Buying guide
How to choose a peptide tracker
Last reviewed · Written by the PepCycle team
Most peptide trackers fail on the same four things: they cap vial size, they cannot represent every-N-day intervals, they force blends into separate entries, and they make backdating awkward. Rather than ranking apps whose features change weekly, this page gives you a checklist you can run yourself in about ten minutes.
Why a checklist beats a ranking
Every "best peptide tracker" article you will find, including the ones written by the apps themselves, has the same problem: it is a snapshot of feature sets that change constantly, written by someone with an interest in the outcome. This page is written by the makers of one of the apps, which is exactly why it is a checklist rather than a scoreboard.
The tests below take about ten minutes across two apps, and they are chosen because they are the specific places tracking apps break — drawn from the recurring complaints in public App Store reviews across this category.
The twelve tests
Data model
- Enter a 100 mg vial. GHK-Cu comes in 50–200 mg vials and NAD+ in 500–1000 mg. If the field caps out at 50, the app was built around 5 mg peptides and will fight you.
- Enter a blend. Try a vial containing three peptides at different masses. Can it be one vial with three components, or are you forced to invent three fake vials? See blends and stacks.
- Change the water volume on an existing vial. Bacteriostatic water volumes get corrected. Can you edit it, or must you delete and rebuild the vial and lose the entries?
- Add a non-injection entry — an oral capsule or a nasal spray. Apps built only for injections mangle these. See Semax.
Schedules
- Set up an every-3-day schedule. Weekday checkboxes cannot express this. See every-N-day schedules.
- Set up an on/off cycle with a defined break.
- Give two compounds different intervals and see whether the calendar handles overlapping rhythms.
- Enter a titration plan as scheduled future changes rather than editing as you go. See GLP-1 titration tracking.
Honesty of the record
- Backdate an entry eleven days. Then check the vial's remaining contents and the next-due date actually recalculated. See missed and late doses.
- Record a skipped dose explicitly. If the only easy action is "taken", your log will drift toward fiction.
- Export everything to CSV or JSON and open the file. Does it include vial concentrations, or just dates and numbers? See exporting your log.
- Find out where your data lives — on the device, in the developer's cloud, or behind a required account.
Four red flags
| Red flag | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Price appears only after setup | Entering your protocol before seeing a price is a sunk-cost tactic. It is also the single most common complaint in this category's reviews. |
| Streaks that punish honesty | If marking a skipped dose costs you a streak, the app has created an incentive to falsify a health record. |
| Account required to start | A log that needs a server account has made your health history someone else's operational responsibility. |
| No export | Without a complete export, leaving the app means losing the record. That is not a feature gap; it is lock-in. |
How PepCycle answers the twelve
- No vial-size cap — enter 200 mg or 1,000 mg as printed.
- Blends are one vial with components, with per-component amounts derived from a single volume.
- Editable reconstitution volume, with vial contents recalculated rather than requiring a rebuild.
- Route is a property of the entry — injection, oral, nasal and topical all fit.
- Every-N-day, on/off cycling and per-compound schedules, with explicit anchoring.
- Backdating recalculates everything downstream, including vial contents and next-due dates.
- Skipped is as easy as taken, and there is no streak that penalises an accurate record.
- Full CSV and JSON export, including vial concentrations and blend components.
- On-device storage with your own iCloud sync — no PepCycle account, no PepCycle server holding your log.
- The price is visible before you enter anything personal.
That is our answer sheet. Run the tests on us too — the point of a checklist is that it applies to everyone.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best peptide tracker app?
There is no single answer, and any article claiming one is either out of date or selling something. What matters is whether an app can represent your specific protocol: your vial sizes, your schedule shape, your blends, and whether you can get your data out. The twelve tests on this page take about ten minutes and answer that directly.
Why do so many peptide trackers cap vial size at 50 mg?
Because they were designed around common research peptide vials of 2–10 mg, where a 50 mg ceiling seems generous. It breaks immediately for GHK-Cu at 100–200 mg and NAD+ at 500–1000 mg, which are routinely tracked in the same log.
Should I use a free tracker or pay for one?
The relevant question is not free versus paid but when the price appears and what happens to your data. An app that shows its price before you enter anything, and lets you export everything, is a reasonable deal at either price point. One that does neither is not.
Is a spreadsheet good enough?
For some people, genuinely yes — a spreadsheet has perfect data ownership and no vendor risk. What it lacks is reminders, arithmetic that cannot be mistyped, and a body map. We wrote a fuller comparison of spreadsheets versus apps.
Related pages
Run the tests on us too
Download PepCycle and try the awkward cases yourself: a 200 mg vial, a three-peptide blend, an every-3-day schedule, and an entry backdated eleven days. That is a better evaluation than any comparison page, including this one.
Free to download · No account required · Price shown before you enter anything personal