Kriterion vs Hevy
Hevy is a very good lifting log with years of polish behind it, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. But the two log a set much the same way. The real question is narrower: whether you want the training log on its own, or the training log joined up to what you ate and how recovered you are.
Readiness, before the session Kriterion checks sleep, recent load, fuelling and cycle phase before it suggests what to train. Hevy's own Trainer adjusts weights from your logged performance, but does not take HRV, sleep or readiness as inputs — so a week of bad sleep looks the same to it as a good one. The figures shown are from a seeded demo account.
| Kriterion | Hevy | |
|---|---|---|
| Lifting log | Sets, reps, RIR, warmup sets, supersets, plate calculator, rest timer, previous best in front of you, estimated 1RM, DOTS, PRs, muscle coverage map | Sets, reps, RPE, previous best, 1RM estimates, PRs — and years of polish on exactly this |
| Food and calories | Built in, with a measured maintenance figure from your own intake and weight trend | Not offered. Hevy is a training app |
| Recovery as an input | Sleep, recent load, fuelling and cycle phase set a readiness score that shapes the session | Progression comes from logged performance; HRV, sleep and readiness are not inputs |
| Menstrual cycle tracking | Built in, feeding readiness directly | Not offered |
| Free tier | Unlimited logging and your full history, never truncated | Unlimited workout logging, but 4 routines, 7 custom exercises, and graph history capped at 3 months |
| Web app | None | Yes — log and review in a browser |
| Social | None | A feed, follows and PR sharing, which folds away if you would rather it did |
| Watches | Apple Watch and Wear OS | Apple Watch and Wear OS |
The join is the point
Plenty of people run a lifting app and a food app side by side, and it works fine right up until the two disagree. A hard week of training and a fortnight of under-eating are the same problem, but neither app can see it, because each holds half the picture.
Kriterion's readiness score is what that join looks like in practice: sleep, recent training load, whether you actually fuelled yesterday, and cycle phase, resolved into one honest read before it suggests a session. When it trims your volume it tells you which of those caused it. That is a different job from logging sets well, and it is the reason to have both halves in one place rather than the reason Hevy's log is worse.
What Kriterion does not do
No web app. No social feed, no follows, no sharing a PR to a timeline. If any of those is the reason you open a training app, this is the wrong one, and it is better to find that out here than three weeks in.