September 7, 2026
We make one of these apps, so read this with that in mind. What follows is the comparison we wish had existed when we started, and the part we got wrong at first.
Search for a poker tracker and you get a list of about ten apps with star ratings next to them. The ratings tell you almost nothing, because the apps are not doing the same job.
The split that matters most
Poker trackers divide into two families that barely overlap.
The first family reads hand histories. You play online, the site writes a file for every hand, and the software imports those files and builds a database. This is where the famous names live, and it is why the category has a reputation for being powerful and complicated. If you play online, this is what you want, and a phone app is the wrong shape for it.
The second family records live play. Nobody writes a hand history for you in a card room, so there is no file to import. Everything the app knows, you told it: the buy-in, the cash out, the hours, the game. These are phone apps, and they are the ones you find searching the App Store.
Almost every disappointed review of a poker tracking app comes from someone who downloaded one family expecting the other.
What separates the live trackers
Once you are inside the live family, the apps differ less than the marketing suggests. They all record a session and show you a profit graph. What varies is how much work they ask of you and how much they do while you are still at the table.
At the simple end sit apps like Banky and Poler, which are close to a nicer spreadsheet. You enter a session after it ends. That is enough for a lot of players, and the honest thing to say is that if it covers you, the extra features elsewhere are cost without benefit.
In the middle sit Bink, Poker Income and Poker Bankroll Tracker. More fields, filters by stake and location, some reporting.
At the analytical end sit Poker Analytics and Pokerbase, which go deep on statistics and, in Pokerbase’s case, on staking arrangements. Poker Analytics has been around long enough that its data model shows it, in the good sense.
Left Pocket sits slightly apart by being the most carefully designed of them. If the reason you stopped using your last tracker was that opening it felt like admin, that matters more than a feature list does.
The part that decides it
Every one of these apps works if you use it. Most people end up with an empty tracker for a duller reason than a missing feature. Logging a session happens after the session, when you are tired and the night has already gone blurry, and the app is asking you to reconstruct it.
So the question worth asking is which one you will still be opening in March. That comes down to how much it asks you to remember, and you can only judge that by using it for a few weeks.
How they charge
The pricing models split three ways, and the model tells you more than the number does.
Some are one-time purchases. Poker Income and Poker Track Pro are bought once. Poker Analytics charges by how many sessions you want to store, which is unusual but at least predictable.
Most of the rest are subscriptions. Annual plans in this category clustered around thirty to forty dollars when we last checked in July 2026, with Pokerbase higher and a couple of apps lower. Some offer a lifetime option alongside.
A few are free, usually because they carry advertising or affiliate links to poker sites.
Two warnings about prices. Store listings show retired products next to current ones without saying which is which, so the figures you see there are often wrong. And these apps change prices quietly. We had a competitor’s price wrong in our own notes for a month. Open the app and look at its actual paywall.
What to check before you commit
Whatever you pick, check that you can get your data back out. A tracker holds years of your results and an export function is the difference between switching later and starting over. Not every app has one. It matters at the other end too: moving in is only easy if the new app reads what the old one produced, which is why we keep a guide to importing from the common trackers.
Check that it handles the format you play. Tournaments and cash games are different shapes of record, and an app built around one often treats the other as an afterthought.
Then use it for two weeks before paying for anything.
Where we sit
StackXo is in the live family, and the specific thing we built for is the gap described above. It records the session while it is happening rather than asking you to rebuild it afterwards, including the tournament clock and the stack changes. That is the whole idea, and if that is not the part you find hard, one of the apps above will serve you better.
If you want the reasoning underneath the numbers a tracker shows you, we have written about what a win rate can and cannot tell you, how to work out an hourly rate, and where bankroll requirements come from.