For years, the Moleskine Planner in its various formats has been the ‘go to’ product for those wanting an analogue calendar/organiser. It was the brand I picked for 2017, because the layout worked great for me. The trade off, of course, came with the paper quality. You can check out the original review of the Moleskine Weekly Planner I did back at the beginning of the year.

For 2018 I have chosen to go with the Leuchtturm1917 Weekly Planner instead. As the two are very similar, I thought it would be useful to do a direct comparison for those people who are interested in trying a different brand.*

Paper Quality

There’s no point avoiding the elephant in the room. If you want to write with fountain pens, the battle of Moleskine vs Leuchtturm in the planner selection is no different to the regular notebooks. Leuchtturm1917 paper wins hand down. Even gel pens show through worse on the Moleskine paper:

Year Overview Sections

There is a difference in approach here. The Moleskine overview is closer to the project planner section in the Leuchtturm (more on that below). The ‘by day’ view in the Leuchtturm probably offers similar space, but is visually less useful to me:

Weekly View

Both have the same format: days on the week on the left hand side, lined page for notes on the right hand size. Because of the extra width of the Leuchtturm, you get more writing space for both.

Blank Pages

Last year it really annoyed me that my Moleskine planner had four blank pages at the back. For a whole year? Impractical. Leuchtturm, by comparison, has ten. Still not a great number, but much more useful.

Bonus features

Leuchtturm has a project planner view of the month. For high level use, this is something I’m really looking forward to trying out.

My Moleskine planner is from 2017, but it no longer came with an address book. The Leuchtturm1917 planner for 2018 came with a separate address book (with a section at the front for listing birthdays perhaps?), as well as some stickers and a grid guide.

Bookmarks – Moleskine has one, Leuchtturm have two. I think two is significantly more useful, given the project plan feature. However, they are both a good length, rather than being less than an inch longer than the length of the book. Small thing, but it really bugs a lot of people when the bookmark is too short.

Moleskine comes with more information at the front. Flight durations, time zones, measurements and conversions. Useful in their own way perhaps, but I’ve not used them once, even when planning travel for the year.

On balance, I think the Leuchtturm1917 wins as a more functional planner. Better paper, more of it, two bookmarks and a project planner. However, you can’t downplay the form factor and brand recognition that comes with Moleskine.

 

*Not an affiliate link. As I’m in the UK I can get Leuchtturm1917 notebooks from Amazon, but in the US it seems harder. I’ve used Goulet for fountain pens though and they’re a great company to order from.