Bible in One Year has taken a great many people through the whole of Scripture, and it is worth being clear that looking for an alternative is not a complaint about it.
What Bible in One Year is
It is a fixed one-year plan through the Bible, with a daily commentary from a single teacher, available free in text and audio. You read the day's passages and then hear them drawn together by the same voice, every day, for a year.
What it does better
It is free, which is not a small thing for something used this widely. The commentary is warm, consistent, and has genuinely carried people through books of the Bible they would have given up on. And there is a real virtue in one voice for a year: you come to know how that person thinks, and the commentary accumulates in a way that a rotating cast never does.
Where Devout is different
The main difference is whose voice you are read to by. Devout draws on your own tradition rather than one teacher — the lectionary and the Roman calendar if you are Catholic, the synaxarion if you are Orthodox, the 1662 prayer book if you are Anglican, Wesley if you are Methodist, Spurgeon if you are Baptist, the Heidelberg and Westminster catechisms if you are Reformed, Luther if you are Lutheran.
The plan is also yours to choose. A year through the whole Bible is one of ours, and every day of it is laid out on the page before you sign up for anything. There are shorter ones too, for a month or three weeks, which is often the better place to start.
And there is a journal. A question drawn from the day's reading, a private place to answer it, and an export button so what you write stays yours.
Which suits you
If the free daily commentary is what you value, stay — you would be paying for something you already have. If you want the reading shaped by your own tradition rather than one teacher's, and somewhere to write as you go, that is what Devout adds.
Side by side
| Devout | Bible in One Year | |
|---|---|---|
| The plan | Several, including a year through the Bible | One, fixed |
| Whose voice | Your tradition's own writers | One teacher throughout |
| Tradition | Eleven, and it changes what you read | One |
| Writing of your own | A private journal on the page | Not included |
| Cost | Paid | Free |
Seeing for yourself
The whole of Devout is open for seven days, with no card taken and nothing to cancel if you decide against it. That is long enough to know — a daily practice announces itself quickly, and so does a bad fit.