Workout trackers worth paying for, ranked by what the subscription buys

The short answer

Ranked by how much a year of the subscription gets you, with the single reason each one earns the money.

• Hevy Pro, $23.99 a year: the cheapest subscription on this list and the hardest to argue with. Unlimited routines, unlimited custom exercises, your full graph history and a web app. If you want one recommendation and you do not mind tapping your sets in, stop here.
• Strong PRO, $29.99 a year: lifts the three-routine cap, adds a plate calculator, and comes with the best Apple Watch logging in the category. The extra six dollars is worth it if you log from your wrist.
• Superset, $49.99 a year after a 3-day trial: you are buying an input method rather than a feature list. Speak the session out loud and its AI writes down every exercise, set, rep and weight. Nothing else here does that. It is also new, iPhone-only, and has no App Store ratings yet.
• Liftoff Pro, $39.99 to $79.99 a year: buys ranks, scores and a competitive layer over your training. A real reason to pay if that is what keeps you turning up.
• JEFIT Elite, $69.99 a year: removes the ads and opens up the deepest exercise database here, with a web interface to match.
• Fitbod, $79.99 a year: buys the decision. It writes today's session around your recent training and the equipment you have.
• Alpha Progression, $79.99 a year: buys programming. Mesocycles, deload timing and per-lift progression schemes, worked out properly.

You are paying for one of four things

Paid gym apps look interchangeable on a feature grid. They are not, and knowing which of these four you are buying makes the price differences obvious.

A better logger. Hevy and Strong sell speed, polish and the removal of free-tier caps. This is the cheapest category, and it is what most lifters actually need.

A program. Alpha Progression sells the thinking. What to run, in what order, and when to back off.

A generated session. Fitbod decides what you train today from your recent work and your gym's equipment. You hand over control and get a decision back.

A different way to get the data in. Superset sells the input. The log it produces is ordinary; what the money buys is not typing it.

What each subscription costs and buys

The cheapest subscription that is still a serious app

Hevy Pro at $23.99 a year is the value benchmark everything else on this page has to beat, and most of it does not. The free version caps you at 4 routines, 7 custom exercises and 3 months of graph history, so the subscription is mostly about removing those caps. What sits underneath is a logger other apps copy, 4.92 stars from more than 85,000 US ratings, an Android version, and a web app for the days you want a real keyboard.

Strong PRO costs $29.99 and does much the same job. The reason to pay Strong instead is the Apple Watch app, which is the best in the category by a distance, and which no amount of iPhone polish substitutes for if you log between sets from your wrist.

Both also sell a one-time purchase, $74.99 for Hevy and $99.99 for Strong. At Hevy's yearly price that pays for itself after about three years, which is a reasonable bet on an app that has been around this long.

What the $70 to $80 tiers add

Fitbod, Alpha Progression and JEFIT Elite all sit around three times Hevy's price. That gap only makes sense if you want something Hevy has no opinion about.

Fitbod ($79.99/yr, 4.81 stars from 280,106 ratings) decides the workout. You tell it your equipment and it builds the session, rotating muscle groups around what you did recently. If your problem is that you do not know what to train, this is the money well spent, and no cheap logger solves it.

Alpha Progression ($79.99/yr, 4.92 stars) is the serious option for progression. It plans mesocycles, schedules deloads and advances each lift on its own scheme. It is the only app here whose progression logic is genuinely programmed rather than suggested.

JEFIT Elite ($69.99/yr) buys ad removal and the largest exercise database in the category, plus a web interface. The free tier is ad-supported, which is the main thing people are paying to escape.

Liftoff Pro ($39.99 to $79.99/yr) puts ranks and scores on your lifting. It works on the people it works on. If leaderboards make you close the app rather than open it, the money is wasted.

Where Superset earns $49.99, and where it does not

Superset costs twice what Hevy does and it only makes sense for one reason: you can log the whole session by talking. You finish training, hold the mic, and say something like "bench press, three sets of eight at 135, then incline dumbbell press for ten, ten and eight at fifty." The audio goes to a multimodal model, comes back structured, and a review screen shows every number before anything saves. No other app on this page has this, and dictating into a text field is not the same thing, because dictation types characters into a field you still have to find.

The subscription also covers 873 exercises with photos and step-by-step instructions that work with no signal, a coach that sets your next working weight for each lift, paste-in routine import, the progress dashboard and cloud backup. There is no separate tier: the 3-day trial turns all of it on, and after that it is $49.99 a year, $7.99 a month or $3.99 a week.

The honest case against it. Superset is new and has no App Store ratings, which is a genuine risk next to Hevy's 85,000. It runs on iPhone only, with nothing for Android, iPad, the web or Apple Watch. There is no Apple Health sync in the shipping build. Supersets and drop sets have no structured logging, so you can note them but the app will not group them. There is no CSV export and no rest timer, and voice logging needs a connection because the recording has to reach a model. If you would not use the microphone, you are paying $26 a year more than Hevy for a shorter feature list.

How to pick

• You want the most app for the least money: Hevy Pro at $23.99. It is the right default for most lifters.
• You log from an Apple Watch: Strong PRO. Superset has no watch app at all.
• You hate handling your phone mid-session: Superset, and only for that reason.
• You do not know what to train today: Fitbod. Logging apps will not answer that question for you.
• You want your progression actually planned: Alpha Progression.
• You are on Android or want a web app: Hevy or JEFIT. Superset is iPhone-only.