TravStats vs. FlightDiary
FlightDiary.net is one of the largest personal flight-tracking services on the web. If you’ve been logging flights for years and want to know whether TravStats is a meaningful move, this page is the honest comparison.
At a glance
Section titled “At a glance”| TravStats | FlightDiary | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Your server (Docker) | Their cloud |
| Data ownership | Your PostgreSQL database | Their database |
| Cost | Free, open source | Free with paid premium |
| Account | Local, optional sign-up | Email + password required |
| Adding flights | Forward a booking email → automatic | Manual web form |
| Cruises | Yes (v2) | No |
| Hotels / POIs | Roadmap | No |
| Map view | deck.gl + MapLibre, 3D globe | 2D web map |
| Statistics | Distance, time, top airlines/aircraft/airports | Similar |
| Public profile | Off by default, never built-in | Public flight feed by default |
| Mobile app | Web (responsive) | Web only |
| Booking-email parser | Yes | No |
| Data export | JSON, full account | CSV |
| Open source | Yes (GitHub) | No |
Where TravStats wins
Section titled “Where TravStats wins”1. The booking-email parser
Section titled “1. The booking-email parser”This is the single biggest reason to switch. FlightDiary needs you to fill out a web form for every flight: date, route, airline, aircraft, seat, time. TravStats reads the booking confirmation that already sat in your inbox and pulls the flight out automatically.
For someone with hundreds of flights, the difference between “a weekend project of manual entry” and “forward the emails, done” is exactly the difference between using and not using a travel logbook.
2. Data ownership and privacy
Section titled “2. Data ownership and privacy”When you log a flight on FlightDiary, that record sits on their servers, governed by their terms of service. They can change terms, sunset features, lose your data, or sell the company. None of those are hostile actions — they’re just risks of using somebody else’s infrastructure.
TravStats runs on your own server. The Postgres database holding your flights is sitting in a Docker volume on hardware you control. You back it up. You own it. If TravStats the project disappeared tomorrow, your data wouldn’t move an inch.
3. No public flight feed
Section titled “3. No public flight feed”FlightDiary’s social-network angle (public profiles, flight feeds, followers) is a feature for some and a quiet liability for others. By default, TravStats has no public surface — your flights are visible to you and anyone you give an account to. There’s no public profile page, because there’s no central server to host one on.
4. Cruises today, more travel domains tomorrow
Section titled “4. Cruises today, more travel domains tomorrow”FlightDiary is for flights, full stop. TravStats already covers cruises in v2 with multi-port voyages and route maps. Hotels and points of interest are on the roadmap — see the GitHub issues for the latest.
Where FlightDiary wins
Section titled “Where FlightDiary wins”1. Zero setup
Section titled “1. Zero setup”FlightDiary is a website. Sign up, log in, log a flight. TravStats is a Docker container you run on your own hardware. If you don’t already have a Linux box with Docker (or a NAS, or a Proxmox node, or a VPS), TravStats has a higher barrier to entry by definition.
2. The community database
Section titled “2. The community database”FlightDiary aggregates flight data from many users, which feeds into features like “popular routes” and “see who else flew this.” TravStats is intentionally single-tenant — your instance only knows about your flights. If discovering other people’s travel patterns matters to you, FlightDiary’s network is genuinely useful.
3. Established schedule data
Section titled “3. Established schedule data”FlightDiary has years of accumulated airline schedules, equipment data, and aircraft-registration cross-references. TravStats reads what your booking confirmation tells it; if the airline didn’t write down the registration, neither will TravStats. For aviation-spotter levels of detail, FlightDiary’s database is hard to beat.
Migrating your data from FlightDiary
Section titled “Migrating your data from FlightDiary”FlightDiary lets you export your flight log as CSV from Settings → Export. The columns map cleanly to TravStats’ import format:
| FlightDiary CSV | TravStats field |
|---|---|
Date | date |
Departure | departureAirport |
Arrival | arrivalAirport |
Airline | airline |
Flight Number | flightNumber |
Aircraft | aircraft |
Registration | aircraftRegistration |
Seat | seat |
Class | cabinClass |
The TravStats wiki has the import format reference and a sample CSV.
Verdict
Section titled “Verdict”If you already log flights on FlightDiary and you don’t run any self-hosted services, the switching cost is real. The reasons to switch all come back to automation (the booking-email parser saving you hours of manual entry) and data sovereignty (your travel history sitting on hardware you own).
If you’re already in the homelab world — Proxmox, NAS, Docker containers as second nature — TravStats is built for you. Spinning it up is a fifteen-minute job. Forwarding a year of confirmation emails afterwards takes another five.