Free workout trackers without a paywall, and which ones still qualify

The short answer

Ranked by how much real training you can do without ever paying.

• Hevy: the best free tier here. Unlimited workouts and full history, capped at 4 routines and 7 custom exercises.
• Strong: unlimited workouts and unlimited history, capped at 3 custom routines. The best pick if history is what you care about.
• Liftoff: logging is free and uncapped. The ranked and social layer is the paid part, and it is the reason most people install it.
• JEFIT: free with ads and feature limits. Usable, but the ads are the price.
• Alpha Progression: limited plan generation on free, $12.99/mo or $79.99/yr to unlock.
• Fitbod: a handful of free workouts and then it is a paid app. Not really a free tier.
• SayLift: not free. A 3-day trial, then $4.17 a month (billed $49.99 a year), and the only app here where you log by speaking instead of typing.

What a free tier actually costs you

Routine caps. The most common. Three or four routines sounds like plenty until you run an upper/lower split plus a deload week plus a travel-day session. That is four, and you have not made a variant yet. This is the cap most people hit first, and it arrives exactly when you have become invested.

Custom exercise caps. Your gym has a machine the library does not, or your coach named a variation. Seven custom exercises goes quickly for anyone training seriously.

History and analytics windows. The nastiest kind, because the data is yours and it already exists. Being shown three months of your own graph and asked to pay for month four is a different transaction from being sold a new feature.

Your time. This one never appears in a comparison table. Every free tracker on this page is a form you fill in. Open the app, find the exercise, set the weight, set the reps, tap save, repeat for every set of every session, forever. Ten sets is ten trips through a picker with chalky hands, and the sessions you log from memory on the drive home are the ones that end up wrong. Free apps do not charge you money for that. They charge you the minutes.

What each free tier actually gives you

#1 Hevy: the most usable free tier

Hevy's free tier is the one most people can live in. Unlimited workouts, your full training log, and the graphs that go with it, without paying. The caps are 4 routines, 7 custom exercises, and body weight plus waist as the only measurements.

For a beginner running one program that is fine for months. For anyone with variants, deloads or a travel routine, it is a matter of weeks before you meet the routine cap.

Its paid tier is the cheapest in this category by some distance: $2.99 a month, $23.99 a year, or $74.99 once for lifetime access. A lifetime option barely exists elsewhere any more, so if you expect to pay for a tap logger eventually, this is the cheapest exit.

The honest limits. The 4-routine cap is low, and 7 custom exercises runs out fast if your gym has unusual machines. Measurement tracking beyond weight and waist is behind Pro.

#2 Strong: unlimited workouts, three routines

Strong takes the opposite approach to a history paywall: the free tier saves unlimited workouts, so your training log is never held back. The cap is on custom routines, at three.

PRO is $4.99 a month, $29.99 a year, or $99.99 once. Strong also has the most established Apple Watch app in the category.

The honest limits. Three routines is tighter than Hevy's four, and the app has seen slower feature development than Hevy over the last two years.

#3 Liftoff: free logging, paid everything else

Liftoff's logger is free and uncapped, which technically makes it a free workout tracker. The catch is that the ranked leaderboards and the social layer are what the app is known for, and those sit behind Pro at $12.99 a month.

If you only want the logger, you never have to pay. You are also not using the reason the app exists, and Hevy's free logger is better at being a logger.

The honest limits. The free experience is built to sell you Pro, so the paid features are visible throughout. Liftoff runs more than one live annual price, between $39.99 and $79.99, so what you are shown may differ from what a friend is shown.

The paid pick: SayLift, if the typing is the problem

SayLift is our app, and it has no free tier, so it does not belong in the ranking above. New users see a paywall after onboarding, start a 3-day trial with everything unlocked, and pay $4.17 a month (billed $49.99 a year) after it. Weekly is $3.99 and monthly is $7.99.

What the subscription buys is voice logging. You finish your last set, say the session out loud, and an AI model writes down every exercise, set, rep and weight, on a review screen you check before it saves. Bench one three five for eight, then two sets of ten becomes three logged sets. No exercise picker between sets, and no reconstructing the session from memory that evening. Nothing else on this page does that at any price, free or paid.

The same subscription includes a coach that reads your logged history and picks the working weight for your next session, 873 exercises with step-by-step instructions and photos bundled into the app so they work with no signal, paste-in routine import that turns a coach's plan or a spreadsheet into training days, cloud backup, and a guest mode so you can start without handing over an email.

Worth knowing before you pay. There is no free tier underneath, so the app locks if you stop paying, although your logged workouts stay in cloud backup and return when you resubscribe. It is iPhone only, with no Android, iPad or Apple Watch version. There is no Apple Health sync, supersets are not grouped (a pairing goes in as a note), and voice logging needs a connection that a basement gym may not have.

If you are happy filling in a form between sets, the free tiers above do that job well and cost nothing. If that is the part you want to stop doing, this is the only app on the page that removes it.

How to pick

• You want the best all-round free tier: Hevy, until you need a fifth routine.
• You want to stop typing your sets and will pay for it: SayLift, $4.17 a month (billed $49.99 a year) after a 3-day trial. Nothing free does this.
• You want unlimited free history above all else: Strong, for the uncapped workout log.
• You want the cheapest way to remove every cap forever: Hevy at $74.99 once.
• You want the app to write your workouts: Fitbod, and accept it is a paid app.
• You are on Android: Hevy or Strong. SayLift is iPhone only.