Hevy and Strong are the two gym trackers most lifters end up choosing between, and both are genuinely good at the job they were built for. They are also more different than their feature lists suggest. One is a training network with a logger attached; the other is a deliberately quiet logger that tries to get out of your way. Which suits you depends less on feature count than on whether you want other people inside your training app at all.

Below is an honest comparison of both, based on what each product currently says about itself, followed by the one thing neither of them does — which starts to matter more than anything on either feature list once you are past your first year under the bar.

The short answer

• Pick Hevy if you train on Android, want to open your log in a browser, or want the social layer — following friends, copying their routines, commenting on sessions.

• Pick Strong if you want a minimal iPhone logger with no feed in it, and you use the plate and warm-up calculators enough to care that they are built in.

• Pick neither if your actual problem is not recording what you lifted but deciding what to lift next. Both apps hand that decision back to you by design.

What Hevy does well

Hevy calls itself a free workout tracker for iOS and Android, and the cross-platform reach is its clearest structural advantage. Your log follows you to an Android phone, a WearOS or Apple Watch, and a desktop browser. If you have ever switched phone ecosystems mid-training-block, that alone can decide it.

The logging itself is fast and well-considered. You can mark sets as warm-up, drop or failure sets rather than having every entry count the same, rest timers start automatically, and each exercise carries notes, charts, personal records and a one-rep-max estimate. The exercise library ships with instructional videos and you can add your own movements.

The social layer is the part people either love or ignore entirely. You can follow other lifters, see their sessions, like and comment, and save their routines straight into your own plan. For a lot of people that is the accountability mechanism that keeps them showing up. For others it is a feed they have to scroll past to start a set.

What Strong does well

Strong's tagline is "Think less. Lift more.", and the app is built around that. There is no feed. You open it, you log, you leave. For lifters who find social features a distraction during a session, that restraint is the whole appeal.

Underneath the minimalism is a surprisingly deep feature set: supersets and grouped exercises, custom exercises, a warm-up calculator and a plate calculator, RPE logging, a muscle heat map, workout scheduling, body measurements that sync with Apple Health, advanced charts covering volume and estimated one-rep-max progression, custom rest timers, Siri shortcuts, and CSV export. There is an Apple Watch companion app that can log a session on its own.

The RPE field is worth calling out, because it is the one autoregulation hook either app gives you. If you already train by rating of perceived exertion, Strong will store that number next to the set, which is more than most loggers do.

Free tiers, and what the money actually buys

Both apps are usable for free, but they draw the line in different places.

Strong lets you log unlimited workouts on the free tier and caps you at three custom routines. Strong PRO removes the routine limit and adds its premium analytics. If you run one upper/lower split and nothing else, you may never hit the ceiling.

Hevy is more generous with the core logging and puts the caps on breadth and depth instead: the free tier limits how many routines you can keep, how many custom exercises you can create, and how far back your graphs reach. Hevy Pro removes all three and adds more detailed measurement tracking. The exact numbers have moved over time, so check Hevy's own site rather than any figure you read in an article, including this one.

On price, Hevy Pro is the cheaper of the two — at the time of writing its App Store listing showed roughly three dollars a month or twenty-four dollars a year, against Strong PRO at around five dollars a month or thirty a year. Both offer a lifetime purchase. Both change their pricing, so treat the Hevy App Store listing and the Strong App Store listing as the source of truth.

The gap they share

Here is the honest part, and it applies to both equally.

Hevy and Strong are records. They are very good records. But neither one decides anything for you. Hevy's own writing on progressive overload is refreshingly clear about this: the app surfaces your previous performance during the session so that you know what you are trying to beat, and then you aim to exceed it, even slightly. The judgement is yours. Strong makes no auto-progression claim on its site either.

That is a legitimate design choice, not a defect. Plenty of people want a notebook and nothing more, and a notebook that never nags is better than a coach you resent. But the choice has a cost, and the cost grows as your training gets less obvious.

What deciding for yourself actually costs

Say you benched 3 sets of 8 at 70 kg (154 lb) on Monday. Your log shows you that cleanly. Next Monday, what do you do?

The reasonable options are: repeat 70 kg and chase 9 or 10 reps, or jump to 72.5 kg and accept that the reps drop back to 6 or 7. Both are defensible. Now do that same calculation for the other five exercises in the session, on a Tuesday evening, ninety seconds into a rest period, having not slept well.

What most people actually do is type in the same numbers as last week. Not because they are lazy — because the log presented last week's numbers and no reason to change them. Then the third week the sets read 8, 8, 7, and now there is a second question: is that a stall, or is that one bad night? A record can show you the reps. It cannot tell you which of those two it was, and it will not tell you that this is the third session in a row where you came up short and the load should probably come down for a week.

In the first year of training, none of this matters, because adding 2.5 kg every week works and the decision makes itself. In the third year, this is the training problem.

How to choose

1. Are you on Android, or do you want a web log? Hevy. This is a hard constraint and it settles the question.

2. Do you want other lifters in the app? Yes, Hevy. No, Strong.

3. Do you run more than three routines? Strong's free tier will stop you; budget for PRO or use Hevy.

4. Do you log RPE per set already? Strong has a field for it.

5. Is your real complaint that you do not know what to load next? Neither app is aimed at that, and no amount of charting will fix it.

If you are still genuinely torn after those five, it does not matter much. Both are well-built, both export your data, and switching later is not expensive.

Where Hefty fits

Hefty is a progressive-overload tracker for iPhone built around the decision the other two leave to you. It logs your sessions like any tracker, but every set arrives pre-filled with a weight and a rep target, plus one line explaining why it changed.

The rules are the ordinary, well-documented ones, applied consistently so you do not have to hold them in your head mid-session. Clear the top of your rep range on every working set and the load goes up — 5% on compound lifts, 2.5% on isolation work, rounded to the plates you actually have. Land inside the range and it keeps the load and asks for more reps. Come up short three sessions in a row on the same lift and it drops that lift 10% rather than letting you grind. Before the session you answer one question about how you feel, and Recover re-plans the whole routine at 90% load and fewer sets — and deliberately does not count that session against your progression, so an easy day never costs you your place.

Two practical notes if you are coming from either app above. Hefty reads CSV exports from both Hevy and Strong, so your history comes with you. And it exports back out as a zip of CSVs in the same column layout Hevy uses, so leaving is as easy as arriving. One caveat worth stating plainly: Hefty is iPhone-only. If you are on Android, Hevy is the right answer and this paragraph is not for you.

If the decision — not the record — is the part of training you have been guessing at, have a look at what Hefty prescribes and see whether it matches what you would have chosen. If you try it and something is wrong, tell us what it got wrong.