Actal vs TradeZella: which trading journal fits you
TradeZella is the tool most of my students have already tried. It is polished and it does a lot. This is where the two products actually differ, so you can pick in five minutes.
The short version
Pick TradeZella if you want the widest feature set in one subscription: broker auto-sync, backtesting, trade replay and an AI assistant. Pick Actal if the thing you are missing is not features but a verdict: a grade on every trade, a price on every mistake, your plan measured against reality, and one thing to fix a week. TradeZella is a bigger product. Actal is a sharper one.
- You want your broker connected and trades flowing in without exporting a file
- You want backtesting and bar-by-bar trade replay inside the journal
- You want an AI assistant to ask questions of your data
- You want prop-firm rules tracked automatically from the firm's own data
- You are drowning in reports and want to be told what to fix
- You want discipline graded separately from P&L on every trade
- You keep a premarket plan and want plan adherence as a weekly number
- You want your risk rules judged per trade and a weekly execution score
- You want to pay nothing now and a founder's price later
What TradeZella does well
TradeZella is the most complete journal on the market and it is not close. Broker auto-sync means trades arrive without you doing anything. Backtesting and trade replay live in the same app as the journal, which matters if you build setups from historical data. Zella AI can tag trades and answer questions about your data. Prop Firm Sync tracks the firm's drawdown rules against your account. There are hundreds of reports, a university, a community and a mobile app.
If your problem is "I want everything in one place and I will do the analysis myself", TradeZella is the right answer and you should stop reading. This is a fair product and a serious company.
Where Actal is different, on purpose
Actal was built for the student who already had TradeZella and still could not tell me what to work on. Reports are answers to questions you have to think of. Actal starts from the other end: it asks the questions a coach would ask and gives you the answer as a number with a dollar sign on it.
- A grade on every trade. A to F on discipline, keyed in from one screen, with your strategy's own criteria as hints. Process and outcome become two different numbers, and the week gets an execution score built from grades, clean trades, rules kept, days planned and plan traded.
- A price on every mistake. Tag "moved stop" and Actal keeps a running dollar cost for it. The most expensive habit sits at the top of your insights with the trades that caused it. That ordering is the whole product.
- Plan versus reality. The premarket plan is filed with A, B and C scenarios per market, closed out in the evening, and "traded against the plan" becomes a weekly number that feeds the score.
- Risk rules as rules. Max loss per day, max trades, cooldowns, R size: judged against every trade as it lands. Stopping at the limit counts as kept, which is the point.
- One thing to fix. The insights engine ranks findings rule breaks first, process gaps second, P&L patterns last, and hands you a single weekly focus with live progress.
- Friends and groups. Mutual sharing of full journals, a group chat, and a weekly board ranked on execution rather than P&L.
Side by side
| TradeZella | Actal | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting trades in | Broker auto-sync, hundreds of brokers | Exports from 16 platforms, any CSV via mapper. No live sync yet |
| Stats and reports | 300+ reports | The core stats, a graded calendar, clean vs mistake |
| Discipline grade per trade | Manual ratings and tags | A to F on discipline, execution score per week |
| Cost per mistake | Tag filters | Running dollar cost, biggest first |
| Premarket plan before the open | Notes and AI briefing, optional | Asked for every day, A, B and C scenarios per market |
| Plan vs reality | Not measured | Closed out every evening, plan adherence tracked weekly |
| Monthly review | Reports | Reflection, best and worst trades by grade, goals with progress |
| Risk rules per trade | Prop-firm rules via sync | Your own rules, judged on every trade |
| Weekly focus | AI suggestions | One focus with live progress |
| Backtesting and replay | Yes | No |
| AI assistant | Zella AI | No chat; a rules engine that explains itself |
| Community | Large community and university | Friends, groups, public trade cards |
| Mobile | Native app | Mobile web |
| Price (checked September 2026) | $35, $59 or $99 a month; $26, $44 or $74 a month billed yearly | Free during beta, founder's price for life after |
Prices are taken from TradeZella's pricing page in September 2026 and can change. Actal has no broker sync today; trades come in from your platform's export file through the importer, which takes about a minute and never doubles a trade.
Who should pick what
If you backtest, replay and want a broker connection, TradeZella. If you have used a journal for a year and your habits have not moved, that is not a feature problem, and Actal is the one built for it. Many of my students run both for a month and keep the one they open in the evening.
Improvement, not statistics
TradeZella is built around features: broker sync, replay, backtesting, an assistant, hundreds of reports. They are real. In six years of coaching I have not seen any of them move a trader's results on their own. As far as its own site shows, TradeZella has notes and an AI briefing where you can write a plan, but it does not ask for one before the open, close it out after, count how often you traded against it, or hand you a monthly review with goals.
Actal makes you do exactly those things, every day and every month, and everything else in the product is built on top of them. The loop is spelled out on the compare page; features shows the plan, the closeout and the monthly review.
What a year costs
| Plan | Billed monthly, per year | Billed yearly |
|---|---|---|
| TradeZella Essential | $420 | $315 |
| TradeZella Pro | $708 | $531 |
| TradeZella Ultra | $1,188 | $891 |
| Actal | $0 during beta | $0 during beta |
Figures are TradeZella's own list prices from its pricing page in September 2026, multiplied out. Actal's paid price is not announced yet; beta users lock in a founder's price for life when it is. If backtesting, replay and broker sync are part of your process, TradeZella's price is buying real things. If you only ever open the journal and the reports, you are paying for a lot you do not use.
How to try Actal alongside TradeZella
- Keep TradeZella running. There is no need to cancel anything to test.
- Export a month of trades from your platform and drop the file into Actal. It takes about a minute and duplicates are skipped, so you can re-import freely.
- Add your risk rules and grade the last twenty trades. That is enough for the insights page to name your most expensive mistake.
- File tomorrow's plan in Actal and close it out in the evening. After a week, compare which tool told you something you acted on.
How this comparison was made
I coach futures traders one-on-one at Jusell Trading Academy and have watched students use TradeZella for years. Actal is my product. I checked TradeZella's features and prices on its own site in September 2026 and have not tested every feature myself; where I am unsure, the table says what their site says, not more.
Questions people ask
Drop in one export. In a minute Actal grades the trades it can, prices the mistakes you tagged, and tells you the first thing to fix. Free during beta, no card.
Full-time index futures trader. Coaches traders one-on-one at Jusell Trading Academy, five students at a time, since 2020. No platform was built for developing traders, so he had his own coaching software built; old students loved it and kept coming back, and Actal is that software turned into a proper journal for what matters.