AniList vs MyAnimeList in 2026: Which Should You Use?
MAL was acquired by a Web3 company in May 2025. AniList has no official app. Here's what actually changed, what didn't, and which tracker to use.
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AniList vs MyAnimeList is a cleaner decision in 2026 than it was a year ago. MyAnimeList was acquired by Gaudiy Inc., a Web3 and AI company, in May 2025. Russia permanently blocked the site in October 2025. AniList, meanwhile, remains independent and is actively shipping new features. The two platforms have always had different strengths; now they have different ownership stories too.
Last reviewed: June 27, 2026.
What changed in 2025-2026
MAL was sold. Gaudiy Inc. completed its acquisition of MyAnimeList on May 7, 2025, paying approximately 531 million yen (~$3.5 million USD). Gaudiy is a Tokyo-based company focused on blockchain infrastructure and AI, with investors including Sony Group and Bandai Namco. Community backlash was immediate. The MAL admin team published a post acknowledging the response, summarizing fan concerns as: “NFTs are scams, generative AI is killing artists’ livelihoods, blockchain is killing the planet, web3 is a pipe dream.”
As of mid-2026, no blockchain or NFT features have appeared on MAL. The site works the same way it did before. The concern is about where the product goes next and who now holds years of your watch history.
Russia blocked MAL. Roskomnadzor permanently blocked MyAnimeList in October 2025, citing LGBTQ+ content. MAL has not indicated it will remove content to lift the ban.
AniList’s traffic has climbed since MAL’s acquisition triggered departures from users who were already considering a switch. It is the most-named beneficiary of that exodus.
What to look for in an anime tracker
Before choosing, decide which criteria matter most:
- Database breadth: coverage of older series, obscure OVAs, films, and specials
- Community: reviews, forum discussions, and how much weight the platform’s scores carry in wider anime discourse
- Scoring flexibility: scale options and rating precision
- Interface: how fast pages load and how cleanly your library is organized
- List management: custom sections, filters, and organization tools
- Mobile experience: official app quality or third-party client ecosystem
- API access: developer ecosystem for custom tools and integrations
Both platforms handle the basics. The meaningful differences are in community scale, scoring options, interface design, and now ownership.
MyAnimeList
Best for: Database completeness, community depth on older titles, the most culturally recognized anime scores
MyAnimeList launched in 2004 and remains the largest anime community online. The database covers approximately 28,000 anime and 77,000 manga entries. For pre-2000 anime, regional releases, and obscure OVAs, MAL’s catalog is more complete than AniList’s. Forum discussions are active for nearly every notable series, including titles that finished airing twenty years ago. When someone in a YouTube comment or subreddit references an anime’s score, they almost always mean the MAL score.
What it does well:
- Largest anime and manga database of any tracker
- Active forum discussions on older and niche titles
- Bayesian-weighted scores that serve as the cultural reference point
- Community reviews, user recommendations, and character rankings
- Seasonal airing schedules and release tracking
- Data export available
The limitations:
- UI has not meaningfully changed since the Amazon-era web design era; pages can feel cluttered
- Android app rated 3.02/5 on Google Play (~18,000 ratings); no in-app review writing, limited manga tracking
- Fixed 10-point integer scoring with no alternative scale options
- No custom list organization beyond five default statuses
- Gaudiy (Web3) ownership since May 2025
- Permanent Russia block since October 2025
Supporter tier: $2.99/month or $29.99/year. Removes display ads (streaming partner video ads remain), adds profile customization, expands favorites slots from 10 to 20 per category. No content is unlocked; it is cosmetic and quality-of-life only.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood has held the top position in MAL’s all-time rankings for years. That persistence illustrates what MAL does well: at scale, with millions of votes weighted by Bayesian averaging, a score becomes a genuine community signal. For any well-known series, the MAL score, the forum threads, and the recommendation chains are where consensus gets built and stored.
Neon Genesis Evangelion
For older and divisive series, MAL’s forum depth is one of its real advantages. Evangelion has been discussed on MAL long enough that the threads cover nearly every angle: the symbolism, the production history, the comparison to the rebuild films. If you want a record of how anime culture has talked about something over time, MAL is the archive.
AniList
Best for: Daily tracking, list customization, stats, the developer ecosystem
AniList rebuilt its platform in 2016 and has grown consistently since. The interface is faster and more modern than MAL, the scoring system is substantially more flexible, and the GraphQL API is the developer-preferred standard in the anime tracker space. AniList remains independent, free for all core features, and is actively shipping.
What it does well:
- Modern interface with dark mode and fast page loads
- Six scoring scale options: 100-point, 10-point, 5-star, 3-point smiley, decimal, or percentage
- Up to six weighted sub-scores per entry (Story, Art, Sound, Characters, Enjoyment) that roll into your final rating
- Custom list labels with no limit on categories, beyond the five default statuses
- Detailed analytics: genre breakdowns, score distributions, time-watched graphs
- Seasonal airing charts with episode-by-episode tracking
- Open GraphQL API, well-documented, actively maintained, free for read access
- Active development roadmap including anime song data, dubbed language filtering, mass edit tools, and groups
- Growing traffic, boosted by users leaving MAL after the acquisition
The limitations:
- No official mobile app. AniList is web-first. AniHyou is the leading Android client (4.0/5, 100,000+ installs, last updated May 2026), but you are depending on a community developer
- Smaller community than MAL means thinner data on older and niche titles
- The 100-point scale clusters scores between 70 and 90; scores do not translate directly to MAL scores
- AniList scores tend to run higher than MAL for the same title due to a more engaged enthusiast user base
- Long lists require continuous scrolling; no pagination
Cost: Fully free for all tracking features. Optional Patreon support ($1-$20/month) adds cosmetic features and more frequent stats updates but nothing behind a paywall for core use.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
AniList’s seasonal tracking tools show their value with a recent title like Frieren. Airing dates, episode counts, studio credits, and community reactions per episode are organized for someone watching week by week. The active roadmap (upcoming features include anime song data with OP/ED tracking) reflects a platform still building for the kind of engaged viewer who follows a show while it airs.
The scoring systems are not equivalent
This is worth understanding before you start comparing scores across platforms.
MAL uses a fixed 10-point integer scale (1-10) with a Bayesian-weighted average that factors in vote count to resist outlier manipulation. AniList defaults to a 100-point scale where user activity clusters scores in the 70-90 range. AniList also separates Average Score (straight mean) from Mean Score (weighted to reduce outliers).
The result: the scales look parallel but do not represent the same community assessment. AniList’s enthusiast-skewed user base tends to rate the titles they choose to watch more generously than MAL’s larger general population. An AniList score of 78 and a MAL score of 7.8 are not interchangeable. When anime discourse references a score, it means the MAL score, because the larger and more general user base produces a number that carries more cultural weight.
Achriom
Best for: Anime watchers who also track books, films, albums, and TV, with an AI that finds connections across all of them
Neither AniList nor MyAnimeList connects your anime to the rest of your media life. If you read the source manga, or if a series sends you toward a particular album or novel, the tracker does not see that pattern.
Achriom tracks anime alongside books, films, TV shows, and albums in a single library. Your AI librarian works across the whole collection: the novels that share themes with a series you finished, the albums that fit a show’s mood, the film that pairs with a manga you have been reading.
What it does differently:
- Anime, books, films, TV, and albums in one library
- Conversational AI that reasons over your entire collection, not just your anime list
- Private by default with no public social feed or follower counts
- Free tier with unlimited library items and 50 AI messages; Pro unlocks unlimited
The limitation: No community layer. No MAL-style forum discussions, no seasonal airing charts, no friend activity feeds. Achriom is a personal library with an AI, not a social platform. It works best alongside a dedicated anime tracker, not instead of one.
Vinland Saga
Vinland Saga points outward: to Makoto Yukimura’s manga, to Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories, to the actual history of Norse expansion. In Achriom, you can add the anime alongside the books it echoes and ask your librarian what they share. MAL and AniList both see it as a list entry.
Want all of it in one place? Achriom tracks your anime alongside your books, films, music, and TV, with an AI librarian that finds the threads between them. That is the part no single-format tracker can do.
Try Achriom free →Quick comparison
| Feature | MyAnimeList | AniList |
|---|---|---|
| Anime database | ~28,000 entries (largest) | ~20,000+ (growing) |
| Community size | Very large (150M+ registered) | Medium (~15M monthly visits) |
| Scoring flexibility | 10-point integer only | 6 scale options + sub-scores |
| Interface | Dated, can feel cluttered | Modern, fast, dark mode |
| List customization | 5 default statuses only | Unlimited custom labels |
| Mobile | Official app, 3.02/5 Android | No official app; AniHyou 4.0/5 Android |
| API | REST v2 (limited docs) | GraphQL (excellent, developer standard) |
| Seasonal tracking | Yes | Excellent |
| Forum discussions | Extensive, especially older titles | Moderate |
| Score authority | Cultural reference point | Scores run slightly higher |
| Ownership | Gaudiy Inc. (Web3, since May 2025) | Independent |
| Cost | Free / $2.99 mo supporter | Free / Patreon optional |
Which should you use?
Use AniList if you are starting fresh. Better interface, more flexible scoring, active development, and independent ownership. For most people beginning an anime list in 2026, this is the right default.
Use MyAnimeList if community is what brings you to a tracker. The forum discussions, the recognizable scores in wider anime culture, and the depth of coverage for older titles are MAL’s real strengths. If you reference MAL scores as part of how you decide what to watch, that context lives at scale on MAL and nowhere else.
Use both if you watch a lot of anime seriously. This is the most common pattern among dedicated fans: AniList as the daily tracker with its cleaner interface and better list tools, MAL as the community and database reference for older titles and community discussion.
Use Achriom alongside either if anime is one part of a larger reading, watching, and listening life.
The honest answer
AniList is the better product. The interface, the scoring flexibility, the API, and the active roadmap all point the same direction. For anyone starting fresh, there is no reason to begin on MAL.
MAL’s advantages are real: the database is larger, the forum depth on older titles is unmatched, and the score is the cultural reference point. Those things do not disappear quickly and they represent years of community investment that AniList has not yet fully replicated.
The Gaudiy acquisition adds something new to the calculus. Your watch history now sits with a Web3 company. No NFT features have appeared yet, but the ownership is different from what it was. For anyone already considering a switch, it is the final nudge.
The AniList import is clean and takes a few minutes. Nothing about staying on MAL is permanent.
For the three-way breakdown including Kitsu, see MyAnimeList vs AniList vs Kitsu. For the full anime tracker field, see Best Anime Tracking Apps. If you are actively leaving MAL, Best MyAnimeList Alternatives covers your options.
Common questions
Is AniList better than MyAnimeList in 2026?
For most users starting now, yes. AniList has a better interface, more flexible scoring, and is independently owned. MyAnimeList has the larger database and deeper forum history, especially for older titles. The Gaudiy acquisition in May 2025 gives MAL a concrete ownership concern that did not exist before. Start with AniList; use MAL as a reference for community and catalog coverage on niche titles.
Should I leave MyAnimeList because of the Gaudiy acquisition?
Gaudiy completed the acquisition in May 2025 and no blockchain or AI features have appeared on MAL as of mid-2026. The concern is forward-looking: a Web3 company now holds your watch history. If you are starting fresh, AniList is the cleaner choice. If you have existing MAL history, the AniList import is clean and worth doing at your own pace.
Can I import my MAL list to AniList?
Yes. Export your anime list from MAL (Profile > Export) as an XML file, then use AniList’s import tool in Settings. Scores, statuses, and watch counts transfer. Most data comes over cleanly; edge cases like unusual status mappings may need a manual check.
Does AniList have a mobile app?
No official native app. AniList is web-first. The leading third-party Android client is AniHyou (4.0/5 stars, 100,000+ installs, updated May 2026). Multiple iOS clients exist. The absence of an official app is a real gap for mobile-first users, and it is worth knowing before you commit to AniList as your primary tracker.
Which has a better mobile app, AniList or MAL?
Neither has a strong official experience. MAL’s official Android app is rated 3.02/5 with roughly 18,000 ratings; common complaints include missing features from the website and no in-app review writing. AniList has no official app at all. The leading AniList third-party client, AniHyou, is rated 4.0/5 with 100,000+ installs and is actively maintained. For daily mobile use, AniHyou on AniList is the stronger option.
Why do MAL scores carry more cultural weight than AniList scores?
Scale and user base. MAL has 150+ million registered users and uses a fixed 10-point integer scale with Bayesian weighting. AniList defaults to a 100-point scale where scores cluster between 70 and 90. AniList’s enthusiast-heavy user base also tends to rate titles more generously. When anime discourse references a score, it means the MAL score because the larger and more general population produces a more broadly representative number.
Is there an anime tracker that also tracks books and movies?
Achriom tracks anime alongside books, films, TV shows, and albums in a single library with an AI librarian that finds patterns across all of it. See achriom.com for the cross-media option.