If you keep a bearded dragon, you already know the urge to write things down: today's weight, the last shed, how many crickets actually got eaten, the date you brought them home. Most keepers do this in whatever's nearest — the iPhone Notes app, a Google Sheet, or a general-purpose cat-and-dog pet app. All of those work. The real question is which one keeps working as your dragon grows from a 4-gram hatchling toward a 500-gram adult.
This is an honest comparison. We make Beardie Days, a purpose-built bearded dragon app, so we have a horse in the race — but a spreadsheet is genuinely the right answer for a lot of people, and we'll say so plainly.
What keepers actually track
Before comparing tools, it helps to be clear about what good record-keeping covers for a beardie:
- Weight in grams, recorded over time — the single best early-warning signal for health.
- Length, snout-to-tail, especially in the fast first year.
- Sheds, appetite, and feeding (insects vs greens, supplement dusting).
- Photos, so you can actually see color, morph expression and condition change.
- Identity & genetics — morph, sex, hatch date, and for breeders, parentage.
Spreadsheet vs generic pet app vs Beardie Days
| Spreadsheet / Notes | Generic pet app | Beardie Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Often free / ads / subscription | Free core, optional premium |
| Weight-in-grams chart | Manual chart setup | Sometimes, generic units | Built-in, grams over time |
| Photo growth timeline | Awkward to embed | Basic photo album | Hatchling-to-adult timeline |
| Morph genetics fields | Make your own columns | Not modeled | Purpose-built fields |
| Lineage / family tree | Very hard | No | Parent & offspring links |
| Multiple dragons | Tabs / messy | Yes | A profile each |
| Data ownership | You own the file | Often on their cloud | On-device, CSV export |
| Speed of daily logging | Slow on a phone | Medium | Fast, beardie-shaped |
When a spreadsheet is enough
Let's give the humble spreadsheet its due. It is free, infinitely flexible, and you own the file forever. If you keep one dragon, weigh them now and then, and just want a column of dates and grams, a spreadsheet or even the Notes app is completely fine. You can add a column for sheds, type a note when something changes, and chart it later if you ever feel like it.
Spreadsheets also shine for keepers who love custom analysis — pivot tables, your own formulas, feeding-cost math. If you already live in Sheets or Excel, there's no shame in staying there. A tool you'll actually use beats a fancier tool you won't.
Where a purpose-built app fits better
The cracks in the spreadsheet approach show up the moment your record-keeping gets visual or genealogical. Embedding a year of photos in a Google Sheet is miserable. Building a family tree across three generations of morphs in columns is nearly impossible. And typing into a tiny grid on your phone, one-handed, while holding a wriggling dragon, is nobody's idea of fun.
That's the gap a dedicated app fills. Beardie Days models the things beardie keepers care about as first-class features: a growth photo timeline from hatchling to adult, a weight-in-grams chart, dedicated morph genetics and sex fields, and lineage trees that link parents to offspring. Everything stays on your device, and you can export to CSV any time — so you get the convenience of an app without giving up the data ownership a spreadsheet gave you.
"I started in a Google Sheet and loved it — until I had three dragons and a folder full of photos with no home. Switching meant I could finally see growth instead of just reading numbers."
The bottom line
If you have a single beardie and you mostly want a tidy log of weights, a spreadsheet is free, flexible, and genuinely good enough. If you want photo growth timelines, grams-over-time charts, morph and lineage tracking, and fast logging from your phone — without handing your records to someone else's cloud — that's exactly what a purpose-built app is for. Either way, the best tracker is the one you'll keep up with.
Track growth, weight & genetics in one place
Growth photo timelines, weight-in-grams charts, morph genetics and lineage trees — all private, on your device, with CSV export.
Download Beardie Days on the App Store →New to beardies? Read our Bearded Dragon Care Guide and the Bearded Dragon Growth Chart. Questions? Email us.