10 Best Walking Apps to Track Steps, Burn Calories & Stay Fit

Map My Walk stands as a comprehensive and powerful tool for walkers of all levels, moving beyond simple step counting to offer a robust GPS-based tracking experience. It meticulously records and maps every walk, providing detailed real-time statistics on pace, distance, duration, and calories burned. 

The app's versatility is a key strength, supporting over 600 activities from outdoor hikes to indoor treadmill sessions. One of its standout components is the ‘Routes’ feature, which allows users to discover new paths shared by a global community of millions.

To keep you engaged, the platform includes a strong social element with community challenges and a feed to share achievements. For those seeking advanced training, a premium MVP subscription starting at $7.99 for a month unlocks personalized, goal-oriented walking plans, real-time audio coaching, and in-depth performance analysis like heart rate zones. It’s definitely one of the best walking apps for Android and iOS users looking for detailed route planning.

Also Read: Best Pedometer Apps

WalkFit is a dedicated walking application singularly focused on weight loss and building a consistent fitness habit. It functions as a personal walking planner, generating daily programs based on a user's BMI and activity level. 

The app’s core features include a simple, user-friendly walk tracker that monitors essential metrics like steps, calories burned, and distance, all aimed at helping users achieve specific weight goals. Beyond outdoor tracking, this app provides a comprehensive library of indoor walking workouts and video guides. 

This includes treadmill-specific routines and low-impact cardio, making it highly adaptable for at-home use. To keep you on track, the app incorporates walking challenges and achievements. The app offers a free trial and operates on a subscription model. You can purchase a monthly subscription starting at $4.99,  which unlocks the full-scale personal plans and workout content.

The Walking for Weight Loss app is a professional, goal-oriented fitness planner designed specifically to help users burn fat effectively. Its core methodology combines standard walking exercises with interval-based, speed-up techniques to maximize calorie burn in a shorter amount of time. 

The app provides structured 3-month training plans with varying difficulty levels (easy, medium, hard), making it suitable for both beginners and advanced users. A key feature is its audio-guided workouts, which direct the user through each session—whether on an outdoor, GPS-tracked route or an indoor treadmill workout. 

It also includes detailed progress tracking, a chart to monitor weight trends, and a built-in music player to keep users motivated. The platform is subscription-based, offering unlimited access to its full range of workout plans and features.

Strava is a high-performance fitness tracking platform and social network designed primarily for athletes, particularly runners, cyclists, and walkers. It utilizes GPS to meticulously record over 30 different activity types, from running and riding to hiking and yoga. 

Its core features include a social feed for sharing activities and encouraging peers, community-based monthly challenges to foster accountability, and a robust ‘Routes’ tool for discovering or building new paths. The app's key differentiator is its social-competitive ecosystem, centered around Segments, which is a user-created sections of road or trail where athletes can compete for the best time on a public leaderboard. 

Strava also integrates seamlessly with a vast range of third-party devices, including Garmin, Apple Watch, and Fitbit, acting as the central hub for all activity data. While the free version offers robust tracking and social features, the premium subscription, starting at $5.99 for a month, unlocks advanced analytics, including AI-powered Athlete Intelligence.

Also Read: Free Running Apps

AllTrails is a comprehensive outdoor guide and navigation tool designed for hikers, bikers, trail runners, and walkers. Its primary function is to serve as a massive, community-sourced database, offering over 500,000 trails worldwide. 

The platform's essential features include robust search filters (by location, difficulty, length, and user-friendly tags like dog-friendly or kid-friendly), detailed trail information, and user-submitted reviews, photos, and real-time trail conditions. While the free version provides excellent trail discovery and GPS activity recording, the key differentiator is its community ecosystem. 

A premium subscription (AllTrails+ for $35.99 or AllTrails Peak for $79.99) unlocks critical off-grid tools, including downloadable offline maps, wrong-turn alerts, live location sharing, and advanced 3D maps.

The Fitbit app functions as a holistic health and fitness hub, designed to be the central dashboard for data collected from Fitbit's wearable trackers and smartwatches. Its primary purpose is to aggregate and analyze a wide spectrum of wellness metrics, including daily activity (steps, Active Zone Minutes), 24/7 heart rate, sleep quality, and stress management. 

The app's free tier provides essential tracking, progress charts, and logging for nutrition and water intake. The platform's key differentiator is its seamless hardware-software integration, which synthesizes complex biometric data into understandable trends. 

A Fitbit Premium subscription unlocks the app's full analytical power. The premium starts at $9.99 for a month and offers advanced features like the Daily Readiness Score, a detailed Sleep Profile, and an extensive library of guided video workouts. Even if you don't have a Fitbit device, the app can still track basic steps using your phone's accelerometer, making it a decent free walking app to get started with basic monitoring.

Peloton is a premier fitness app centered on delivering high-production, studio-quality workouts, both live and on-demand. While synonymous with cycling, the app provides a vast library of instructor-led classes across numerous disciplines, including strength training, outdoor and indoor running, yoga, HIIT, and meditation. 

Its core features are its charismatic, world-class instructors, highly curated music (including artist-themed series), and community engagement elements like live leaderboards and in-class challenges. 

The app is a subscription-first service, Peloton App One for $15.99 and App+ for $28.99, which unlocks its entire content library, and is designed to be used with or without Peloton's proprietary hardware.

Charity Miles is a fitness tracking app with a unique philanthropic model, designed for users who want their physical activity to translate into social impact. It allows users to log various activities, including walking, running, and biking, and select a charity from a large roster of non-profit organizations. 

Instead of focusing on deep analytics, the app's primary motivator is altruism. For every mile logged, users earn money for their chosen charity from a corporate sponsorship pool or, optionally, through direct pledges from friends and family via a personal pledge page. 

The app is free to use and functions as a simple, purpose-driven tracker that syncs with platforms like Apple Health and Strava. It’s not a data-heavy app for training, but it’s a powerful motivator. It’s one of the best free walking apps for adding a layer of purpose to your daily steps.

Walkmeter is a highly advanced fitness application designed for data-driven walkers and hikers, effectively transforming an iPhone into a comprehensive fitness computer. Its core function is the in-depth tracking of a massive range of statistics, including pace, cadence, distance, speed, and elevation, all captured via GPS. 

Essential features include customizable intervals, splits, and laps, hundreds of configurable voice announcements, and a robust mapping system with topographic and road views. 

The app's key differentiator is its powerful data analysis, allowing users to visualize their performance with detailed graphs and follow structured training plans (5K, 10K, etc.). A premium Elite subscription is required to unlock all advanced features and remove ads.

Sweatcoin is a move-to-earn application that gamifies fitness by providing financial and retail-based incentives. Its core function is a pedometer that runs in the background, verifying and converting a user's outdoor steps into a proprietary digital currency called Sweatcoins.

The app's essential features revolve around its in-app marketplace, where users can redeem their earned coins for a rotating selection of products, service discounts, and digital experiences. 

The key differentiator is its motivational model: rather than focusing on detailed health analytics, it incentivizes activity through gamification, social challenges, and the prospect of tangible rewards.