If you want to decorate your bullet journal in the easiest fuss free (and cheapest) way then highlighters are the way to go – here are my favorites for each type:

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1. Fat Tip

Most people probably call these chisel tip but I call them fat tip. Basically, it’s the highlighters you can get from just about anywhere. My favorite are the Stabilo Boss as the chisel tip is 0.5mm which is the same height as the spacing between dots in most notebooks.

I also recommend:

Stabilo Boss
Faber Castell
Stabilo Swing Cool
Sharpie Clearview (they only come in 4 colors though)
Staedtler Textsurfer

Trying various highlighter widths:

If you don’t want to splurge for the more well-known brands I’ve found cheaper knocks for most of them. As you can see in the picture below, the colors are almost identical!

2. Dual tip

Great for borders, underlining and simple decorating. You don’t have to buy dual tip highlighters – using the point end of a normal highlighter works fine too.

I Recommend:

Tombow Kei Coat
Daiso Twin Tip
Zebra Just Fit
Uni Propus Window
Zebra Mildliner (expensive though so I’d only get if you really want their colors)
Any of these 4 similar & cheaper alternatives to the Zebra Mildliners

3. No bleed through or ghosting

Use gel highlighters. They remind me of a cross between a highlighter pencil and zooms (twistable crayons).

I’ve tried a couple of different gel highlighter brands – there wasn’t much difference between them so I’d just get whatever is readily available.

They’re supposed to be really good for highlighting your Bible with no bleed through on the other side.

These are the Thornton’s wax highlighters that I got from Amazon. THere was no bleed through when I tried them out.

Daily planning bullet journal style (using a Plum Paper grid dot notebook)

If you’re wondering if there’s any traditional highlighters (e.g. chisel tip) that aren’t prone to ghosting… well not really. The paper of most bullet journals tends to be really thin so just about every highlighter will have some ghosting:

4. Thin

Perfect for borders, underlining and drawing circles around things e.g. mind maps or numbers

Recommended thin tip highlighters

Kikki K fluorescent Pen
Daiso Twin tip
Any twin tip listed on the dual tip recommended list earlier in this post

If you don’t want to buy a thin tip highlighter, just angle the chisel tip so that you’re using the pointed tip not the chisel end. That’s what I did for the ‘blog posts’ text on this spread:

Bullet journaling in my custom Agendio dot grid notebook

Here’s a spread I did with the Daiso pen like highlighters

5. Erasable

Erasable highlighters are good – but only if you’re using a ballpoint pen. They tend to smear when you erase (especially the Frixion highlighters) if you use them with ink pens like gel pens. They’re more expensive and if, like me, you already use erasable pens for bullet journaling, then I don’t think it’s worthwhile getting them. If you erase the highlighter it’ll take the erasable pen ink with it. Since I almost always use erasable pens using both isn’t a great combination.

The other alternative are highlighters that have 2 ends – 1 for the ink and the other for the erasable part. They’re less common but are better if you do a lot of highlighting (quicker than frixion / erasing by heat).

Recommended:

Frixion erasable (brights not the pastel, they are far too pastel especially against the yellow paper of most bullet journals)
Foray erasable
Ooly erasable

I don’t recommend the Crayola erasable – the colors are really dark.

6. Pastel

I normally avoid pastel highlighters however they’re one of the best options for bullet journaling: less prone to bleed through and you can write over the top of the highlighter to use them for headings.