PhotoPills earned its reputation, and nothing here pretends otherwise. This is an honest look at where the two apps agree, where they part ways, and which one belongs in your pocket.
Same sky, two very different ideas about what a planner owes you.
PhotoPills is the planner serious photographers reach for, and it deserves the standing. For over a decade it has given landscape and night shooters an extraordinary set of instruments: the map-based Planner, augmented reality overlays, exposure tables, and a depth of tooling most of us will never fully exhaust. Its philosophy is generous and clear - show the photographer every number the sky can produce, and trust them to do the judging.
Almanox starts from a different question. Not "what are all the numbers tonight" but "is tonight worth heading out." Instead of handing you every measurement and leaving the verdict to you, it fuses darkness, moon interference, Milky Way altitude and cloud into one Tonight verdict - a single honest 0-100 score you can read at a glance and act on.
It also remembers. Every note you make lives in a journal keyed to the place and the night, so your history builds into something you can actually consult. It knows the nearest certified dark-sky places. And it wraps all of it in a living, animated sky rather than a control panel - an app you enjoy opening on the many nights you are not shooting at all. The core runs on your phone, and it costs less.
Common ground worth naming: both apps are one-time purchases. Neither asks for a subscription, and in 2026 that alone puts them both in rare company.
The honest grid. Where both apps do something, both get credit.
| Feature | Almanox | PhotoPills |
|---|---|---|
| Tonight verdict score (one 0-100 answer) | Yes | No |
| Sun and moon ephemeris (rise, set, golden hour, twilight) | Yes | Yes |
| Milky Way core planning | Yes | Yes |
| Sun and moon alignment planner | Yes | Yes |
| Photo calculators (500 rule, NPF, depth of field) | Yes | Yes |
| Dark-sky place finder (nearest certified places) | Yes | No |
| Observing journal that remembers per place, per night | Yes | No |
| AR sky finder | Yes | Yes |
| Price | One-time $12.99 | One-time (higher on iOS) |
To be fair in the other direction: PhotoPills carries specialist tools beyond this grid - deep exposure tables, drone planning, and more. If your work lives in those corners, that depth is real and it matters.
Choose PhotoPills if you want the deepest bag of tools in the category and you like doing the judging yourself. It is a superb instrument, particularly at home on iOS, with years of tutorials and a devoted community behind it.
Choose Almanox if you want a fast, honest verdict on tonight, an app that remembers your nights place by place, a finder for genuinely dark skies, and a beautiful daily driver - at a lower one-time price.
There is no wrong pick here. One hands you the observatory; the other hands you the answer. We built Almanox because most nights, the answer is what we actually wanted.
One 0-100 verdict, a journal that remembers, a core that runs on your phone. One-time $12.99, no subscription, ever.