Comparison

Pilgrim vs Stroll

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

Head to head
About

Pilgrim

This app guides intentional walks, offering GPS tracking, voice journaling, and meditation features. It allows users to discover new paths, share their journeys, and leave ephemeral audio messages for others. Enhance your walking experience with mindful prompts and ambient soundscapes.

Highlights
  • GPS tracking with pace, steps, and altitude
  • Guided discovery walks with on-map clues
  • Shareable walk paths and location-based audio messages
  • On-device voice note transcription
  • Mindful writing prompts and meditation modes
  • Photo integration and permanent cairn building
Features
Read full description

Every walk holds something waiting to be noticed. A walking companion for those who walk with intention, whether across a continent or around the block. No leaderboards. No calorie goals. No social feeds. Just you, the path, and whatever arises. WALK GPS tracking with live pace, steps, altitude, and waypoint marking. A three-way breakdown shows how each walk splits between walking, talking, and meditating, because those are different states of attention. Lock the screen and keep going; a Live Activity holds it there. SEEK For days you want to be led. Choose a duration, set an intention, and Pilgrim hides clearings in fog on your map: places you didn't choose, shaped by your question and the hour you set out. A quiet pulse guides you: a sonar ping in your pocket, a crescent of light on the map. Reach the fog and be still, and the way continues. Found places return in your summary glowing with the light of the hour you reached them. HONOR Follow a path someone else laid down: a walk a friend shared, one of your own walked again, or a stage of the Camino, the Kumano Kodō, or Shikoku's eighty-eight temples. Their voices arrive where they were spoken, and you can answer in the same place. Save the maps before you go and the way holds with no signal at all. LEAVE A WHISPER Leave an ephemeral audio message at your location for others to find. Choose from seven energies (presence, lightness, wonder, gratitude, compassion, courage, stillness) and set how long it lingers: a day, a week, a month. Walk near someone else's and it plays softly, a voice from a stranger who passed this way. PLACE A STONE Start or grow a cairn as you walk. Cairns are permanent, evolving through seven tiers as pilgrims add stones, from a faint mark to an eternal cairn of 108. Each tier carries its own kanji and meaning. Walk to one to see who has been here before you. RECORD Tap to capture a voice note at any moment, timestamped and pinned to your location. After the walk, everything is transcribed on your device using WhisperKit. No audio ever leaves your phone. GATHER YOUR RELICS Photos from a walk appear in a carousel on your summary, gathered from Apple Photos by time and GPS. Pin one and it becomes a circular thumbnail anchored to exactly where you stood: on your map, your walk page, and inside .pilgrim exports. Nothing is copied or uploaded, only referenced. Opt-in, default off. REFLECT Six styles of writing prompts (contemplative, reflective, creative, gratitude, philosophical, journaling), generated on-device from your own words, walk context, and pinned photos. Copy them into your writing tool of choice and turn a walk into writing. MEDITATE A meditation mode with an animated breathing circle and customizable rhythms. Downloadable voice guide packs offer spoken prompts during stillness. Ambient soundscapes accompany the practice. Meditation time is tracked separately, alongside walk time. PILGRIM COLLECTS GOSHUIN In Japan, pilgrims collect vermilion ink stamps at temples along a route. Pilgrim generates a digital seal for each walk from its own data: distance, duration, weather, elevation. Milestones press their own seals for a first walk and a first unknown. Your collection grows with your practice. YOUR WALK IS YOURS ALONE Everything stays on your device, transcription included. No accounts, no analytics, no behavioral profiling. Delete the app and your data goes with it, unless you exported it first. An anonymous counter, with no accounts or identifiers, tracks how far pilgrims have walked together and crosses milestones as it goes: the Camino, the Shikoku 88, the length of Japan. Weather awareness via WeatherKit. Moon phases and planetary hours woven into the walk context. Seasonal color shifts calibrated to your hemisphere. Export as .pilgrim packages. Share walks as ephemeral web pages or hand-painted etegami postcards. View your journey at view.pilgrimapp.org. Open source. Free forever. No subscriptions. pilgrimapp.org

About

Stroll

Features
Read full description

Some of your clearest thinking happens on a walk — and then it's gone by the time you're home. Stroll is a calm place to keep it. Leave your phone behind, take an unplugged walk (a sunrise one is lovely), and when you're back, write down the thoughts that surfaced. That's the whole app. No feeds, no streaks that punish you, no noise. WALK FIRST, PHONE SECOND The best walks are unplugged, so Stroll is built to work even when your phone never came along. Just enter how long you were out when you get home. Prefer to time it? Bring your phone on airplane mode — the timer keeps perfect time even with the screen locked and no signal. ONE NUMBER THAT ONLY GROWS Stroll adds up every walk into a single, quiet total: the time you've spent walking and thinking. It never resets and never guilts you. It just grows. A GENTLE PLACE TO REFLECT • A simple, notebook-style space for what came to mind • A calm prompt to get you started • Your past reflections, gathered by day • A quiet "look back" months later, so you can see how your thinking has changed PRIVATE BY DESIGN No account. No login. No ads. No analytics. Your reflections live on your device — they're never sent to a server, and no one (including me) can read them. Optional iCloud Backup keeps a private copy in your own iCloud so your words survive a new phone. FREE, AND IT'LL STAY FREE Stroll is free with nothing locked away. If it's helped you, you can leave a one-time tip to support an independent maker — but there's no pressure, and tipping never unlocks anything. Take a walk. Let your mind wander. Keep what it brings back.

Screenshots

Pilgrim4 screens
Stroll4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is update cadence: Stroll at every 2 days against Pilgrim's every 11 days. Stroll also leads on device support (3 vs 1) and iOS requirement (15.1 vs 18.0). 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

Pilgrim ships an update every 11 days, Stroll every 2 days. The most recent releases landed on October 31, 2026 and October 25, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard3 real differences · 7 level
Pilgrim versus Stroll: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterPilgrimStroll
PriceFreeFree
Rating5.0 (6 ratings) — better—
Positive reviews100.0% of reviews—
Number of ratings6 — better—
Update frequencyEvery 11 daysEvery 2 days — better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
MonetizationFree—
DevicesiPhoneiPhone, iPad, iPod — better
Requires iOS18.015.1 — better
Further details — not scored
Size80 MB51 MB
Age rating4+4+
Developerwalk · talk · meditateConnor Burns

In-app purchases

None

Pilgrim

No in-app purchases

None

Stroll

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Pilgrim free?
Pilgrim is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Stroll free?
Stroll is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Pilgrim or Stroll have ads?
Neither Pilgrim nor Stroll shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Pilgrim or Stroll?
Pilgrim ships an update every 11 days, and Stroll every 2 days. Most recently, Pilgrim was updated on October 31, 2026 and Stroll on October 25, 2026.

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