There is no best workout tracker. There are seven apps that each answer a different question, and the right choice depends on which one is yours.
Before anything else: I build REPWIND, one of the seven. I am saying so here rather than in a footnote, and I am ranking it last. A list where the author comes first is worth nothing, and you would know it before the end of the second paragraph.
Each app is here for one thing it does better than the others, not for an overall score that would mean nothing. Each one also carries its limitation, ours included. No link on this page is paid for, and none of these apps contacted me.
No account, no noise, nothing to configure. Open it, log the set, close it. FitNotes has done that for years without ever selling anything, and plenty of lifters have never needed more. It is the default choice if the app should do exactly one thing: replace the paper notebook.
Its limitation : Nothing beyond the log. No programming, no analysis, no adaptation.
Three taps per set, a rest timer that starts itself, an interface that surprises nobody. Strong is mature and proven. If the only thing that matters is not losing time between sets, it is the yardstick the others are measured against.
Its limitation : It stops at the number: tracking stays a list and a few charts.
The free tier is a complete logbook — unlimited routines, full history, progression charts — which is rare and worth saying plainly. On top of it sits a real social feed: for a lot of people, seeing their friends train is what gets them back to the gym. Nobody else has that at this scale.
Its limitation : The feed is also what can weigh on you: if comparing yourself to others discourages you, it is a flaw rather than a feature.
Thousands of shared routines and an exercise library no newcomer will catch up with for years. If you want a program already written by somebody else rather than building your own, this is where there is the most of it.
Its limitation : Abundance has a cost: you have to sort through it, and shared routines vary in quality.
Strength programs written by named coaches, followed week after week with nothing improvised. That is a different use of a logbook: you do not record what you did, you execute what was planned. Done cleanly, and it is what a lot of people need.
Its limitation : It assumes your week does not move. A missed session breaks the program's logic.
Fitbod builds today's session from your equipment, your history and your recovery. Walking into the gym with nothing to decide is a real comfort, and this is the app that has done it longest.
Its limitation : It decides without always explaining why, and the model rests on a subscription.
This one is ours, and it comes last — see below for why. Every exercise plays as a real lift instead of a frozen thumbnail, worked muscles lit up, and the session resolves into an anatomical map: primary in red, secondary in orange. The question stops being how much you lifted and becomes what you actually loaded. Bar-path analysis runs on the phone; the video never leaves it.
Its limitation : New, Android only, with no community and none of the thousands of shared routines the two above have.
Because it is the newest, it exists only on Android, and it has neither Hevy's community nor Jefit's library. On the logbook job itself — log fast, find a history, follow a progression — the other six are years ahead, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. REPWIND only earns a place if the question you care about is the one none of the six asks: not how much you lifted, but what your body actually took.
Each app above has its own comparison page, with a section on what the other one does better: FitNotes · Strong · Hevy · Jefit · Boostcamp · Fitbod
And to see what the anatomical map means: the ten muscle groups on this site use exactly the plate the app draws.
The journal, the anatomical map and all 257 catalogue exercises — free to start.