By Orion Voss

Updated 2026-09-27

Best Heart Rate App for iPhone (2026): Five Picks, Compared

Almost every “heart rate app” for iPhone is really one of four different products wearing the same name. Below: how to tell which kind you need, then the five apps worth installing, what each costs and where each stops.

70 BPM · Free heart rate app for iPhone

70 BPM: see what caused every heart rate spike

70 BPM lays your Apple Health heart rate over your calendar, so every spike has a name: the standup, the client call, the commute home.

Heart rate on your calendar Reads Apple Health No account, no upload Free to download, no subscription iPhone, iOS 18 or later

Free to download · Optional Pro in-app purchases · Reads from Apple Health · Stays on your iPhone

First, which kind of heart rate app do you need?

• Measuring apps take a spot reading, usually by pressing a fingertip to the camera lens. Useful if you have no wearable. Accuracy varies considerably with lighting and how still you hold your hand.
• Tracking and monitoring apps read the history Apple Health already holds and present trends, resting rates and alerts. These need a watch or other source feeding Health.
• Training apps use heart rate zones to guide exercise intensity and recovery. Built around workouts, not daily life.
• Contextualising apps take the same Health data and place it against something else — your calendar, your sleep — so you can see what coincided with what.

Confusion between these is the most common source of disappointment. A training app will not help you understand your working day, and a calendar-overlay app is useless for interval training.

1. Heart Analyzer — the best general heart rate tracker

Free with an optional subscription, 4.7 stars from nearly 22,000 ratings, iOS 17.5 or later, iPhone, iPad and Watch. Turns your Apple Health heart data into charts, reports and widgets, and is the closest thing here to a complete heart dashboard. Best for: most people who just want more than Apple Health shows. Limitation: the deeper analysis is behind a subscription.

2. HeartWatch — best if you refuse subscriptions

$8.99 once, 4.7 stars from over 13,600 ratings, iOS 11 or later. Tracks heart rate across waking, sleeping and workout states, with a Watch app that alerts you to hold a target zone. Paid once, no recurring cost. Best for: long-term tracking without a subscription. Limitation: no iPad app.

3. Welltory — best for depth

Free with a subscription, 4.7 stars from over 132,000 ratings, iOS 16 or later. The most established app in this space by a wide margin, built around heart-rate variability and correlating stress against sleep, work and workouts. Best for: people who want the most analysis available and will invest time learning to read it. Limitation: subscription, and a real learning curve — covered in more detail in our Welltory app review.

4. Zones for Training — best for workouts

Free, 4.8 stars from over 19,000 ratings, iOS 17.6 or later. Reads Apple Health workouts and shows intensity by zone. Best for: training rather than general health tracking. Limitation: built around workouts, so it has little to say about the other twenty-three hours — see the zone app comparison.

5. 70 BPM — best free app for knowing what caused a reading

Free to download with optional Pro in-app purchases, no subscription, iOS 18, iPhone only. Reads the heart-rate history Apple Health already holds and draws it against your actual calendar events, so a spike arrives labelled with the meeting or block it happened during. Nothing leaves the device — no account, no upload. Best for: answering “what was that?” rather than “how fit am I?”

Limitations: it measures nothing itself, so a watch or other source must be writing to Apple Health. No Apple Watch app. No zones, no HRV scoring, no recovery number. Requires iOS 18. And it is new — a handful of ratings against competitors with tens of thousands, which is a fair reason to weigh it carefully against the field.

Heart rate app comparison

Prices, ratings and OS requirements taken from each app’s App Store listing on 26 August 2026, and they change. This is a comparison built from published information and product capability, not a hands-on long-term test of every app — verify anything decision-critical on the listing itself.

Which one

• Want more than Apple Health, nothing specific: Heart Analyzer.
• Want a free heart rate app with no subscription: Zones for Training for workouts, 70 BPM, the free heart rate app for everyday context.
• Hate subscriptions but will pay once: HeartWatch.
• Want serious analysis: Welltory, or one of the Welltory alternatives if the subscription puts you off.
• Never want health data leaving your phone: 70 BPM.
• No wearable at all: a camera-based measuring app, for occasional resting spot checks only.

What accuracy actually looks like

Wrist optical sensors are good at rest and less reliable during movement, particularly activities involving wrist flexion or grip. Fit matters enormously — a loose band produces missing or erratic readings.

Camera-based fingertip measurement is workable for a resting spot check and poor for anything else. Lighting, hand steadiness and skin contact all affect it.

Chest straps remain the most accurate consumer option for exercise, measuring electrical activity rather than optical blood flow.

Across all of them: treat trends as informative and individual absolute numbers as approximate.

Heart rate app review checklist: what to check before installing

• Where does the data go? Read the App Store privacy label, or run the two-minute checks in heart rate app that does not upload to the cloud.
• Does it need write access to Health? A viewer does not. Requesting write permission it does not need is a small red flag.
• Is the useful part behind a subscription? Common in this category. Check before importing anything.
• Does it overstate what it knows? Apps producing a confident single “stress score” from heart rate alone are overreaching — pulse rises from caffeine, posture, temperature and excitement as readily as from stress.
• Does it show sampling gaps honestly? Apple Watch samples periodically outside workouts. An app drawing a smooth line across a twenty-minute gap is showing you interpolation, not measurement.

Frequently asked questions