Best Stompers Alternatives in 2026 (5 Honest Picks)

Correction, August 2026. An earlier version of this article told you Stompers had gone quiet after September 2025 and that you should move off it. That was wrong. We rechecked the App Store: as of late October 2026 Stompers is on version 1.9.15, shipped days ago, sitting at 4.8 stars from around 14,000 ratings. It’s healthy, it’s actively developed, it’s on Google Play now too, and its rating base has roughly tripled since we first wrote this. We’ve rewritten the piece.

So let’s answer the question you actually came with. Stompers works fine. If you’re looking for something else, it’s almost certainly because of what Stompers is rather than whether it’s maintained.

Stompers is a daily race. Soren Iverson and Josh Rozin built something genuinely playful, avatars, power-ups, and sabotage items you fire at your friends, bats and banana peels included. It is the anti-fitness step app, and for a lot of crews it’s the best thing on the App Store. It is also, by design, a competition you can’t switch off. That’s the whole product, not a mode.

Which means the honest reason to leave isn’t quality. It’s fit. Maybe your crew has a 25-year age spread and the race stopped being funny. Maybe one person travels every week and is permanently last. Maybe someone in the group goes quiet the moment anything turns into a scoreboard. Maybe you got tired of the nightly paywall.

This isn’t a takedown, and it isn’t an escape route. It’s a fit guide. Five honest Stompers alternatives in 2026, each a different answer for a different crew. Steps Club is one of the five, not the headline, and if you want to skip ahead and grab Steps Club free on the App Store and Google Play for your small friend group, that works too. We’ll tell you when something else fits better.

Is Stompers still being updated?

Yes. Stompers is on version 1.9.15 as of late October 2026, updated within the past few days, rated 4.8 stars from roughly 14,000 ratings. It is not abandoned and we were wrong to say it was.

For context: Stompers hit the App Store in 2024 and quickly became an indie darling. InsideHook wrote it up as “the wacky step-counting app” in July 2024. The creators, Soren Iverson and Josh Rozin, built the kind of app that made people screenshot their avatar and post it in the group chat. That was the whole charm, and it still is. The rating base has grown from about 4,500 to about 14,000 since that write-up, which is not what a dying app looks like.

So if the app is fine, why are you reading a page about alternatives? Usually one of four things:

• The competition is the point, and you don’t want competition. There’s no calm mode. The race is the product.
• Mixed fitness levels. In a shared race, the person walking 4,000 steps is losing to the person walking 14,000 every single day. That gets old fast in a family or a multi-generational crew.
• The nightly paywall. Counting steps after 9 p.m. sits behind Super Stompers, which InsideHook flagged and which still annoys people.
• Onboarding friction. A February 2025 design critique from IxD@Pratt called out forced friend registration, rigid power-up targeting, and confusing navigation.

Jackie, 65, walks with three friends most mornings. They tried Stompers together and loved the avatars. What didn’t work was the race: Jackie’s knee means she does about 4,000 steps on a good day, and one of her friends is a retired postie who clears 15,000 without trying. Every day the app told Jackie she’d lost. They wanted the shared part without the ranking part. That’s a fit problem, not a quality problem, and it’s the one this article is really about.

Short on time? Skip to the shortlist or grab Steps Club free on the App Store or Google Play if your crew is a small friend group.

What makes Stompers fun (so the replacement doesn’t miss it)?

Stompers works because it mixes three things: a named friend group, a small daily ritual (the race), and just enough personality (avatars, power-ups) to make opening the app feel playful. A good replacement keeps at least one.

Look closely at what your crew actually liked and you’ll probably land on one of these:

• Named friends, not strangers. Stompers doesn’t dump you into a public leaderboard with 4,000 randos. It’s six people you know.
• Daily cadence. A new race every day means opening the app feels like checking in, not grinding toward a quarterly goal.
• Personality. Weird avatars, sabotage items, unhinged little moments. It doesn’t look or feel like a fitness app.
• Low pressure on fitness itself. It isn’t about pace, VO2 max, or PRs. It’s steps, and you can still “play” with 4,000.

This matters because different alternatives keep different parts. If the competitive game layer is what you love, honestly, stay on Stompers, it does that better than anything else here. If what you love is the daily shared thing with four people you actually know, minus the ranking, Steps Club is probably home. Figure out which slice your group actually wants before you pick.

What should you look for in a Stompers replacement?

The real filter is competition: does your crew want to race, or walk together? After that, pick based on group size, platform, and whether you want a game layer. Answer five questions, then match to an app.

Here’s the short checklist. Run through it with your crew in mind before downloading anything:

1. Does your crew want to compete or not? This is the big one and it’s binary. Stompers, StepUp, Stridekick, and Pacer all rank people. Steps Club deliberately doesn’t run a contest: everyone’s on their own goal. If one person in the group goes quiet whenever there’s a scoreboard, you already know your answer.
2. What size is your crew? Three close friends and a 500-person office are completely different products. A crew that knows each other wants a private-club model; a big workplace push wants a leaderboard-style tool.
3. Do you need Android? Stompers is on Google Play now as well as the App Store, and every pick in this roundup runs on Android too, including Steps Club as of July 2026, so one Android holdout no longer rules anything out.
4. Do you want the game layer? Power-ups, avatars, missions, or are you past the sabotage phase and just want to see your people walking?
5. Is the free tier enough? Stompers’ nightly paywall (the “night mode” needed to count steps after 9 p.m., per InsideHook) sours a lot of people. Pick an alternative whose free tier covers your actual usage. Our best free walking apps roundup breaks down exactly what each app’s free tier includes before you commit.

If you know your answers to those five, the next section is basically a lookup table.

The best Stompers alternatives in 2026

The five we’d point to: Steps Club (private friend groups who don’t want a contest), StepUp (big workplace groups), Stridekick (cross-platform), Walkr (game layer without the friend race), and Pacer (structured challenges).

None of them are identical to Stompers, each keeps a different slice of it. Pick based on which slice your crew actually wants, and note the leaderboard column, it’s the one that decides most of these.

Here’s the quick matrix, then the per-app breakdown:

Steps Club, the connection-first pick

Best if what you like about Stompers is walking with a named friend group every day, and the sabotage mechanics are the part you’d drop. Private clubs with no member cap, Live Walking Sessions, reactions over rankings, on iOS and Android.

Full disclosure: we make Steps Club. We’ve tried to flag every case where something else is a better pick. The closest feel to Stompers’ small-crew energy, minus the race, is a private club of the people you already walk with. You invite your people, you see their steps in a feed, you tap a heart when someone hits their goal. There’s no sabotage and no race. Each person sets their own daily goal, so Grandma’s 4,000 and your cousin’s 12,000 both count as a win.

What’s in the box: private clubs (no member cap, no recommended size), Live Walking Sessions where you can see friends walking in real time, an activity feed with reactions, per-member step goals, Apple Health sync (Apple Watch, Fitbit, Garmin, WHOOP, Oura via Apple Health), and iOS widgets. Free tier covers 2 clubs and 5 friends, Plus is $4.99/month or $19.99/year (or $29.99 lifetime) for unlimited.

Honest limits: no gamified power-ups, and no challenges feature with brackets or prizes. If the game is what you love about Stompers, stay on Stompers, it does that better than we do. If you want a game but not a friend race, Walkr is the call.

David and Priya used Stompers as their long-distance thing for about a year. They liked it, but a two-person race just meant one of them lost every day, which got strange fast. They moved to Steps Club for the 2-person club feature, which fits inside the free tier. The small thing that actually stuck was Live Walking Sessions on Sundays, both of them opening the app, seeing each other walking, sometimes getting on a phone call mid-walk. No avatars, no power-ups, just presence. They’ve been using it six months as of this writing.

Walking with a small crew or a partner? Grab Steps Club free on the App Store or Google Play and make a club in about two minutes.

StepUp, the big-group and cross-platform pick

Best if your workplace is involved or your crew actually wants a leaderboard-style competition. Free, groups of up to 15,000 people, leaderboard-first, iOS and Android.

StepUp is the dominant social step tracker in the App Store, with around 148,000 ratings at 4.8 stars. It’s been around for years and it handles what Stompers doesn’t try to: big groups, mixed devices, corporate wellness. Clients include Amazon, BMW, and Google. If your group wants a big, leaderboard-driven, corporate-wellness-style challenge, it’s the right call.

The catch: StepUp’s model is leaderboards. For a friend group of six where one person travels every week, that can feel punishing by Wednesday, which is why it’s not a 1:1 swap for a friend-group Stompers experience. For a 50-person workplace or a competitive running club, it’s exactly right. For a full breakdown, read our Steps Club vs StepUp comparison.

Download: thestepupapp. com.

Stridekick, the no-fuss cross-platform pick

Best if you want cross-platform step challenges without corporate-wellness branding. Free, runs on iOS and Android, lets you challenge friends individually or in groups.

Stridekick has been around long enough to be reliable. It syncs with most major wearables, and it doesn’t look or feel like a tool your HR department picked. For mixed iOS and Android friend groups who mostly want a shared step count and a friendly challenge now and then, Stridekick is a solid middle-ground pick. The free tier is tighter than it looks, though: free challenges run up to 7 days, hold up to 10 people, and are public. Private and longer challenges need a Pro plan (from $12.99 a month, paid by the organizer only). It has leaderboards (like StepUp, like Stompers), so if the ranking is the thing you’re leaving, skip to Steps Club instead.

Download: stridekick. com.

Walkr, if you still want the game layer

Best if the part of Stompers you actually loved was the avatars and missions. Walkr is a space-adventure step game, steps power a spaceship through a galaxy of little planets. Less friend-focused than Stompers, more gameplay-focused.

Walkr (from Sparkful, the studio formerly called Fourdesire) ships regular iOS updates and has an Android version too. The social layer is lighter than Stompers, it’s primarily a solo gamified experience with optional friend connections, not a shared daily race. So it’s the odd pick here: it keeps the game and drops the competition between friends. If your crew loves the weird personality and the “my avatar did a thing” vibe but not the head-to-head, Walkr scratches that. Steps & Beasts is a similar pick in the same spirit, also worth a look.

Honest note: if the social-with-friends part of Stompers was the main thing for you, you’ll find Walkr thinner on that axis.

Pacer, the structured-challenge pick

Best if you like Stompers’ daily-race cadence and want that structure with more control over how it’s set up. Pacer offers customizable challenges, runs on iOS and Android, and has a friends/teams mode.

Pacer has been around longer than most apps in this roundup, has a massive user base, and the free tier includes group challenges. The feel is more traditional fitness app than Stompers, less personality, more data. For a couple doing a weekly step target, or a group of coworkers running a 30-day push, Pacer handles it cleanly. Cross-platform, actively maintained, been doing this for a decade-plus.

Stompers vs Steps Club, a closer look

Stompers and Steps Club share one thing: walking with a named friend group. Stompers is a daily competitive game with avatars and power-ups. Steps Club is a shared feed with reactions, where everyone walks toward their own goal.

Same starting point, opposite bets. Stompers bets that competition is what gets you out the door. We bet that company is. Both bets are right, for different people.

Side by side on the dimensions that actually matter for a crew deciding where to move:

Honest call: if you love the daily competition, the sabotage, the avatars, don’t switch. Stompers is better at that than we are and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. If you loved walking with specific people and the social-visibility part was the point, Steps Club probably fits better than any other app in this roundup. For the same honesty applied to other comparisons, see our Steps Club vs Strava breakdown.

How do you move your friend group to a different app?

Moving a friend group is about coordination, not data. Pick one alternative, announce it in whatever chat you already use, have the least-busy person invite everyone, and give the new app a week before anyone judges it. Most of the friction is social, not technical.

Here’s the five-step playbook that works for most crews:

1. Pick one alternative. Use the previous section. Don’t put three links in the chat and ask, “which one?”, people won’t answer. Pick one, own the call.
2. Post once in the chat you already use. Something like: “Trying [X] instead, no race so nobody’s losing. Here’s the link.” Say why in one clause, then stop. Short post, one link, done.
3. Accept that step history doesn’t transfer. Your Stompers streak stays in Stompers. Apple Health kept the underlying step data, but the in-app streaks, badges, and leaderboards reset. That’s fine, fresh start.
4. Give the new app a full week. The first three days always feel thin because there’s nothing to react to. By day five or six, people start hitting goals and the feed fills in. Don’t declare it dead on Tuesday.
5. Keep it low-stakes. If two of you stick with it, the group will follow. You don’t need 100% adoption on day one.

Alex ran the Power Hours group at his office of 22 people. Stompers’ daily friend race wasn’t built for an office-wide challenge, and at the time it was iOS-only, so half the office couldn’t join. He spent one evening comparing options, landed on StepUp because his office crew wanted a leaderboard-style challenge at that scale, posted the link in Slack on a Monday morning, and 17 of the 22 had signed up by Thursday. The remaining five joined the following week when they noticed the channel was active. Total switching cost: one Slack post. For more on getting a group off the ground once you’ve picked an app, read how to start a walking group.

Which Stompers alternative should you pick?

If you want a quick decision, match your crew to one row below. Most people land in the first three.

• Small friend group of close friends? Steps Club.

• Couple doing a daily shared thing? Steps Club.

• Multi-generational family with mixed fitness levels? Steps Club.

• Big group that wants a leaderboard? StepUp.

• Office or workplace wellness? StepUp.

• You want the Stompers game layer back? Walkr (or Steps & Beasts).

• Cross-platform, no corporate vibe? Stridekick or Pacer.

• Genuinely want the race? Stay on Stompers. It’s the best version of that.

No single app is the answer for everyone, that’s why this is a roundup, not a Steps Club commercial. Pick the one your crew will actually open.

The bottom line

Stompers is good. Soren Iverson and Josh Rozin built something playful and weird, it’s still shipping, and it’s rated 4.8 stars by 14,000-odd people for a reason. We said otherwise for a while and that was our mistake, not theirs.

It’s just not built for every crew, because the race isn’t a setting, it’s the design. If your group has a wide spread of ages or abilities, if one person is permanently last, if someone quietly checks out the moment there’s a scoreboard, the problem isn’t that you picked a bad app. You picked one built on a different idea of what walking together is for.

Six options, six honest fits. Stompers if you actually want the race. Steps Club if your crew is close and you want connection over competition. StepUp if you want a big leaderboard-style challenge. Stridekick if you want cross-platform without the corporate energy. Walkr if the game layer is the point but the head-to-head isn’t. Pacer if structured challenges are your thing.

If your crew mostly wants to walk together and cheer each other on, without anyone coming last, grab Steps Club free on the App Store or Google Play and make a club with your people. It takes about two minutes. For the broader landscape across every use case, read our full guide to the best walking apps for groups in 2026 or our take on walking with friends as a habit.

Whichever app you pick, the people you walk with are the point.