Cephalo vs Migraine Buddy: the private alternative

Migraine Buddy is one of the most widely used migraine trackers, and for many people it works well. Cephalo makes a different choice on one point above all: where your health data lives. Below is a factual comparison, with every claim about Migraine Buddy taken from their own public pages and dated, so you can decide which diary fits you.

Comparison accurate as of July 2026.

  Cephalo Migraine Buddy
Price The diary is free, forever. Optional Cephalo Plus: $2.99/month, $24.99/year, or a one-time $49.99 lifetime unlock. Free to download. MBplus subscription: $24.99 per two months or $89.99 per year on their website[1]; the App Store lists monthly plans at $9.99 to $12.99 and annual plans at $69.99 to $89.99.[2]
Account required No. No sign-up, no email, no login. Yes, for access to your recorded data: “If you want to access data collected by your Device, you must create a Migraine Buddy account.”[3]
Where your data lives On your device. Optional encrypted sync through your personal iCloud account. No third-party trackers. On cloud servers, including third-party processors such as AWS; anonymised, aggregated statistics may be included in research reports (with an opt-out).[3]
Works offline Yes, fully. Every feature except weather lookups works without internet. Not stated by the vendor; the app is built around cloud sync (“our app syncs to the cloud so you will always have your migraine history”).[4]
Languages 13: English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish. 9: English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish.[2]

Why where your data lives matters

A headache diary is health data: when you were in pain, what you took for it, how it relates to your sleep or your cycle. Cloud-first apps ask you to hand that record to a company and trust their policies. Cephalo is built so that the trust is not needed in the first place: your entries are stored on your iPhone, insights are computed on your iPhone, and nothing about your headaches is uploaded to us. If you enable iCloud sync, the data goes encrypted into your own Apple account, not ours.

You do not have to take our word for it. Cephalo's App Privacy section on the App Store lists only data not linked to you (purchases, anonymous identifiers, usage statistics) and no health data collection at all.[5]

That architecture has a practical upside too: with no server in the loop, the diary works in full on a plane, in a basement, or during an outage, and it keeps working if we ever disappear.

Cephalo insights screen: trigger analysis with confidence levels, tomorrow's risk outlook, and discovered patterns
All of this is computed on your device: trigger analysis with confidence levels, discovered patterns, and an honest outlook for tomorrow.

Try the diary that keeps your data yours.

Download Cephalo on the App Store

Sources

  1. Migraine Buddy, MBplus pricing page, https://migrainebuddy.com/mbplus/ (accessed July 17, 2026). ↩
  2. Apple App Store, Migraine Buddy listing (price, in-app purchases, languages), https://apps.apple.com/us/app/migraine-buddy/id975074413 (accessed July 17, 2026). ↩
  3. Migraine Buddy Privacy Policy, last updated February 22, 2024, https://migrainebuddy.com/privacy-policy/ (accessed July 17, 2026). ↩
  4. Migraine Buddy homepage, https://migrainebuddy.com/ (accessed July 17, 2026). ↩
  5. Apple App Store, Cephalo listing, App Privacy section, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cephalo-headache-diary/id6749801188 (accessed July 17, 2026). ↩