Comparison

Personal Bests vs RunBests

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Personal Bests

This app analyzes your workout history from Apple Health to find your fastest segments of any distance. It ranks these personal bests across all your activities and timeframes, offering detailed insights and flexible tracking for athletes focused on performance.

Highlights
  • Finds fastest segments of any distance
  • Works across running, cycling, swimming, rowing
  • Segments can be anywhere within a workout
  • Customizable segment lengths
  • Rankings across all timeframes
  • Detailed segment analysis and export
  • Syncs via iCloud
Read full description

Personal Bests finds the fastest efforts hidden inside your workouts and awards you medals for them, with nobody to compete against but yourself. Your fastest 5K might be kilometers 7 to 12 of a half marathon. Your best mile might be buried in the middle of a long run. Personal Bests looks inside every workout in Apple Health, finds your fastest segment for every distance you care about, and ranks it against your whole history. Just You vs. You Personal Bests isn't a social network. There's no feed, no followers, no leaderboard of strangers and no challenges telling you to go faster. You earn gold, silver and bronze for real work, and the only person you're up against is you. Your Game, Your Rules • Choose the distances that count: 400 m, 5K, 10 miles, a marathon or anything else, for every sport. • Choose what you're compared against: all-time, the past year, or any window of days, weeks, months or years. • Coming back from an injury or a break? Rank against the last three months instead of your all-time best. • Keep the medals you've earned, even after you beat them, or let them move on. • Rank indoor and outdoor workouts separately, so a treadmill run isn't compared with a trail run. Find Your Fastest Efforts • Segments can start and end anywhere in a workout, not just at the start. • Running, cycling, swimming, rowing, paddling, walking, cross-country skiing and more. • Your whole Apple Health history, from Apple Watch, iPhone and other apps. • New workouts are analyzed automatically, even in the background. See Where You Were Fastest • On iPhone, your fastest segments are drawn on the route, each in its own color. • Leaderboards for your fastest times, longest workouts and farthest distances. • A short written summary of any workout, using Apple Intelligence where it's available. Keep Bad Data Off the Podium • Forgot to stop your watch on the train? Segments that are too fast to be true for you are flagged, judged against your own history. • Crop a workout to the part you actually did, or remove GPS spikes with one tap. • Your Health data is never changed. Celebrate Your Progress • Get a notification when a new workout earns a medal. • "While you were away": a recap of your new medals and training when you come back to the app. • Rankings and Recent Bests widgets for the Home Screen and Lock Screen. On iPhone, iPad & Mac • Your iPhone reads Apple Health and does the analysis. • iPad and Mac show your workouts, rankings and medals, with the list and details side by side. Private by Design • No account, no ads, no tracking. • Analysis runs on your device. • Syncs only through your own iCloud, and you can switch that off. • Read-only access to Apple Health. Make It Yours • Three app icons and three themes. Personal Bests is for anyone who loves earning medals but doesn't need to race strangers for them: runners tracking PRs from 400 m to the marathon, cyclists comparing their best 40K across seasons, swimmers, rowers, and everyone who has ever wondered, "When was I actually at my fastest?"

About

RunBests

Features
Read full description

Run Bests finds your personal best running times in Apple Health. Runs rarely end at exactly the same distance. Set the distances you care about and choose a margin to group comparable workouts. A 5-mile target with a 0.25-mile margin includes runs from 5.0 through 5.25 miles. COMPARE TIMES CLEARLY Workout time covers the full run and uses the duration reported by Health. Race time estimates how long it took to reach your target distance from the start. Both exclude pauses. Each has its own pace, and the workout detail explains which time you are viewing. FIND YOUR FASTEST SEGMENTS See your fastest continuous 1 mile, 1 km, or custom distance anywhere within a run. Segment estimates use Health's recorded distance samples when available, with GPS as a labeled fallback. A best segment can start between the fixed split markers shown in Fitness. CUSTOMIZE YOUR RECORDS Choose distances in miles or kilometers, set a distance margin, and enable half marathon, marathon, longest run, longest workout time, and fastest average pace records. FOLLOW YOUR PROGRESS Filter by all time, a recent period, a calendar year, or a custom date range. View the top 20 in each category and sort qualifying runs by race time, race pace, workout time, or workout pace. Workout sorts include runs without usable race timing. EXPLORE EACH RUN Open a workout to see its timing, distance, route map, heart rate, elevation, energy, and weather when those details are available in Health. YOUR DATA STAYS UNDER YOUR CONTROL Run Bests reads running workouts from Apple Health and keeps a local cache on your device. No account, advertising, tracking, or developer-operated server. Run Bests does not write to Health. Requires running workouts in Apple Health. Race and segment estimates depend on the distance and timing data recorded with each workout.

Screenshots

Personal Bests4 screens
RunBests4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is update cadence: RunBests at every 2 weeks against Personal Bests's every 4 months. RunBests also leads on iOS requirement (17.0 vs 26.0). Personal Bests's advantage is device support (3 vs 1). On price, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Personal Bests ships an update every 4 months, RunBests every 2 weeks. The most recent releases landed on October 15, 2026 and September 26, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard3 real differences · 7 level
Personal Bests versus RunBests: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterPersonal BestsRunBests
PriceFreeFree
Rating5.0 (2 ratings) — better—
Positive reviews100.0% of reviews—
Number of ratings2 — better—
Update frequencyEvery 4 monthsEvery 2 weeks — better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
MonetizationFree—
DevicesiPhone, iPad, Mac — betteriPhone
Requires iOS26.017.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size25 MB1 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperMarkus KettnerJohn Bergmayer

In-app purchases

None

Personal Bests

No in-app purchases

None

RunBests

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Personal Bests free?
Personal Bests is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is RunBests free?
RunBests is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Personal Bests or RunBests have ads?
Neither Personal Bests nor RunBests shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Personal Bests or RunBests?
Personal Bests ships an update every 4 months, and RunBests every 2 weeks. Most recently, Personal Bests was updated on October 15, 2026 and RunBests on September 26, 2026.

Other comparisons