LogTen vs ForeFlight vs MyFlightbook: Logbook Compared

LogTen, ForeFlight Logbook and MyFlightbook differ first on what you pay and what hardware you must own. LogTen is an Apple-only app at $79.99 or $129.99 a year once you pass a free first 50 hours; ForeFlight's logbook comes bundled inside an EFB subscription that starts at $130 a year; MyFlightbook is free, donation-funded, and runs in a browser or on iOS and Android (vendor pages, checked October 2026). Most of the choice follows from those three facts.

The rest follows from one question to ask of any logbook before you type a single hour into it: how do you get the hours back out.

The comparison at a glance

Every cell comes from the vendors' own pricing, feature or support pages, fetched in October 2026; the FlyFren column is limited to what flyfren.com states today.

What each one costs, checked October 2026

LogTen's pricing page lists two plans, Basic at $79.99 a year and Pro at $129.99 a year, and says the app is free for your first 50 hours logged. The help center is more exact: LogTen "can be used without restrictions until you have logged more than 50 hours of total flight time," after which a subscription is required to add new flights and sync. The threshold is total time in the logbook, so a 300-hour pilot who imports history is over it on day one. Basic is iOS only. Pro adds the Mac app, airline schedule import for over 100 airlines, batch editing and custom reports. Subscriptions are annual, bought through the App Store, and cover up to five devices per operating system.

ForeFlight does not sell the logbook on its own. It is a feature of the Starter plan at $130 a year, and of Essential at $260 and Premium at $390, each of which includes everything below it. The plan names are new: a ForeFlight support article dated May 1, 2025 explains that Basic Plus became Starter, Pro Plus became Essential and Performance Plus became Premium, with prices and features unchanged. One license covers two iPads and one iPhone, or one iPad and two iPhones, with one geographic region included. You are buying an EFB and getting a logbook in the box.

MyFlightbook costs nothing. Its FAQ says the service is not run for profit, that out-of-pocket operating expenses are a few hundred dollars a month, and that donations average more than that. A few features, such as video attachments and nightly backups to a third-party cloud, are reserved as thank-yous for donors; the feature chart marks them with an asterisk. The site also notes that it shows limited advertisements.

Platforms decide this for a lot of pilots

LogTen runs on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac, and nothing else; logten.com lists no browser version (checked October 2026). ForeFlight runs on iPad and iPhone, with the logbook also reachable on ForeFlight Web; it lists no Android app. MyFlightbook's home page says you can log "from any browser or via our free iOS and Android apps."

If you carry an Android phone, this list is one item long.

If you are already an iPad pilot paying for ForeFlight, the marginal cost of its logbook is zero, which is a hard number to argue with. The question then becomes whether you want your logbook's lifespan tied to an EFB subscription, which the lock-in section below takes up.

Currency, endorsements and signatures

All three compute currency. ForeFlight's product page lists IFR, type ratings, night passenger carriage, night vision goggles, medical and CFI renewal. MyFlightbook's feature chart lists FAA, EASA, Canadian, FAR 117 rest, military, night vision and custom currencies. LogTen's pricing page lists currency, duty and rest tracking, and its site names FAR 117 and EASA limits. For what the FAA rules themselves require, read Pilot currency requirements; the app is a reminder, and the regulation is the rule.

Endorsements are where the three diverge in character. ForeFlight ships over 60 endorsement templates derived from AC 61-65H and lets a student send a draft entry to a CFI for remote signing. MyFlightbook lets a designated instructor sign flights and issue "back of the logbook" endorsements from templates, and marks a signature invalid if the flight is edited afterward. LogTen's site describes digital endorsements and signatures and says instructors can "share approvals" with them.

One honesty point in MyFlightbook's favor. Its FAQ states that the FAA accepts digital signatures under AC 120-78B and that MyFlightbook believes it complies, but adds that the FAA has not, in its words, "indicated willingness to even evaluate, much less certify, online logbook systems for compliance" with it. That is the position for every app on this page. 14 CFR 61.51(h)(2) says what a training endorsement must contain: a legible endorsement with a description of the training, its length, and the instructor's signature, certificate number and expiration date. Whichever app you use, check that each signed entry shows all of those.

Import and export, the lock-in test

One test. Can you produce a file, without the vendor's help, that another logbook reads.

ForeFlight passes on the export side: its product page says you can export your entire logbook any time from the ForeFlight website, and its support article puts the CSV behind a single Export button on ForeFlight Web, with an optional email every 30 days. The CSV omits signatures, endorsements, photos and track logs, so the PDF report has to travel with it. The step by step is in How to export your ForeFlight logbook. On import, ForeFlight accepts its own CSV or TSV template plus LogTen, MyFlightbook and ZuluLog exports, on the web only.

LogTen's export is the Export Flights (Tab) report under Reports, then Exporters, which produces a tab-delimited .txt that any spreadsheet opens. LogTen's own help article is blunt that this "IS NOT A COMPLETE BACKUP": crew names and tail numbers come along, but extra details on People and Aircraft records do not, and neither do signatures or images. Import runs the other way around. You email the file to LogTen's support team and they migrate it; the pricing page counts this as "Free Logbook Import Support," 1 on Basic and 4 on Pro.

MyFlightbook has a Download item on its Logbook menu that produces a CSV, and each row carries a FlightID so that re-importing updates rather than duplicates. Donors get nightly backups to Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive. On import it reads ForeFlight and LogTen exports with, in its words, minimal manipulation; custom fields, whose headers ForeFlight writes as [Hours]Name and LogTen as flight_customxxx, must be renamed to MyFlightbook's names first.

ForeFlight gives you a button. LogTen gives you a button out and a support ticket in. MyFlightbook gives you a button and, for donors, a nightly copy you never have to remember.

What happens if the vendor dies or you stop paying?

All three keep existing entries readable after a lapse: ForeFlight in a read-and-edit mode that still prints reports, LogTen with export intact, and MyFlightbook with its code public on GitHub (vendor pages, checked October 2026).

ForeFlight's lapsed-subscription article, updated September 1, 2026, calls it Limited Logbook Access mode. You can still view, edit or delete entries, print and manually export reports, and manage certificates and existing endorsements. You cannot create entries, import data, add currencies or issue new endorsements. The details are in Can you use ForeFlight's logbook without a subscription?

LogTen's help center says that if the subscription lapses "you will always have full access to your logbook data, where you can view, edit existing entries, generate reports, export, and print," but not add new flights. Same shape, stated more generously.

MyFlightbook's answer to the vendor-death question is the longest, because one developer runs it. The FAQ lists a dedicated bank account tied to the hosting providers, named backup administrators, written transition plans, and the code in two repositories including GitHub, so that someone could stand up a new instance and restore from a backup. It then recommends keeping your own backup anyway.

That last line is the real guarantee for all three. A file on a disk you own, dated, with a PDF beside it. Put a repeating reminder in your calendar for the export, every 90 days at most, because good intentions are not an asset a bankruptcy court can hand back to you.

Who should pick which

Opinion follows, labeled as such.

A student or renter who already pays for ForeFlight on an iPad should use ForeFlight Logbook and turn on the 30-day auto-export in both formats. The templates derived from AC 61-65H and the remote signing are built for the student-and-CFI loop, and the price is already paid. The one caveat is the lapse: if you expect to pause the subscription after the checkride, export first.

A pilot on Apple hardware who intends to fly for a living should look hard at LogTen. Airline schedule import for over 100 airlines, FAR 117 tracking, the 8710 report and the Mac app are aimed at that career, and the 50 free hours let a student run it alongside training before paying. The price is $79.99 or $129.99 a year for the rest of that career, and there is no browser fallback if you ever leave Apple.

Anyone on Android, anyone who wants zero cost, and anyone who distrusts subscriptions on principle should pick MyFlightbook: the only one of the three that is free without an hour limit, the only one with open source code, and the only one on all three platforms. Donate if it carries your logbook.

FlyFren, our product, is a free browser logbook with CSV import from ForeFlight, Garmin Pilot and LogTen Pro, a preview of every entry before it is saved, currency tracking for night, IFR, medical and flight review, flight sharing, and a scanner that reads paper pages. It does not list instructor endorsements or signatures, and it is a planning and logbook companion, not an EFB. If that is the shape of what you need, start with the converter and keep your PDFs.

Whichever you lean toward, do the test before you commit: export what you have today, import it into the candidate, and compare the totals. The preview screen will tell you more than this table did.

This article is educational and is not a substitute for the current regulations, the AIM, official weather briefings, or instruction from a CFI. Check the current text at the linked sources before you rely on any detail.