Before building Torqe I spent months testing every major workout app on the market. Not skimming them — actually using them for my own training, logging real sessions, trying to get them to do what I needed. This is what I found.
The short version: most apps are charging monthly fees for features that dedicated lifters don't need and shouldn't waste time with. Strip away the noise and two apps stand above the rest on what actually matters — features, reliability, and price. But both of them get the single most important thing wrong.
What actually matters for progressive overload tracking.
Before ranking anything it helps to be clear about the criteria. A serious lifter doing progressive overload needs three things from an app. A place to load their program. A way to track targets and actuals for every set. A clear signal for when to increase weight.
Everything else — AI recommendations, social feeds, muscle heatmaps, animated exercise guides, nutrition integrations — is noise for this purpose. Useful for some people. A distraction for the lifter who walks in knowing exactly what they're doing and just needs the data tracked correctly.
The apps tested.
Over the course of testing: Hevy, Strong, RP Hypertrophy, Fitbod, MacroFactor, RepCount, JEFIT, FitNotes, Boostcamp, and several others. Here are the ones worth talking about.
The best free tier of any app tested. Clean interface, reliable logging, good social features if you want them, and a genuine commitment to not paywalling the core functionality. For a lifter who wants to log workouts without paying monthly, Hevy is the strongest starting point. The problem: it overwrites your target reps with your most recent actuals. Every session, your previous performance becomes the new baseline. There is no persistent target to work toward — just a rolling record of what you last did. For a lifter tracking progressive overload with a specific rep range, this is a fundamental design flaw that no amount of other features fixes.
The fastest, most friction-free logging experience of any app tested. Strong clearly understands that the moment of logging — mid-set, hands sweaty, under fatigue — needs to be as effortless as possible. The interface is genuinely excellent. The price is reasonable. And it has the same problem as Hevy: it overwrites the target with the actual. Your rep range goal doesn't persist. After every session, the app moves on and forgets what you were working toward. A lifter who needs to see their target reps alongside their actuals in real time has to maintain that information somewhere else, which defeats the purpose of the app entirely.
The most science-forward app in the category. Dr. Mike Israetel's methodology — MEV, MRV, mesocycle structure, deload automation — is genuinely valuable and not available in this form anywhere else. But at $25–35 a month with no free tier, a web-only interface, and a learning curve steep enough to discourage most intermediate lifters, it prices and complicates itself out of the market it should own. The science is right. The execution is not built for a person who wants to open an app, log a workout, and leave.
Fitbod generates workouts for you — which is useful if you don't have a program but not what a lifter who already knows what they're doing needs. Boostcamp has an impressive library of pre-built programs but limited custom planning. JEFIT has an enormous exercise database but an interface that prioritizes features over clarity. All three are charging monthly for functionality that serious progressive overload lifters won't use.
The problem nobody is solving.
Every app tracks what you lifted. None of them hold your target — and show it next to your actual — while you're lifting.
This sounds like a minor gap. In practice it forces every serious progressive overload lifter to maintain a parallel tracking system. A spreadsheet. A notes app. A piece of paper. Something that holds the number they're working toward so they know when they've earned the right to add weight.
The apps treat previous performance as the goal. Progressive overload lifters treat a specific target rep range as the goal. These are different things, and no existing app handles the distinction correctly.
When you hit your target reps across all your sets, you add weight. When you don't, you keep working at the same weight until you do. The app should show you that target alongside your actuals every single set, so you always know exactly where you stand. None of the apps tested do this.
How they compare on the things that matter.
| App | Free tier | Target reps persist | Target vs actual visible | Price/month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Torqe | ✓ Full | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | Free |
| Hevy | ✓ Good | ✗ Overwrites | ✗ No | $8.99 |
| Strong | ✗ Limited | ✗ Overwrites | ✗ No | $4.99 |
| RP Hypertrophy | ✗ None | ✓ Yes | ✗ Partial | $25–35 |
| Fitbod | ✗ 3 workouts | ✗ No | ✗ No | $15.99 |
| Boostcamp | ✓ Good | ✗ No | ✗ No | $7 |
Why I built Torqe.
After working through every app on this list I was still maintaining a spreadsheet alongside whichever app I was using at the time. The app tracked what I did. The spreadsheet held what I was working toward. It was clunky, easy to fall behind on, and the kind of friction that compounds into inconsistency over months.
I took a weekend and built something that did the one thing none of them did. Load your program, set your target weight, sets, and reps for each exercise, log your actuals during the session, and see both on the same screen. When you hit your targets across all sets, Torqe flags the exercise for a weight increase. You choose the increment. The new weight becomes the baseline and you work back up to your target reps again.
Hevy and Strong are genuinely good apps and I still recommend both over most of the field. If progressive overload tracking isn't your primary use case they are solid choices. But if you're a dedicated lifter who programs their own training and needs a persistent target to work toward — not just a record of what you last did — neither one solves the problem.
The only app that keeps your targets.
Set your target weight, sets, and reps. Log your actuals. See both on the same screen. Free, forever.
Download on the App Store → Free. No subscription. No ads. iOS — Android coming soon.