Stay Fit vs Hevy (2026): Free Alternative Comparison

Hevy did something smart at launch: it took Strong's minimal logging model, added a social feed, and made the free tier more generous than Strong's. For a while, that made it the obvious pick for anyone who'd slammed into Strong's 3-routine wall.

The generosity has limits, though. Give it a year or two of consistent training and you'll start bumping into the 7-custom-exercise cap or watching your analytics history get trimmed. Here's the honest comparison, not the app store pitch.

Price and the fine print on "free"

Hevy's free plan is real. You can log unlimited workouts forever. What it doesn't include: more than roughly 4 saved routines, more than 7 custom exercises, and full analytics history (trimmed to about 3 months). Hevy PRO removes those limits for $2.99–9.99/mo, $23.99/yr, or a $74.99 lifetime purchase.

Stay Fit skips this entirely. There's no PRO tier to grow into.

Hevy's web app and cross-platform reach are real advantages if you train from more than one device or want a browser view of your history. Stay Fit is Android-only for now, so if that flexibility matters more than the price, Hevy earns its keep.

The social feed: feature or distraction

Hevy's feed lets you follow other lifters, comment on their sessions, and share your own. For some people that's genuinely motivating. Public accountability works. For a lot of solo lifters, it's a tab they never open, sitting on top of an app they only wanted for logging.

Stay Fit doesn't build a feed at all. No profile to maintain, no audience to perform consistency for. Your streak lives on your home screen, visible to you, and that's it.

Where the free-tier caps actually bite

The 4-routine limit sounds generous until you're running push/pull/legs with separate deload variants, or coaching yourself through multiple training blocks a year. Add a program change and you're deleting an old routine to make room, or paying.

The bigger issue is the ~3-month analytics window. Progressive overload tracking gets more useful the longer your history runs. A 3-month trim means you can't compare this January to last January without upgrading. That's rough if you've been training consistently and just want to see the trend.

Stay Fit's reports run on your full history from day one: weekly, monthly, and longer-period overviews, muscle-balance insights, and a year-long heatmap, all included at no cost.

Hevy Trainer and AI programming

Hevy has been building out Hevy Trainer, an algorithm-based programming feature, as a differentiator from Strong. It's a real feature, but it sits behind the paid tier. Free users are still logging manually or following their own routines, same as with Stay Fit.

If AI-generated programming is what you actually want, that's a different comparison entirely (see Fitbod), not a reason to pick Hevy over Stay Fit specifically.

Who should pick Hevy

You want the social feed, you need a web dashboard, or you train across iOS, Android, and Apple Watch and want one account tying it together. The free tier works for casual use. PRO makes sense once you outgrow it.

Who should pick Stay Fit

You're on Android, you want unlimited routines and full analytics history, and you were never going to scroll a social feed between sets anyway. Goal tracking included, no ceiling.