The Best Benjamin Franklin Virtues Tracker: Free vs. Paid Compared

Franklin's original tracker was a five-cent notebook. Today you can get a hand-drawn chart, a free PDF, a dedicated app, or a laminated physical booklet sold online for real money — and most comparisons of these options are written by whoever is selling one of them. We make two of these things ourselves, so here's the honest version, including where we'd point you elsewhere.

Key Takeaways

• The mechanism is simple enough that most trackers do the same thing — the difference is whether you'll actually use it
• A hand-drawn chart is free but the first thing abandoned when life gets busy
• A printable PDF is free, sits somewhere visible, but depends on you remembering to look at it
• An app can prompt you on schedule, which paper can't do on its own
• A physical booklet product mostly buys durability and presentation, not new functionality

What Actually Makes a Tracker Good

Before comparing options, it's worth being clear on what Franklin's method actually requires, since that's the bar every tracker should be measured against:

• All 13 virtues, correctly worded — not a shortened or modernized substitute list
• A weekly focus mechanism, not 13 things tracked with equal intensity at once
• Room to mark a fault per day, not a rating or a paragraph
• Something that prompts a weekly review — see why the review matters more than people expect

The Options, Compared

A hand-drawn chart

Cost: free. Effort: ten minutes to rule the grid, repeated every week you want a fresh copy. It works exactly as well as Franklin's original, but it's also the version most likely to get abandoned — see our step-by-step guide if you want to try it anyway.

A free printable PDF

Cost: free. Effort: print once, reuse the tracker page weekly (or print a fresh one). This is the sweet spot for most people who want paper: no drawing required, correctly worded, and it can sit taped above a desk as a visual reminder — which a phone in a pocket can't do.

A dedicated tracking app

Cost: free to a few dollars a month, depending on the app. Effort: essentially none once set up — the app prompts you instead of relying on you to remember. This is the meaningful advantage over every paper option: a scheduled notification is a real mechanism, not a hope.

A physical laminated booklet

Cost: real money — these are sold as small-batch or reusable physical products. Effort: none, it arrives ready to use with a dry-erase marker. What you're paying for is durability and object permanence, not a better tracking method than a printed page provides for free.

Our Honest Recommendation

If you know you'll actually look at a piece of paper — print the free worksheet and put it somewhere you can't avoid seeing it. If your honest answer is that a printed page will end up buried on a desk by Thursday, use the Ben Franklin Virtues app instead — it runs the identical 13-virtue method with morning and evening prompts and a built-in weekly review, so the habit doesn't depend on your memory. Plenty of people end up using both: the PDF for the reference and the app for the daily nudge.

For more on that exact tradeoff, see our post on printable vs. app.