I used to keep track of the anime I was watching in a little notebook next to the computer. Then I discovered MyAnimeList in early 2008 and ever since it has been my go-to website for stat tracking and what I browse whenever I need to remember what anime I’ve seen. Even something as basic as “what anime figurines might I want to buy” start with me heading to my MAL profile and scrolling through the list. But that doesn’t even begin to cover how far into that website I had buried myself. I have so many reviews on there I am officially the 26th “Most Helpful” reviewer across the entire site (and used to be way higher when I was reviewing more regularly). I even worked freelance for them writing featured articles for several months, including such highlights as Top 10 Best Anime Asses, which remains one of my proudest writing accomplishments.
However then MAL started advertising that it was selling NFTs of the Fist of the North Star manga and I decided maybe I should start looking elsewhere for an anime listing site.
MAL has had some dodgy shit going on in the background for a while now, and there have been numerous issues with the website for years, but my attempts to move away from it to other sites like AnimePlanet or the since defunct Hummingbird were not a success. However it’s been a few weeks and I’ve actually stuck with AniList. It appears to have taken over and become my MAL replacement. It won me over almost instantly during the sign up process with this page.

Holy shit thank you so much AniList! Do you know how long I have raged at MAL for not giving us this option? Meaning I have to remember the Japanese titles to Ghibli movies that nobody fucking uses like Sen to Chihiro to Whateverthefuck? Considering one of my main uses for scrolling through my MAL was to recall anime titles I’ve seen, it was made significantly more difficult when I couldn’t see the titles I knew them by.
The site also gave me the option to rate things on different scales, such as out of 5 stars or out of 100 or with decimal points, which I appreciated even if I didn’t use it. I imported all my anime, got it all set up, felt good about myself, and then went to the homepage and discovered something I didn’t realise I was missing until AniList gave it to me.

On the homepage it lists all the currently airing anime you are watching, when the next episode airs on streaming platforms, and the most important part, will tell you how many episodes you are behind if you scroll over them. It has become how I keep track of what anime to watch next. This, along with the English language titles, were honestly enough to get me to stay here over MyAnimeList, so take everything else I say with a pinch of salt.
Anilist ain’t exactly perfect. A lot of this is me being new to it as adjusting to a new layout is always a bit difficult. Trying to navigate to the current season always takes me a little longer than I feel like it should. However once I get there it’s pretty easy to navigate, especially the little drop down that lets you do cool things like figure out what is the most popular TV anime from 1980-89, or list where it’s streaming.
A lot of these things are indicative of the site being designed much more recently than MAL so these aspects are more readily built into the design, while MAL was built in the days of speedy fansubs with elaborate karaoke effects. It does, however, have one of my eternal pet peeves when it comes to legal streaming, which is that it just assumes everyone is from North America and will list a bunch of anime you can’t actually watch. It will happily inform me I can watch Hunter X Hunter on Crunchyroll, only to discover that no I can’t, it’s not available in my region. There’s no way to say what region you live in so it’s like they just assumed nobody outside of NA would be interested in the feature.

If there is one big issue I have, and it’s one that carries over from MAL and I really wish these sites would fix this problem, it’s that they continue to list each individual season as separate entities with no way to pare them. The picture above is the top 12 anime ranked on the site. 4 of them are Gintama sequels. This is dumb. It’s also actively unhelpful when you’re looking for something new to watch when all the top anime are various sequels, since of course the sequels are the highest rated. It’s a self-selecting audience, the people who didn’t like the show have been weaned out. Even trying to see what new anime in a season are worth checking out is difficult when the top row are all sequels. If Cowboy Bebop had aired today, it would be counted as 2 seasons due to the way it originally aired, yet we continue to list these new split-cours anime as separate entities.
I understand this is a difficult problem to solve since not all sequels are made the same. You can’t pretend Genesis of Aquarion and Aquarion EVOL are the same as Fate Zero season 1 and season 2. But the current solution as used is actively detrimental to discovery and readability on the website currently. It’s a problem all these anime categorising websites have though, so I’m mostly shouting into the void. Maybe add “direct sequel” as a tag option?
If AniList was to take something from MAL though, it would be the option to tell what was still airing during a specific season apart from what started airing that season. For example I currently have no way of knowing that during Winter 2010, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood was airing. If I go to the MAL page for Winter 2010, it informs me in a whole separate section that Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood was still airing, as was Cross Game. This gets especially silly going back to really old seasons like the 70s when anime were much longer.
There’s a bunch of other small things I could talk about. I particularly enjoy the stats pages that breaks down my scores across years and stuff like that. But those elements are more fun extras than central functionality that keeps me using the website. AniList is good. Better than MyAnimeList, and it took a lot to prize me away from there considering how thoroughly embedded I was (seriously, go read that butts post, it’s legitimately really funny and I’m still amazed I got paid like 40 bucks to write about anime butts so who’s laughing now). Here’s my profile if you want to fire me a friend request. Or a follow? Still need to learn more about the social side to the website. I’m also fairly sure the creator of AniList used to be a reader of The Cart Driver so they obviously have good taste.

Part of me will miss the comments I get on my MAL page though.
Pretty good review. I agree with you that sequels hogging up the “Top 50 or whatever” makes it difficult to discover good content. I’m surprised they haven’t figured out how to fix this, and I’m sure adding a “direct sequel” tag would be better than nothing. Regardless, it’s one of the reasons why I check out reviews rather than auto-generated lists.
Yeah it has been a problem for so long I have to think they simply don’t think it’s a problem.
I switched to AniList back when MAL’s api shat the bed because I use Taiga. AniList instantly proved to be superior has it allowed Thunderbolt Fantasy to be listed while MAL did not. Kidding aside, overall it has been a better experience than MAL. But I have experienced some downsides. For some reason they don’t list the openings and endings, you have to use an extension that pulls the data from MAL funny enough. The other is that lists of stuff like an anime’s characters and staff or a person’s roles do not load all at once. You have to keep scrolling and scrolling to load a bit more at a time. This takes forever for long lists. Meanwhile Mal will have the entire list on page load and in a more compact format. Sometimes old web design is far superior to the new web design.
Yeah I’ve seen a few people mention the lack of OP and ED data in there. I also sorta agree with your take on the scrolling loading format, but I’ll admit it’s been way less of a problem than I thought it was going to be
I switched over to AL from MAL recently myself, and while I’m still getting used to some of the differences I think I like it more overall. I do agree that it’d be nice if entries could be more compact in regards to multiple seasons of a show. Something like being able to choose specific roles like Director or Scenario Writer and such in the staff filter of one’s stats section would be nice as well.
As an aside, I’ve seen some of your twitter threads of game reviews and wondered if you knew about the website backloggd.com. It’s like AL and MAL in that it lets you keep track of games you’ve finished/dropped, giving them a rating, writing a review etc., and the website design is pretty decent.
I probably should use a website like that for games. I got Playnite, but that’s more of a desktop client and is more for organised libraries across multiple launchers
Nice to see that you chose AL, too!
I started researching other services back in June 2018, when MAL crashed badly for an extended period of time. Initially I chose Kitsu for its sleek and modern design and ease of use but, really, everything a bit more modern is better than MAL – unfortunately the best EN-language database, AniDB, is even more ancient so I only ever upload backups of my list from other services there, to have the stuff I watched highlighted when I obsessively check out someone’s career.
Hummingbird is not defunct, it’s what Kitsu rebranded from. I’m not surprised you might not know that, I only remember because I made notes.
For me a big plus of AL is its connection with other useful services like AniChart (remember when you were one of the brave people making those? I know it brought people to your blog, me being one of them, but at what cost!) or trace.moe. And the ability to just follow people instead of requesting to be friends – I could immediately follow a dude who writes nice horror manga reviews without any awkwardness. And yes, I agree that the database search options are awesome, I could learn that the anime released the closest to my birth was Riding Bean, so, nice!
AniChart has that “still airing” category unter “leftovers” section, but it’s not as easy as on MAL since its archive page only goes back a few years, you have to tamper with address bar to get to stuff earlier than 2004.
I did actually know Hummingbird transformed into Kitsu, but it’s so barren compared to the other platforms I kinda dismissed it lol