Best Free App for Group Fitness Challenges With Friends

Running a group fitness challenge sounds easy. Pick a goal, invite friends, watch the leaderboard. In practice, most apps are built for solo tracking and treat group features as an afterthought.

This is a practical breakdown of the apps people actually try, what each one is good for, and where each one falls down. Written by someone who has tried all of them and built one of them, so take the bias with a grain of salt.

What makes a good group challenge app

Before the list, the bar:

• Works regardless of device. A friend on a Garmin, one on an Apple Watch, one on nothing, all on the same leaderboard.
• Any goal. Distance, time, steps, streaks, sleep, custom counts.
• One scoreboard everyone can see. No screenshots, no spreadsheets, no "wait, who is winning?"
• Free or close to it. Group challenges should not require everyone to have a paid subscription.
• Low friction join. A code or a link, not a friend request flow.

With that bar set, here is the lineup.

Quick comparison

1. Strava Clubs

Good for: people who all use Strava and want a familiar social feed.

Where it falls short: Strava-only. If three friends use Strava and three do not, only three show up. Challenge formats are mostly distance and time. No custom goals. We wrote a longer breakdown of Strava club limitations here.

2. Garmin Connect groups

Good for: Garmin-only friend groups doing step or distance challenges.

Where it falls short: Garmin-only, fixed formats, leaderboards live inside the app so sharing with non-Garmin friends means screenshots. Full breakdown of Garmin Connect group challenges here.

3. Apple Fitness+ sharing

Good for: small groups where everyone wears an Apple Watch.

Where it falls short: Apple Watch only, limited to closing rings and step competitions, no custom metrics, locked into one ecosystem. Great if you and your friends are all in. Useless the moment one person is on Android.

4. Strides, Streaks, Habitica

Good for: solo habit tracking with a streak count.

Where it falls short: not really group apps. You can compare manually but there is no shared scoreboard. Good companions, bad replacements.

5. Spreadsheets and group chats

Good for: week one.

Where it falls short: week two. Someone forgets to update, someone enters the wrong distance, the person who set it up gets sick of being the scorekeeper. Every long-running spreadsheet challenge eventually dies of admin fatigue.

6. Meryus

Good for: mixed-device friend groups, families, coworkers, and any challenge format you can think of (distance, time, steps, streaks, sleep, custom).

Honest disclosure: this is the one we built. The reason we built it is that nothing on this list met the bar above. Meryus syncs from Strava, syncs from Garmin, accepts manual entry from anyone else, and puts everyone on the same live leaderboard. Free, no ads, no paid tier.

If your group is single-device and single-format, the native option is probably fine. If your group is mixed in any way, you will save yourself a lot of pain by skipping straight to a tool built for this.

Company and workplace challenges

Office challenges have one extra constraint: you cannot mandate hardware. Some people wear a Garmin, some an Apple Watch, some nothing at all. Any app that scores only one ecosystem excludes half the building on day one, which is why native platform challenges rarely work at work. Use a step or active-minutes target, keep it to four weeks, and pick something anyone can log. Full walkthrough in the workplace step challenge guide and on the workplace challenge page.

Competing with friends who use different devices

This is the single most common reason people go looking for an app in the first place. One friend records on Strava, one on a Garmin, one just walks. Native tools cannot merge those three. A neutral scoreboard can: sync what syncs, type in the rest. See Apple Watch vs Garmin vs Strava for the device-by-device version of this, or the full list of alternatives.

How to pick

Ask three questions:

1. Is your whole group on the same platform? Yes and you only care about distance, use the native option. No, use a cross-platform tool.
2. Do you want custom goals? Native options are fixed formats. Custom tools let you build what you actually want.
3. Will one person be doing admin? If yes, automate it or that person quits within two weeks.

Try a few

Most of these are free or have free tiers. Spend 15 minutes setting up the same fake challenge on two or three of them and see which one your group actually opens twice. That is the whole test.

Start a free challenge on Meryus if you want to skip ahead. Or read our deeper Strava Clubs vs Meryus comparison for the side-by-side.