Stay Fit vs FitNotes: Modern Free Tracker Comparison

FitNotes has been a fixture of the free-Android-fitness-app category for years — it predates most of the current wave of minimalist loggers and has the mature exercise database to show for it. It's also ad-supported, which is the one place it and Stay Fit genuinely differ on cost, even though both are $0.

Price: free vs free-with-ads

Both apps cost nothing to use, permanently. The difference is how each funds that. FitNotes runs banner ads throughout the app — a small but constant interruption in exchange for a fully unlocked feature set. Stay Fit runs no ads anywhere, funded instead by not needing server infrastructure that a subscription or ad revenue would otherwise pay for.

What FitNotes does well that Stay Fit doesn't beat

FitNotes has a genuinely mature exercise database built up over years of user contributions, and its charting, while basic compared to Stay Fit's Reports tab, has been reliable for a long time. If you've been using it since 2018 and your entire routine history lives there, that continuity has real value that a newer app can't manufacture just by having more features.

Where Stay Fit goes further

Stay Fit's feature set extends past logging into the things that keep people training consistently: a streak that distinguishes a real skip from a planned rest day, body measurements across 9 tracked types, on-device progress photos, and goal tracking for weight and weekly frequency. None of that exists in FitNotes today. If your use of a tracker has grown past "log sets and reps," this is the practical gap between the two.

The ads question, honestly

FitNotes' ads are not aggressive — banner-level, not full-screen interstitials between sets — but they're there on every screen, permanently, because that's what funds continued free access. Stay Fit's ad-free model works because offline-first, on-device storage removes the ongoing server cost an ad or subscription would otherwise need to cover. Neither approach is dishonest; they're just different trades for the same $0 price tag.