Head to head
Filmatic vs Trakt: tracking versus taste
Builds Filmatic. Has abandoned more streaming sessions than he has finished.
4 min read
Claims verified
| Trakt | Filmatic | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Automatically record everything you watch | Decide what to watch next |
| Automatic tracking (scrobbling) | Best in class. Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, devices | None. Swipes are manual by design |
| TV and episode tracking | Excellent — episode level, next-up, calendars | Films only |
| API and integrations | The reason it exists. Huge third-party ecosystem | None public |
| Personalised recommendations | Present, but driven by watch history and popularity | The whole product. Taste model from explicit swipes |
| Interface | Utilitarian. Powerful, not pleasant | Built for one-handed use at 11pm |
| Free tier | Yes, with limits tightened in 2025 | Yes, unrestricted |
| Paid tier | VIP $60/year — legacy $15 and $30 plans were migrated up in 2025 | No paid tier |
Gold marks the stronger option in each row.Trakt wins 3 of 8 — that is the honest count, not a rhetorical device.
Choose Trakt if…
- You run Plex, Jellyfin or Emby and want everything logged automatically.
- You watch a lot of television and need episode-level tracking.
- You want an API and a third-party ecosystem to build on.
- Completeness of the record matters more than the interface.
Choose Filmatic if…
- You do not care what you watched last March, you care about tonight.
- You want a recommendation from your taste, not your history.
- You want the useful features without a $60 subscription.
- You would rather swipe for thirty seconds than configure a webhook.
Trakt is a product of its respective owner. Filmatic is not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with it. Details were checked against their own site on the review date above; pricing and features change, so verify anything that matters to you.
Trakt and Filmatic get compared because both sit in the “film app” category. In practice they point in opposite directions: Trakt is the most thorough backward-looking tool in the space, and Filmatic only looks forward.
Trakt is a record. Filmatic is a decision.
Trakt’s central idea is that logging should be automatic. Connect it to Plex, Jellyfin, Emby or a streaming device and it records what you watched as you watch it — no diary entry, no remembering. For anyone with a media server this is genuinely transformative, and the ecosystem around its API is the largest of any product here.
Filmatic asks for the opposite. Swipes are deliberate: liked, seen, save, skip. That is more effort per signal and the signals are much better, because a choice tells you something a completed watch does not. You finish plenty of films you did not much like.
What Trakt does better
Scrobbling, decisively. Nothing else automates tracking this well. If your objection to film apps is the manual logging, Trakt is your answer and this page should not talk you out of it.
Television. Episode-level tracking, next-up queues, calendars for returning shows. Filmatic does not do TV at all.
The API and the ecosystem. Trakt is API-first and a decade of third-party clients, scripts and integrations have grown around it. Filmatic has no public API.
Completeness of the record. If you want to know what you watched on a Tuesday in 2019, Trakt knows. We have no ambition to compete on this.
Where each falls short
Trakt’s weakness is that a history is not a preference. Recommendations built on watch history inherit your habits, including the film you gave up on halfway and the series you watched because it was on. Passive data cannot distinguish “enjoyed” from “completed”, and the gap between those is where most bad recommendations come from.
Its interface is also honestly described as utilitarian. It is a powerful tool with a developer-flavoured surface, and it does not make choosing a film pleasant.
Then there is pricing. In 2025 VIP moved to a flat $60 a year and long-standing legacy plans at $15 and $30 were migrated onto it, while free-tier limits tightened. That is a business’s right, but a lot of people who had been there for years experienced it as a bait-and-switch, and it is a fair thing to weigh.
Filmatic’s weaknesses are the mirror image. No automatic tracking, no TV, no API, thin statistics, no import from Trakt yet. And because it relies on explicit swipes, it needs a few minutes of your attention before it is any good — where Trakt starts producing value the moment a webhook fires.
Using both
There is no conflict here:
- Let Trakt keep the record. It does it automatically and better than anything else.
- Use Filmatic to choose. Explicit swipes, a taste model, a short list.
The one thing worth flagging is that they do not talk to each other yet. Import from Trakt is on the roadmap — its export and open API make it very doable — and this page will say so when it exists, not before.
If you only want one
Ask which failure annoys you more. Forgetting what you watched, or spending twenty minutes deciding? Trakt fixes the first properly. It does not really try to fix the second, and that is the gap Filmatic was built into.
Questions
Does Trakt recommend things to watch?
Yes, based largely on your watch history and what is popular among similar users. Because the input is passive — what you happened to finish — it reflects your habits more than your preferences. Explicit signals like a deliberate skip carry information that a completed watch does not.
Is Trakt still worth paying for?
If you use scrobbling seriously, probably. The 2025 change to a flat $60 a year annoyed a lot of long-term subscribers on legacy $15 and $30 plans, and the free tier got tighter at the same time. Whether that is good value depends entirely on whether automatic tracking is the thing you need.
Can Filmatic scrobble from Plex?
No, and there are no plans to. Trakt does this properly with years of integration work behind it, and building a worse version would not help anyone. If automatic tracking matters to you, use Trakt for it.
Can I import my Trakt history into Filmatic?
Not yet. Trakt has a good export and an open API, so this is a tractable problem and it is on the roadmap. We will update this page when it ships rather than before.
Which is better for TV?
Trakt, without qualification. Filmatic is a film app. If your watching is mostly series, Trakt or Simkl is the right tool.
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