As a person who watches quite a bit of TV, tracking the shows I am watching and airing shows is pretty important to me. I’ve been using Trakt to track my shows after the past year, however was intrigued when I was contacted by Simkl to review their alternative to Trakt.
Specifically, Simkl offers a separate Anime section – the TV genre I watch the most. Whilst Trakt does offer an anime filter in search, Simkl allows you to quickly and easily discover new content to watch – as well as TV shows and movies.
Your home on Simkl is the dashboard, found when you click on your profile. Here, you can view various lists – what you’ve recently watched, items that have aired but you haven’t watched, a calendar of upcoming shows, and your plan to watch lists. Clicking on a show will bring you to its page, where you can see a lot – and I mean a lot – of information about the show. Whilst I like the Simkl dashboard – especially the separated watch lists – I do find it a little cluttered and hard to find what’s going on.
I do, however, really like the episode overview for various shows. It shows you ratings for the show, as well as its rank on Simkl, and how many people have dropped it. You can view seperate episode information, a countdown to the next episode, descriptions, and so much more. What I really like about the episode view is the episodes panel – it lets you easily see what episodes you’ve watched, how long until the next one, and when it next airs. This makes it really easy to keep track of where you are in a show. Simply clicking on the X
marks it as watched.
Simkl also allows you to have a public profile, which has a rating queue – something I quite like as it means that you don’t forget to rate your shows. In addition to this, it shows your top rating shows in each respective genre, and shows you have recently rated.
A powerful list view allows you to easily get an overview of your shows – ones that you are currently watching, your plan to watch list, and much more. This allows you to easily manage all your shows in one place – once again, this list is split up into TV Shows, Anime, and Movies. You can increment the last seen episodes here, switch notifications on and off, and manage your shows.
Simkl also offers scrobbling, which integrates with your media player so you can automatically mark shows as watched.
Simkl does have a social side – you can comment on various shows and movies – it is slightly weaker than Trakt. You can have reactions, reviews, comments, or memos, however many shows don’t have much activity on them in the social section.
Various apps are offered by Simkl for mobile, so you can track your shows on the go. Simkl also offers a VIP program, giving you features such as no ads, a badge, calendar sync, exports, and a few more features.
I really like that Simkl splits everything up into three, distinct, categories. It makes it a lot easier to manage shows, and seperate plan to watch lists is great. Whilst sometimes the interface can be confusing, and there is a small learning curve to using the interface, it can be pretty powerful once you get the hang of it. Simkl is completely free, but you can upgrade to VIP if you want to support the development of the program, and unlock a few extra features.