People leave Whoop for one of two reasons: the yearly membership, or not wanting a second thing on their wrist. This page is about what actually changes if you stop — including the part where Whoop is better, and a cheaper app than ours that may suit you more.
What Whoop does that an app cannot
The band senses continuously. It is on you all day and all night, so it can build a strain figure that moves through the day and a recovery score from a full night of its own measurements. If that continuous picture is the thing you value, no phone app replaces it, and you should keep the band. We would rather say that here than have you find out after paying us.
One thing to know if you keep the band
Whoop writes your sleep and resting heart rate to Apple Health, so we can read those. It does not write heart-rate variability, because Whoop computes that as RMSSD and Apple Health stores SDNN — two different statistics. Any app claiming to work with your Whoop variability figure is describing something that does not happen. Sleep and resting heart rate are what our short-night rule and our heart-rate comparison actually run on, so it matters less than it sounds, but you should hear it from us rather than find out.
What you get back
An Apple Watch already measures heart rate, heart-rate variability and sleep, and writes them into Apple Health. That is enough to know whether this morning is below your own normal. It is not enough for a live strain target.
Side by side
| Whoop | IntentNorth | |
|---|---|---|
| What it needs | The WHOOP band. The App Store listing says the app “requires a WHOOP wearable”. | An iPhone. It reads what Apple Health already has, including an Apple Watch if you wear one. |
| What it costs | A membership, per year. Vendor pages would not load for us; the figures we could source were about A$299, A$399–419 and A$599 a year depending on tier. | A$89.99 a year, or A$14.99 a month, or A$249 once. No hardware. |
| Without paying | No app. One free month is offered with the band. | The interview, your first insight, the day’s shape, and every urge and reset tool — permanently. |
| Where your data goes | Its App Store label lists health, location, contact, content, identifiers, usage, sensitive info and diagnostics as linked to you, across advertising and analytics. | No account. Device ID only, not linked to you. Health data is read on the phone and stays there. |
| What it does with the reading | A recovery score and a live strain target through the day. | Changes your actual session and the rest of the week, and writes the reason on it. |
Whoop’s prices are the least certain thing on this page. Its own pages would not load for us, so those figures come from search snippets and a third-party report that disagree with each other. Check them at whoop.com before deciding anything.
If you only want the number, we are not the cheapest
Athlytic reads your Apple Watch and gives you a recovery score and an exertion target for A$45.99 a year — half our price — and its App Store privacy label reads “Data Not Collected”, which is the strongest label in this category and stronger than ours. If a daily readiness number is all you are replacing, that is the honest recommendation and we are not it.
Where we are different
A readiness score tells you today is a bad day. It does not change what you were going to do about it. IntentNorth takes the same reading and rewrites the session — the hard lifts stay, the smaller exercises come out, the session shortens rather than gets cancelled — and then places it in a week that also contains your meals, your focused work, the practices you have added and the people you live with. That is the difference, and it is the only reason to pick us over a cheaper score.
The honest summary
- Keep Whoop if continuous, all-day sensing is what you are paying for.
- Buy Athlytic if you want a daily readiness number off your Apple Watch, cheaply, and nothing else.
- Try us if the number was never the problem — if what you actually wanted was for something to change the plan when the number is bad.
See how IntentNorth plans a week →
What we read from Apple Health, and which devices send it →
Facts about other apps come from their Australian App Store listings and published pages as at 7 September 2026, recorded in our competitive review. Prices and privacy labels change; check them yourself before buying. Nothing here is a recommendation about your health.