Comparison

Personal Bests vs PaceBuddy

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

PaceBuddy

This app acts as a personal running coach, allowing you to race against your past performances on familiar routes. It provides real-time feedback on your pace and distance, with advanced features for accurate tracking on varied terrain and integration with smartwatches.

Highlights
  • Race against past runs or personal bests
  • Live ahead/behind pace feedback
  • Falling-behind alerts (vibration, beep, spoken)
  • Accurate distance and elevation tracking
  • Calorie calculation with climbing cost
  • Apple Watch standalone workouts
Features
Read full description

Everyone has a route they do over and over — the same loop, the same hill, the same trail. PaceBuddy is built on one idea: on that route, the only pace worth chasing is your own. It replays your last run beside you, second by second, and tells you whether you're ahead or behind and by how far. Race your last attempt, or your best. RACE YOURSELF, NOT A STRANGER • Live ahead/behind against your own past run on the same route • Choose your last run or your personal best as the target • Works even if you start the loop from a different point each day • Falling-behind alerts by vibration, beep, or spoken callout • Distance announcements at every kilometre or mile • Lap splits with distance, time, pace and calories BUILT FOR REAL TERRAIN • Elevation from the barometer, not GPS altitude — far more accurate on hills • Distance from GPS Doppler speed with step-based stride calibration, so it holds up under tree cover and on switchbacks • Calories that account for the metabolic cost of climbing, not just distance • Heart-rate zones when you wear an Apple Watch APPLE WATCH, WITH OR WITHOUT YOUR IPHONE • Standalone workouts — leave the phone at home • Create routes on your wrist; they sync back automatically • Live heart rate and heart-rate zones • Lap splits and alerts on the watch too PRIVATE BY DESIGN • No ads — ever • No subscription. One purchase, yours forever • No account, no sign-up, no tracking, no analytics • No third-party SDKs PaceBuddy has no servers and makes no network connections. Your workouts, routes and settings stay on your devices — aside from heart-rate and workout data you choose to sync through Apple Health. TRY IT FIRST PaceBuddy is free for 14 days, with everything unlocked. After that, a single one-time purchase keeps it. No subscription, no renewal, and the workouts you recorded stay readable either way. A NOTE ON HOW IT WORKS Pace coaching compares you to your own history on a given route, so it appears from your second workout on that route onward — a first run has nothing to race yet. Workouts under 100 m are treated as accidental starts and discarded.

Screenshots

Personal Bests4 screens
PaceBuddy4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Personal Bests at none against PaceBuddy's 1. PaceBuddy's advantage is iOS requirement (16.2 vs 26.0). On price, rating, ratings volume and ads 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. PaceBuddy sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Personal Bests asks for nothing beyond the download.

ReceptionRating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings

On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Personal Bests against 5.0 for PaceBuddy. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 2 and 2 respectively.

Scorecard3 real differences · 7 level
Personal Bests versus PaceBuddy: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterPersonal BestsPaceBuddy
PriceFreeFree
Rating5.0 (2 ratings)5.0 (2 ratings)
Positive reviews100.0% of reviews—
Number of ratings22
Update frequencyEvery 4 months—
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNo — betterYes
MonetizationFree — betterFree with in-app purchases
DevicesiPhone, iPad, Mac — betteriPhone, Apple Watch
Requires iOS26.016.2 — better
Further details — not scored
Size25 MB35 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperMarkus KettnerShahab Karimi

In-app purchases

None

Personal Bests

No in-app purchases

1 purchases

PaceBuddy

One-time1
  • Unlock PaceBuddy$6.99

Questions

Is Personal Bests free?
Personal Bests is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is PaceBuddy free?
PaceBuddy is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Which has better reviews, Personal Bests or PaceBuddy?
Personal Bests and PaceBuddy are both rated 5.0 out of 5 on the App Store, from 2 and 2 ratings respectively.
Do Personal Bests or PaceBuddy have ads?
Neither Personal Bests nor PaceBuddy shows ads.

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