Compound vs Hevy: a feed, or a number that went up

Hevy is a workout logger with a social layer built in: an account, a profile, followers, and a feed of other people's sessions. Compound is the opposite bet: no account, no feed, no leaderboard, no streak badge. Use Hevy if training in front of other people is what gets you to the gym. Use Compound if you would rather nobody was watching and the only comparison that matters is the bar four weeks ago.

What is Hevy?

Hevy is a workout tracker for iOS and Android, free to start, built around logging sets and sharing them. The logging half is genuinely strong: previous-workout values filled in automatically, rest timers, a plate calculator, live personal record notifications, and a routine builder backed by a library of 26 pre-built training programs across three experience levels, plus HevyGPT, a ChatGPT integration that generates a program from a prompt and imports it straight into your Hevy profile.

The social half is the point of difference. You follow other lifters and see their sessions in a Home feed, complete with training volume and personal records. A Discover feed surfaces workouts from people you do not follow. You can like and comment on a session, and leaderboards rank your best lift on 38 exercises against your friends. A profile shows a bio, follower and following counts, a week-to-week activity graph, and uploaded photos and videos, and a finished workout can auto-post to Strava.

Hevy's free tier covers logging without a time limit. A paid Pro tier, listed in the App Store on August 22, 2026 at $2.99 a month, $23.99 a year, or $74.99 for a lifetime unlock, removes caps on routines and custom exercises and extends how far back your analytics history goes. Pricing varies by region and by store, and changes over time on both apps.

Does social accountability actually help people keep training?

Yes, for a lot of people, and it is one of the better-documented levers in exercise psychology. A 1993 study following adult exercisers found that social support predicted both exercise adherence and the efficacy beliefs that sustain it over time, tracked with a growth-curve model rather than a single snapshot. A 1995 study of women and men ages 50 to 65 found that social support, specifically the kind aimed at the exercise itself rather than general encouragement, was one of the stronger predictors of who kept training and who dropped off.

This is the honest case for Hevy. A follower who notices you skipped three sessions, or a leaderboard that shows your bench slipping behind a training partner's, is a real mechanism, not a gimmick. If that mechanism is what gets you back to the gym on a bad week, an app built to surface it is doing its job.

Does comparing your training to other people ever backfire?

Sometimes. The research on social comparison in fitness apps is mixed, not settled. A 2023 study of fitness app users found that both upward comparison, measuring yourself against someone ahead of you, and downward comparison shape body satisfaction, but the direction and strength depend on the user's gender and the size of their social network, not on the app. A second 2023 study found that upward comparison on a fitness app shapes overall wellbeing, and that people with higher self-control experience it more positively than people with lower self-control, who are more likely to come away discouraged.

Put plainly: the same feed that motivates one person to add five pounds this week can leave another person feeling behind before they have racked a single plate. Neither finding cancels the other. Social accountability works, on average, and it does not work the same way for everyone it touches.

What does an account cost that Compound doesn't have?

A server, and a copy of your training data on it. A feed only works if Hevy's servers hold everyone's sessions, which means an account to attach them to. Hevy's own privacy policy describes a registration flow that collects your first name, username, gender, date of birth, email address, password, and general activity data, processed at the company's operating offices and wherever its service providers are located. None of that is a criticism. It is what a social product requires: for your training to show up in a friend's feed, it has to leave your phone.

Compound made the opposite architectural choice, and it costs something too. Training history is a JSON file in Application Support on the device, with no server and no login, so there is nothing to sign into and nothing for anyone else to see. The cost runs the other way: no web dashboard, no cross-device sync beyond a paired Apple Watch, and no way to recover your history if you lose the phone without a backup of your own. A private record on one device is exactly as durable as that device.

What does Compound show you instead of a feed?

Your own numbers, going nowhere. The Progress screen tracks four main lifts, bench press, back squat, deadlift, and overhead press, each showing the weight gained since your first session as a staircase you can see climb. Above the lifts sits a consistency dial, a score from 0 to 100 built from the days you actually trained: it climbs fast, forgives a short break, and only bleeds points once you have gone well past a normal rest day. A home screen widget and Apple Watch complication show which of the four days is next, a small daily nudge with nothing to compare and nobody to post it to.

None of it is a substitute for a follower noticing you were gone. It is a different bet entirely: that the number on the bar, checked against your own history and nobody else's, is enough of a reason to come back.

How do the two apps compare on design?

On opposite sides of nearly every decision: Compound fixes what Hevy leaves open, and Hevy shares what Compound keeps private.

Who should use Hevy instead?

Anyone whose motivation is social. If you train with friends and want to see their sessions, if a leaderboard genuinely gets you to add a rep you would otherwise have skipped, or if you want a public record of your training rather than a private one, Hevy is built for exactly that, and it does it well. Community is one of the better-evidenced tools in exercise adherence, and an app that takes it seriously is not a lesser choice. It is a different one.

What does Compound do about motivation?

It bets on your own numbers instead of anyone else's. Every lift on the Progress screen shows what it has gained since you started, the consistency dial only ever answers to you, and nothing about either one is built to be posted. Compound is a worse app for anyone whose motivation is social, and it is not trying to be a better one. It is trying to be the app for the person who wants the bar heavier than it was last month and does not need an audience to get there.