Stronger wrote a comparison page about RepCount. Here's my reply.
Stronger have a page comparing their app to RepCount. If you've landed here from it, hello.
On the surface it looks correct. They list most of our features accurately, they know we're native on both iOS and Android, and they don't invent things we can't do. I'd rather engage with it than complain about it.
What I want to argue with is underneath the table. Nearly everything it scores us on is something you aren't allowed to check.
Look at where the page says they win, though. Their table marks five wins for Stronger, and three of them are the same win. The Strength Score. Weak-point feedback, which is the Strength Score broken down by muscle. Friend challenges and leaderboards, which need a comparable number to rank anybody by.
It's worth knowing what those three rows cost, too. The Strength Score is a premium feature: their own FAQ lists it first under what the 7-day trial unlocks, and what you keep afterwards is the tracker without it. So the ranking is paid, the weak-point call built on the ranking is paid, and the leaderboard is paid at both ends. To race a training partner you both subscribe, and you're both on the same app to begin with. The pool you're ranked in isn't lifters. It's subscribers who chose this app.
So three of five rows rest on one number, and the number is behind the paywall. Most of the comparison depends on whether that number is worth having, and the page never asks.
The other two rows are real, and unalike. Adaptive routines adjust to how your recent sessions went; we don't do that, and I'll come back to why, because the reason has nothing to do with the score. The last is daily insights and post-workout summaries, and that cross is half wrong. RepCount builds a summary card from a workout, your exercises, sets and reps, sized for a story, that you can save or share. We just don't put it in front of you the moment you rack the bar. As for daily insights, I went looking and couldn't work out what they are: the phrase appears twice on that page and nowhere on their homepage or in their App Store description.
Ours is the opposite bet. We go deeper than most on charts, personal record tracking across every rep range, and estimated 1RM against your bodyweight. What we don't do is tell you what those numbers say about you next to everyone else. To be fair to them on this, they don't claim we have no analytics. Their table marks ours "legit (Premium)" and the page says outright that anyone telling you RepCount has no analytics is wrong. It's only in the little pricing card that it shrinks to "Charts, supersets, CSV." I'd rather argue with the page they wrote than the card.
The score
Here's where we actually disagree, and it isn't about features.
Their Strength Score takes what you lift, adjusts for bodyweight, sex and training age, and places you on a scale from beginner to world class. It's built carefully. It's also genuinely nice to look at, which is not nothing.
Mark Rippetoe published strength standards tables like these. Then he took them down and wrote about why. On where they came from:
"The idea for the strength tables we posted was an early attempt to create interest in the website. I wrote the tables based on my personal experience with training a lot of people over the years, but they were not based on any data I had formally gathered. But damned if they weren't popular. For some reason, people love to compare their numbers."
And on whether they help:
"The problem with strength tables is not their accuracy... The problem is that they don't matter. They have no bearing on your training, since your goal is to get as strong as you can, not as strong as somebody else got."
There's a genealogy here that I only found because I went looking. Stronger's standards guide cites Strength Level. Strength Level's about page says Michael Clark built it in 2007 starting from strength standards provided by Lon Kilgore and published by ExRx, which in turn drew on Practical Programming and Starting Strength. Kilgore wrote both of those with Rippetoe. So the lineage runs through his work, even if the idea was never his alone.
It doesn't stay there, though, and this is the part I want to be fair about. Strength Level replaced those formulas in 2015 with regression models fitted to community lifts, and their current standards cover 287 exercises drawn from over 195 million lifts by nearly 28 million people. Whatever you think of the concept, those numbers are not somebody's recollection of the lifters he coached. They are enormously better evidenced than anything Rippetoe published.
Which is exactly why I keep coming back to that second quote. His objection was never that the tables were wrong. Make the dataset a hundred thousand times bigger and the objection is untouched, because it was never about accuracy. A precise number telling you where you sit among strangers still doesn't tell you what to do on Tuesday.
That's my problem with a Strength Score. Not that it's inaccurate. That it answers a question I don't think is the useful one.
One more thing, and it's the bit I'd want to know as a user. Strength standards are per exercise. Strength Level publishes a bench table, a squat table, a deadlift table. Stronger's score isn't per exercise: it's per muscle group, and then one number overall. Getting from the first to the second means deciding which lifts count toward which muscle and how much each one counts, and that step isn't published anywhere I can find.
Their own FAQ draws the line pretty clearly. The public tables are "educational benchmark snapshots based on external public datasets." The Strength Score is "a proprietary metric."
I don't think there's anything sinister in that. Every app has something proprietary and we're no different. But it's worth noticing that the part you can check isn't the part the app runs on, and that the advice you get out of it, train your back first, comes from the part you can't.
The routines are the same story. Their App Store listing says "AI recommendations to optimise your training." Their site says a generated plan "adjusts as you get stronger." Their blog says it adjusts weights, sets and reps "based on how your recent sessions actually went." That's intent, not a rule. Nothing published tells you what happens when you miss a rep, when it adds weight, or when it decides to back off.
I'm not saying it doesn't work. I'm saying you can't tell, and neither can I.
So set the social side aside and look at what's left of their column. The score is proprietary. The weak-point call comes out of the score. The routines are described as AI, with no rule published. They might all be very good. Not one of them can be checked.
Here's my bias, stated plainly, because you should know it before you weigh anything else I've said. I wouldn't hand my training over to a number whose formula I can't see.
That isn't an argument against programs deciding things for you. Deciding for you is what a program is for. 5/3/1 tells you exactly what to add and when. Starting Strength tells you what to do the day you stall. MadCow lays out the whole week. Those are strong opinions handed to a lifter, and they work, and I've run them myself. The difference is that you can read the rule on a page, disagree with it, and know precisely what it will do to you next Tuesday.
"AI recommendations to optimise your training" is not that. Neither is a score you're ranked by without being told how it's worked out. The line for me isn't how much the app decides. It's whether you can see why.
I could be wrong about this. Plenty of people are genuinely driven by a number going up against other people, and if that's you, you'll know, and you should use their app. I'm not being coy about that. It's a real reason to pick them.
The watch row
One more thing about how the page is built. Their table gives RepCount a cross for Apple Watch and Wear OS logging, and gives Stronger "Inconsistent — see below." Read the note underneath and it says their own watch support has been inconsistent and they're fixing it.
If you're fixing it, you don't have it. Neither app has a watch app today. One of us gets a cross for that and the other gets a footnote.
There's a knock-on effect too. That row is where the phrase "iPhone only" appears, and their page uses "Only for iPhone" twice more nearby. It's accurate in context, since it's Apple's own compatibility label meaning there's no Watch app. But sitting in a comparison table it reads like a statement about which phones RepCount runs on. RepCount has been on Android for years, built natively in Kotlin, and their page says so elsewhere. If you skimmed the table and came away thinking otherwise, that's why.
What each of us charges for
We're cheaper. $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year against $9.99 a month or from $39.99 a year, and their annual shows up at four different figures depending on where you look, which they acknowledge themselves. They do keep a free tier after the trial, narrower than ours.
But their page says something about price that I think is right, and it's the sharpest line on it: "Yes, RepCount is cheaper. No, that's not the question." Being cheaper isn't an argument for anything on its own. I'd rather win on what you get without paying at all.
Our analysis is premium. So is theirs. The Strength Score, the muscle map, the adaptive routines: all on their own list of what the trial unlocks. Neither of us gives away the part we spent years building, and I'd be wary of anyone in this category who claims otherwise.
Which is where we differ. Our free tier is a complete logger and stays one: unlimited workouts, unlimited routines, unlimited custom exercises, no ads, no trial clock. Most of our users never pay us anything, and that's fine. Theirs is a tracker without the number the app is built around.
And you can look before you decide either way. Premium has a free trial on our side too, so if you want to see what the charts actually tell you before paying for them, you can.
So
If you want your lifts compared to other people's through a number whose formula nobody will show you, Stronger does that, and the muscle map looks good doing it. If you want your progression decided for you by an algorithm they won't publish, that's them too. Both of those are real products and some people want them, and I've said so throughout.
Here's my pitch instead.
A fast, clean interface that gets out of the way while you train. Your last session sitting right there when you start the exercise, so you always know the number to beat, which is the whole of progressive overload and most of what a tracker is for. And when you do want to zoom out, analytics that go properly deep: estimated 1RM over time, your strength relative to your own bodyweight, personal records at every rep range rather than just your single, volume and frequency cut however you like.
No ranking. No verdict. Your numbers, and enough of them to see what's actually happening.
Because that's what strength training is. You, making progress. Not a position relative to people who train differently, eat differently, sleep differently and started somewhere else entirely. The number that matters is the one you lifted last time, and whether you can beat it today.