WisdomWeave vs Storyworth vs Remento: An Honest Comparison

This is going to be an unusual comparison, because I'm going to tell you up front: I'm one of the people who built WisdomWeave. So if you're looking for an apparently-impartial review of three competitors, you should know that bias is in the page.

But you're here because you want to give a parent or grandparent a meaningful gift — one that captures who they actually are, not who Hallmark thinks they are — and you want to know which of these three tools is the right one for your family. So instead of pretending I have no skin in the game, I'm going to be as honest as I can about where each of these tools wins and where it doesn't. By the end you should be able to make the call yourself.

There's no wrong answer here. All three apps are made by people who care about the same thing: that the stories don't get lost.

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The 30-second version

	WisdomWeave	Storyworth	Remento
Founded	2026 (UK)	2017 (US)	2022 (US)
How you answer	Talk into the phone	Type a written answer	Talk into the phone
Prompts	279, research-grounded	~52, generic	~52, generic
What you get back	Audio + transcript + photo book	Hardcover book of written answers	Video book + audio archive
Voice clone	Yes (after 30 min audio)	No	No
Family reader access	Yes, free	One reader, paid extra	One reader, included
Annual price (2026)	TBC — under £100	$99 in year 1, $79 thereafter	$99
Best for	Parents who'd rather speak than type	Parents who like to write	Parents who want to leave a video for grandkids

If you stop reading here, the short answer is: Storyworth is the right pick if your parent is a writer at heart and looks forward to sitting down with a coffee on a Sunday morning to type out three pages about their childhood. WisdomWeave is the right pick if your parent will roll their eyes at the weekly email and never log in, but would happily talk for an hour over the kitchen table. Remento is somewhere in between — video-first, more about the recording moment than the resulting book.

If you'd like the longer version, read on.

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What each one actually does

Storyworth — the original

Storyworth is the granddaddy of this category. It was started in 2017 and has built a real, loyal customer base over nine years. The mechanic is simple: every Monday morning, your parent gets an email with a question — "What were Saturday mornings like as a child?" — and they reply with a written answer. After 52 weeks, Storyworth turns the year of answers into a hardcover book. You give the book to your parent (or keep one for yourself). It costs $99 in year one (more if you renew).

What Storyworth gets right is the book. The finished hardcover is genuinely lovely — proper typesetting, family photos, a real heirloom you'd be proud to put on the coffee table. The brand is established. The email-prompt cadence is gentle and well-paced. The gifting flow is smooth: you pay, you schedule the start date, your parent gets the first email on Mother's Day morning. It's polished.

What Storyworth gets less right is the participation side. The hard truth that the team behind Storyworth knows and has been trying to address for years is that a significant portion of recipients quietly stop answering by week six. The format is hard. Writing three good paragraphs about your first job, every Monday, for a year, is more work than most people in their seventies want to do. Either the answers tail off, or your sibling sits down with mum the weekend before the book is printed and ghostwrites half of it from notes she gave them years ago.

If your parent is a writer at heart — keeps a journal, sends long emails, has the patience for the page — Storyworth is exactly right. For everyone else, the dropoff is the elephant in the room.

Remento — the video-first newcomer

Remento launched in 2022 with a sharper take: the bottleneck isn't the writing, it's the typing. So they built around recording instead. Your parent gets a weekly prompt, taps a button, and records an audio or video answer on their phone. Remento transcribes the audio with AI, and at the end of the year you get a video book — essentially a digital archive of all the recordings, plus a printed photo book with transcripts. The price is similar to Storyworth, around $99/year.

What Remento gets right is meeting parents where they are. Talking is easier than writing for most people over sixty. The video format produces a really moving artefact — you don't just have the words, you have the face, the laugh, the pause before they answer the hard question. The technology is solid and the team has been thoughtful.

What Remento gets less right, in my view, is what you end up with as a physical book. The book becomes secondary to the digital archive. If what you wanted was the book on the coffee table — the thing you'd give to a niece on her wedding day, or read at the eulogy — Remento's book is functional rather than beautiful. The other thing worth flagging is that Remento's prompt set is similar in size to Storyworth's — 52 questions for the year — and the questions themselves are reasonable but not noticeably better.

WisdomWeave — the new entrant (us)

We started WisdomWeave because of a specific problem: my own mum wouldn't write a memoir, would absolutely not sit down to type into an app, but would cheerfully talk for hours if you sat at her kitchen table with a cup of tea and asked the right question. So we built an app that does that. She presses one large button, talks, and the app handles the rest.

Three things make WisdomWeave different.

1. The prompts. We spent the better part of a year researching what questions actually unlock real stories from older parents. We read the academic literature on life review (Robert Butler, Erik Erikson, McAdams' Life Story Interview, Chochinov's dignity therapy), we tested questions on real families, and we wrote 279 of our own — not 52. They're three-line questions, designed to land warmly rather than to interrogate. Roughly half of them are forward-looking, not backward-looking, because the research says generativity questions ("what do you most want the next generation to know about you?") get the deepest answers from older adults. Of all three apps, this is the one we think is most clearly different from the competition. You can see the prompts yourself — they're all free and public.

2. Voice cloning. After your parent has recorded about 30 minutes of audio, we use ElevenLabs to make a private voice model. It's not a gimmick. The use case is dignified and practical: when we build the printed book at the end of the year, we can also produce an audio narration of the book in your parent's actual voice, so a grandchild who never met them can hear their grandfather read his own story. We don't market this as "talk to your dead relative" — we don't think that's an appropriate use of the technology, and we won't build that feature. It's narration of the book, and an archive of the audio that can be revisited any time.

3. The book. The book matters to us as much as it does to Storyworth's team. Ours is a hardcover, beautifully typeset, family photos integrated with the stories. We're a year newer than Storyworth so our book has had fewer iterations, but we've put real effort into the design.

What WisdomWeave gets less right than the others: we're brand new. Storyworth has nine years of trust and customer reviews; we have months. We haven't had the time to find every edge case in the recording flow that Remento has already found. We're a tiny team — at the time of writing, just one person and a small set of advisors. If you want the safest, most-tested option, that's Storyworth or Remento. If you want the option that's been most thoughtful about what to ask and how older parents actually want to share, that's us.

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The decision tree

The honest way to think about this is to ask three questions:

Question 1: Is your parent a writer?

If your parent already keeps a journal, sends long emails, or has the patience to compose three good paragraphs about their life every week — Storyworth is your answer. Stop reading. They'll love the format and you'll get a beautiful book at the end.

Question 2: Would your parent rather talk than write?

If your parent is the kind of person who tells a great story at the dinner table but groans at the thought of writing one down — both WisdomWeave and Remento are candidates. The question is what you want at the end:

Question 3: Do you want a book or a recording?

If what you ultimately want is the book on the coffee table — beautifully designed, full of your parent's stories in their own words, something you'd be proud to give a niece on her wedding day — WisdomWeave is built for that.

If what you ultimately want is the recording itself — your dad's actual face, his laugh, his shrug, captured on video so you can replay it years from now — Remento is built for that.

The answer might be both. We've had families use WisdomWeave specifically for the book and also use a phone voice memo when they're together at Christmas. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

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Pricing, fairly

All three apps cost in the same range — around £80–100 a year — which makes the price more or less a non-factor in the decision. Storyworth's $99 in year one and $79 thereafter is the most established pricing. Remento at $99 includes one family reader. WisdomWeave's pricing is being finalised at the time of writing; it'll be in the same neighbourhood, with the family-reader access included free.

If you're price-sensitive enough that £20 a year matters, the honest answer is that none of these will give you the best experience. The Sunday lunch with a free phone voice memo will give you 80% of the value for £0, and we've written a guide on exactly how to do that:

→ 10 questions to ask your dad on Father's Day (free, no signup)

We genuinely mean this. You don't have to pay anyone to capture your parent's stories. You just have to ask.

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What no one is going to do for you

There's one more honest thing worth saying. None of these three apps — Storyworth, Remento, or WisdomWeave — will make your parent want to share. That part is on you. The app is the vehicle; the conversation is the thing.

What the apps will do is structure the asking, transcribe the answers so they survive, and at the end produce something tangible you can hold. The hard, intimate, beautiful work of sitting down with a parent and saying "tell me about Granddad" — that bit is still yours to do.

We'd be lying if we said our app was a substitute for that. It isn't. It's a scaffolding for it. If you choose Storyworth, Remento, or us — or none of us — please don't put off the asking. The questions on our free prompts page cost nothing to use. The voice-memo app on your phone is free. Whatever else you decide, do the asking.

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In summary

• Storyworth — pick this if your parent loves to write. The book is lovely. The dropoff problem is real.
• Remento — pick this if you want the video archive more than the printed book.
• WisdomWeave — pick this if your parent would rather talk than type, and you want a beautiful book at the end.

If you're not sure yet, grab our free Father's Day PDF and try a kitchen-table version this Sunday. The right app will be obvious after you've actually had the conversation.

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One last thing, in the spirit of honesty: this comparison page will be updated as the three products evolve. Storyworth has launched audio-recording features in the past and may launch more. Remento's book quality may improve. We may build features that change the answer to one of the questions above. If you spot something on this page that's out of date, please let us know — we'd rather be embarrassed by correction than misleading.