Fogbreaker
There are two completely different products hiding behind the phrase "step challenge app", and picking from the wrong half is why so many of these lists feel useless.
One half is corporate wellness software. Woliba, Big Team Challenge, ChallengeRunner and, in Germany, instingo and Hansefit. These are sold to HR departments, priced per employee, and come with reporting dashboards and rewards catalogues. If you are running a challenge for 300 colleagues and someone will ask you for participation rates, you want one of those and this list is not for you.
The other half is five friends who want to compete for a fortnight. That is the list below, and it is the one nobody writes properly.
Fogbreaker is in it, at number six. We do steps, challenges and a shared leaderboard, so we belong here, but our actual argument is that the number is the least interesting thing you can compete on. More on that at the bottom, after the apps that are better than us at the thing this category is nominally about.
The problem nobody mentions: the device decides the winner
Before the apps, the thing that will actually determine your challenge.
Step challenges assume everyone's steps mean the same thing. They do not, and the gap is not small. A wrist-worn tracker and a phone in a pocket are measuring different physical events, and they disagree by more than most challenges are won by.
The numbers come from a body of comparison research, and the clearest summary is in a 2022 Preventing Chronic Disease analysis from the CDC: wrist-worn monitors overestimate steps in free-living conditions by 10% to 35%, and underestimate by 35% to 95% during walking where the arms are not swinging, which means pushing a shopping trolley, a wheelchair or a pram. A 2019 free-living comparison in Frontiers in Medicine found the wrist-worn ActiGraph recorded 3,000 to 5,000 more steps per day than the same model worn at the hip, in both younger and older adults.
Sit with that number for a second. Three to five thousand steps a day, from hardware alone, in a competition where the daily target is often ten thousand. Over a two-week challenge that is a lead of 40,000 to 70,000 steps handed to whoever happens to own a watch.
It gets worse in the other direction, because the 35% to 95% undercount is not an edge case. The person pushing a pram around your challenge is the person being penalised hardest by it, and they are also, usually, the person doing the most walking.
Three practical consequences:
- Agree the device class before you agree the rules. All-watches or all-phones is fair. Mixed is a hardware contest with a step-count theme.
- If it has to be mixed, do not compete on absolute steps. Percentage improvement against each person's own first week removes almost all of the device bias, because the bias is roughly constant per person.
- Expect the phone users to look lazy and not be. A phone only counts what it is carried through. Ours has a whole post on why that happens.
None of the apps below correct for any of this. It is worth knowing that going in.
The apps
1. Pacer
The default answer, and the one to pick if you want the fewest arguments. Pacer has run group challenges for years, works on the phone's own step counter without requiring anyone to buy hardware, and its free tier is genuinely usable rather than a trial. Groups, leaderboards and a challenge format that your least technical friend can join from a link.
Best for: a mixed group where you cannot assume everyone owns a tracker. The trade-off: the interface carries a decade of accumulated features and the free tier is heavily upsold. It is functional rather than pleasant.
2. Stridekick
The most flexible on rules, which matters more than it sounds. Stridekick lets you build challenges that are not just "most steps wins": streak formats, target-based formats, team splits. It also syncs across a wide range of devices, which makes it the practical choice when your group is half Fitbit, half Apple Watch, half phone.
Best for: groups who have already discovered that most-steps-wins is boring by day four. The trade-off: the device breadth is also its weakness, since syncing across mismatched hardware is exactly where the problem above bites hardest, and Stridekick does not adjust for it either.
3. StepUp
Built specifically for the friends-and-office middle ground, with group chat sitting next to the leaderboard. That combination is underrated: most of what makes a step challenge fun is the talking, and apps that make you run the conversation in a separate WhatsApp group lose half their energy.
Best for: small groups who want the banter in the same place as the numbers. The trade-off: it lives or dies on everyone actually installing it, and it is a narrower tool than Pacer if your group later wants something other than steps.
4. Big Team Challenge
The best of the ones that are really workplace products, and worth naming because a lot of people arrive at this category through work. Teams get placed on a virtual map and progress along a route as the steps come in, which gives a challenge a shape and an end point rather than an open-ended leaderboard.
Best for: a company or a club with an organiser and a budget. The trade-off: it is priced and structured for organisations. For five friends it is heavy and expensive, and the virtual-map format is the opposite of walking somewhere real.
5. Apple Fitness or Google Health, if you already have them
Worth checking before you install anything. Apple's built-in activity competitions run seven days head to head with anyone in your contacts and cost nothing. Google Health, the app formerly called Fitbit, kept its leaderboard through the 2026 rebrand even as badges, groups and the community feed were removed.
Best for: a two-person rivalry where nobody wants another app. The trade-off: both are locked to their own ecosystem, so a mixed iPhone and Android group cannot use either. And Apple's competition scores on activity rings rather than steps, which is a different game.
6. Fogbreaker
Ours, and we will be specific about what it is and is not.
Steps count. They arrive from Apple Health or Health Connect the same way they do in the apps above, they earn XP, they level up your explorer, and your friends sit on a shared leaderboard that updates through the day. As a step-challenge app it works.
The difference is that steps are not the only thing being scored. The map starts under fog and clears where you actually walk, so the thing your friends can see is not just a bigger number, it is the shape of where you have been. Two people can finish a week on 70,000 steps each and have completely different maps, and the map is the more interesting object.
Best for: groups who got bored of the number and want the competition to be about somewhere rather than how much. The trade-offs, plainly: the fog only clears from GPS movement outdoors, so treadmill and indoor steps earn XP and leaderboard position but reveal nothing. We do not do workplace administration, team assignment or HR reporting. And our streak breaks the moment you miss a day, with no freeze or rest day, which is a harsher design than some people want.
So which one
If you want a step challenge, take Pacer, or Stridekick if your group wants rules that are not most-steps-wins. Both are better than us at running a plain step competition, and neither will make you install something with a map in it.
Take ours if the number has stopped doing anything for you. That is a real and common failure mode: a step challenge works for about ten days, then everyone learns roughly where they land in the ranking and the ranking stops being informative. The device problem at the top of this article is part of why. When the leaderboard is mostly reporting who owns which hardware and who has the longest commute, there is nothing left to compete over.
If you would rather fix the challenge than change apps, we have a post on challenge formats that survive past week one, most of which work in any of the apps above. And the wider category, including the ones that turn walking into a game rather than a scoreboard, is covered in our walking games roundup.
The honest summary: pick your app second. Pick your rules and your device class first, because those decide the challenge, and every app on this list will happily let you run an unfair one.
