats, favorites, to read piles etc. for other people would be excellent!

Additionally, on the social side, it would be nice if the timeline to see what my friends are reading/adding to their to read pile/ratings/etc. was more easy to see. The updates are rather large. It can also be hard to find people, and I’m confused about the difference between following people and being friends with them? What are the differences between the two statuses? Anyways! Love the app, great alternative for goodreads. All my critiques come from a place of love, I really hope the app continues to grow and improve and eventually becomes a more social platform for sharing and discussion because more people need to read! And reading is fun when you get to share it

Seems like the majority of us are coming here from Goodreads and to review this app I can't help but compare
Also, I waited to do this review after I used the StoryGraph app for sometime. Here is my opinion of how it fared:

1. An app with actual people behind it! Someone didn't just create a boat and let it out into the unruly ocean of madness to fend for itself *cough goodreads*. No, they care for what they created and are there every step of the way.

2. Recommendations that are beyond great! I have added so many books to my to-read shelf from StoryGraph that would never have been recommended by Goodreads. Instead, I'd get the same old tired books over and over that I would never even go near and recommendations from my DNF shelf! for crying out loud (of course the DNF recs are a programming issue no one at GR cares to fix).

3. The stats are great. I usually don't need complicated graphs and pies, but it's important that my reading numbers don't mysteriously disappear!

4. The interface is well done! It's clean, uncomplicated, not cluttered with amazon sales or ads from your latest browser history! It's not constantly changing to give you a headache. Hope Dark Mode is coming soon!

5. I also really like that the ratings are at the bottom, so you're picking up a book based on the description and whether it peaks your interest. More times than not, I'd pass over a book based on the ratings (and we all know how Goodreads posts those rating right next to the books like a flag!)

6. And finally, this app is getting better and better, while Goodreads stays stagnant and unimproved!

Both the website and app are great. I love the stats, the reading challenges, the recommendations, the filters based on mood and everything like that, and the review questionnaire. I reserve a star for the some features that I like from the other book tracking app that this one doesn’t have, which is stopping me from abandoning the other app entirely.

First, I like the interactive component from the other app. You can like, comment and discuss the books, as well as join groups, message and receive notifications when people interact with your updates/reviews/etc.

I love the track progress feature for each book that you’re currently reading (and the reading journal aspect really great too), which wasn’t available when I first joined the website as a beta user. However, I wish there was an option under the track progress feature to click when you’re finished reading the book which when clicked transfers the book to read and prompts the user for a rating. It’s such a minor thing that I never realized I would miss from the other app.

I also wish that there was some way to see and interact with people that are reading/have recently read the same books as me around the same time in addition to the tabs for updates on people you follow and the community.

I know that most of the things I mentioned are social media-esque, and that is probably not what the creators were aiming for. The storygraph is meant to be more of a tracker/recommendations service rather than social media, so it’s probably a bit unfair to take away a star because of that. But if sometime in the future they would be open to adding those features, it would be great. If not, I will still be using the app because it’s amazing for what it does!

I will start off by saying StoryGraph is definitely an amazing app and a great alternative to Goodreads. I think what makes StoryGraph so great is exactly what they advertise: the data/charts that let you “see” your reading habits by giving books “moods” and “pace” and using this data can help you select your perfect next read.

However, the main problem I’ve found is that this data is wildly inconsistent and, in most cases, wrong. I’m not exactly sure how book moods and pace are determined for each book, but from what I can gather it comes from reader reviews (each reviewer can select the moods/pace they feel like the book has). If the majority of reviewers say that a book is “hopeful” then the book is marked as such. Again, this is a great idea in concept, but in practice it isn’t working.

To illustrate how incorrect the system is currently, out of the 177 books in my to read pile, 134 or 77% have moods and/or pace (mainly moods) labeled incorrectly. For example, a book will be labeled as “funny” when only 2% of reviewers marked it as that, or a book will not be labeled “tense” when 90% of reviewers say it is. Similarly with pace, a book will be labeled “fast paced” when the majority of reviewers say that it’s “slow paced.”

This has two negative implications, both of which go directly against what the app is advertising. One, it distorts your reading graphs and makes them inaccurate. Two, it can throw off book recommendations, which are based off moods and pace.

What makes this issue even more frustrating is that their response to this issue is inconsistent and unclear. Users can submit tickets asking them to fix the moods and pace for a book. Sometimes they do fix them! But other times they do not or do not reply to the ticket at all. Why are some changed but not others? Why is there no consistency? This can be especially frustrating as a plus user who pays for advanced stats that are… wrong. Also, volunteer librarians cannot update moods/pace, for whatever reason, leaving this issue for the creators only (maybe allowing this could be a temporary solution?)

I understand this is an app run by a small group and that it is continuously developing and will keep improving. But I, and I’m sure others, would appreciate clarity on how moods were determined (top 3 moods that are rated at least 50%?) and that tickets to fix moods/pace were fixed appropriately, given that this greatly impacts the user experience.

For a while, I was using Goodreads and Storygraph simultaneously until I figured out which one I liked more. After months I finally settled on Storygraph - a decision I’m very happy with. I love how simple and easy to navigate Storygraph is, and I really hope more people start using it too. I also love how detailed you can get in your reviews and how mindful Storygraph is of people who may not like spoilers or would like content warnings prior to reading a book. Storygraph is doing a lot of things that I don’t see many other book-tracking apps do and I think that’s super cool! As much as I love it, I gave it four stars because I think it could use some more features to make the app experience better for users. One thing that I’ve had an issue with is that there are only four categories you can insert books into: Currently Reading, Owned Books, Read Recently, and To-Read Pile. I wish there was at least one more for books that don’t fit on any of those categories. For example, I have a LONG list of books that I want to read but I don’t want them cluttering up my “To-Read Pile” if I’m not going to read them in the near future. I also have books that Storygraph recommended to me that I found interesting and would like to add to my account for the future, but I feel like I have nowhere to put them. If there was a category for something like “Liked Books” or something like that that I could have on my page, that would be really cool. Or if Storygraph let us make customized folders. That would be super cool for keeping track of books I would like to read or purchase later in life right there on the app with all my other “reading journey” info. Also, this is really just for me because I love customizing lol but I think that if you could personalize your account, that would be really cool. Like if you could add a bio or header or maybe change the color of your page or something like that just to make it more *you*…I think that would give Storygraph an edge over other book-related apps. I also just think that all the gray can be a bit of an eyesore. That’s all! Overall, I love this app and recommend it to all my fellow book lovers. I know it’s a fairly new app in comparison to other ones that have been in the game for a while, so I look forward to seeing how this app grows and changes over the years!

Update/Edit: I didn’t know about the tags thing and now I feel a little silly! I will definitely be using them now.

Thank you so much for reaching out! I truly look forward to seeing what y’all do in the future :)

I love the idea of the app and it’s relatively well put together. But there are numerous books that aren’t in its database. And then when you try to import by ISBN it never does anything. It has a way to manually add them but I have not been able to get that to work either.

I just recently downloaded this app and I think it’s very useful and I love the charts! The only issue I have is that the profile page won’t load. Home, reading stats, and community will but once I click on my profile icon the app turns all white and becomes completely unusable.

I don’t know if I’m missing something or what but almost all the books on here are wayyyyyy less page numbers than the book I am reading. I don’t know where the disconnect is. That’s the main reason i use this app to track how many books and pages I’m reading so this just isn’t doing it for me.

Got this to replace Goodreads, which has a very slow loading time. This also loads very slowly and frequently (9/10 times) doesn’t work until you completely close out the app and reopen, which is frustrating because apple makes it difficult to close out apps because they think it’s “unnecessary”.

I really want to like this App. I hate goodreads. But I can’t get the app to load. It took me 10 minutes to sign up because it wouldn’t load and kept crashing. I still haven’t gotten to the Home Screen. Highly recommend moving to a better platform and getting more developers or your team. The user experience is horrendous right now.

I love the platform but my app isn’t loading. I can do what I want on my computer but my phone started staying on the load page. It’s annoying. If I’m not close to my computer I can’t update my reading status or talk to my buddy read group. I can’t do anything. Please fix this bug on the iPhone. Thanks. I will love to change my stars to a 5

Let me start by saying I have a Plus account. My physical library is large and I keep it up to date on LibraryThing. However, it doesn't not export into a format that StoryGraph will import.

When I downloaded the app I was hoping for a barcode scanner. Nope.

This is a big issue. Sitting down and hand-entering all the ISBNs will take hours.

The book recommendations are as mediocre and disappointing as the good read app. Their transfer library from good reads to their app isn’t accurate and you still need to input a good chunk of what you’ve read over. Their book analytics is just a gimmick and honestly not that insightful. The only good thing I’d take from this is that imputing your reading log is fast and easier than the one in good reads.

So I’ve spent the better part of 3 days trying to figure out this app (both on my phone and on website) and I still can’t find my list of books or how to add a review to a book. I’ve tried to find info on line on how to use this and there is nothing truly useable… mostly fan gurl-type blogs about how fabulous it is (I don’t learn well from videos so those are also not useful). There doesn’t appear to be help menu. I’m so frustrated with this app. I’d give it a zero if I could.

it’s been over a year now and this app hasnt improved its design hardly. so many people were excited to leave goodreads but clearly this app doesn’t have what it takes to be more useful. too much loading when you go to a new screen, the profile page is wayyy too spaced out you have to scroll down to find your to-read or already-read lists which is a hassle and the fonts and titles aren’t even eyecatching to make it easy, just basic HCI stuff that makes this app more of a hassle to use

It’s okay and could be great eventually, but for now it’s too disorganized and hard to use.

- There’s no way to edit the started reading date, only add a finish date or reread dates.
- Very disorganized in general and not easy to navigate. Too busy looking.
- You have to go through so many steps just to do a review. And the “review” link is so small it often takes me a minute to find it.

I like that it has a few more options than Goodreads, but those things honestly don’t make it worth the effort.

I’ve heard good things about this app, but trying it myself, I’ve found the main page to be a bit confusing to track the books I’m reading at a glance. Instead, the home page is a search bar and a list of a few recommended books to read instead of showing your own list of books you’re reading/have read.

This app does track your books, but you have to go through a maze of menus just to get to add a new books you’re going to be reading.

I’ll come back to this app if changes are done to the main screen.

I HATE the user interface on this. It’s clunky and confusing. Whenever you move to a different section of the app it does this animation like it’s taking you to a whole different page, similar to when you click a link in the gmail app and it opens the in-app browser.

The goodreads import did not work well. It does not keep track of the dates read. It also wouldn’t let me choose what I wanted imported. I really didn’t want my TBR pile from goodreads in there but now it’s there and they say specifically when you’re uploading there’s no way to undo it.

I have been using this app since 2021 and want to love it. Overall I love the graphs and tracking. Some things are laborious in tracking, but I don’t mind. For the last 2 months, I pull up the app to update my currently read books and it is stuck on the loading screen. I feel like I’ve wasted almost 2 years using this app and it’s just become a headache.

Update: still getting the spinning wheel on my iPhone even after deleting the app and trying to downloading again. Please fix your software! I would like to keep using, but looks like I might have to start looking for a new tracking system.

I was hoping I could use this app as an alternative to Goodreads, but I’m disappointed that it’s not working out for me. While I really like that you can customize book recommendations and ratings, navigating the app is quite cumbersome. I tried to review a book, and could not easily find out how to do so. The way the app is set up is confusing to a first-time user, and I didn’t find the layout of the profile page helpful at all. I love the stats page and the creativity that has gone into this, but honestly dealing with clunkiness of the app and its weird layout has made me quit this and go back to Goodreads, sadly.

Like everyone, I decided to try out this app in place of goodreads. I’ve tried to tag the books I’ve read and want to read yet it doesn’t log the information properly. It keeps saying I’ve read no books so I can’t even see the data graphs which is what I was most excited about. The book challenge also doesn’t properly display the books I’ve read this year and stays at zero. Finally, the app keeps forcing me to log out, which is rather annoying, but I would have dealt with it had the app been good enough. I had very high hopes for this app but it’s been quite the let down. I think I’ll stick to goodreads at this time.

Organization is a joke. Can’t even have books in the order you read them unless you put them in in that order. Why there is no latest read is beyond me. Latest added is stupid and does nothing. Just because I added a book last doesn’t mean I read it last.

No way to add lists/shelves that I can find. Tags do not do the job in the slightest.

I don’t want recommendations unless I ask for it (which is almost never). I couldn’t care less about community unless it’s an actual friend.

You have a very, very long way to go to replace goodreads considering you can’t do even the basic job of organizing. Stop worrying about the community aspect and make the app be functional.

Love the concept of this app- but it’s really not user friendly. The hoops I have to jump through to update the books I’ve read is frustrating. It just seems more intuitive and flows better on Goodreads. I think I was also under the impression that it would automatically link with my Goodreads account so when I marked a book as read on Goodreads, it would automatically import to Storygraph after I downloaded and then uploaded my Goodreads books the first time. This isn’t the case and so now I’m manually inputting my read books into 2 apps which isn’t practical for me. Time will tell if it becomes more user friendly. But I think the UX team could really work on this.