Best Baby Tracking Apps

Most of the baby tracking apps we evaluated received high scores for features, but their scores for ease of use, ease of setup, and security and privacy varied. Our assessment found that all the applications met modern network encryption standards, which is important when transferring sensitive data, according to Blair. But each app’s privacy and security scores were generally lower than their scores in other categories. Here’s how each app scored in order from best to worst. 

The Huckleberry: Baby & Child app came out as our overall standout. It was the only app to achieve the highest scores in all three of the usability categories, though when it came to privacy and security, it left a lot to be desired. (As it turns out, all the apps have room for improvement in terms of privacy and security.) The free version of this app offers a number of core tracking features, and you may even be able to get away with using it without paying extra fees. But Plus and Premium subscription fees unlock advanced sleep-related tools and the ability to use widgets and live activities on iPhone.

For starters, this is an attractive-looking app, with clean, organized pages and a nearly effortless setup process. Creating an account and your baby’s profile may take a little while, but the app offers clear instructions to walk you through the process. The free version of this app will give you access to most tracking features, including feeding, medications, and play time. However, paying more gives you access to more sophisticated functions. A Plus subscription (which costs $10 a month or $59 a year) unlocks the SweetSpot feature designed for babies over 2 months old; it lets “you know when your child should nap.” A more expensive Premium subscription ($15 a month or $120 a year) includes everything in the Plus subscription, with the added perk of even more sleep-related tools. CR didn’t evaluate the SweetSpot or additional subscription-based features, but users are given a free 14-day Plus membership trial. 

Ritchey’s overall impression of the Huckleberry: Baby & Child app is that it is well designed and its promotion of paid services was subtle enough that it was not annoying, unlike some other apps, including Glow, featured below. With that said, a prominent portion of the home screen is taken up by an ad for the SweetSpot feature. And tracking tools like Sleep and Feeding may appear to some to only be able to log events by using a timer—at least one Huckleberry app user we heard from provided negative feedback about this aspect: “I do love the Huckleberry app, but I would have to say the sleep tracker is kind of frustrating. It works like a timer, and I would much rather input the information because I would start the timer and realize the next day I never stopped the timer.”

Otherwise, logging events as they happen was fairly easy to do, although logging past or multiple events requires more steps and can be annoying. Its graphs are easy to use and boast an abundance of filtering and customization options.

One of the nicest things about the Huckleberry app is that if you’re the type of person who wants an app to deliver the goods without having to spend extra on in-app purchases, you’ll find that the free version of this app satisfies most of your needs. There’s a pumping tracker (with reminders), bottle and breastfeeding trackers, a solid food tracker, a potty tracker, and medication, temperature, and growth trackers. You can create profiles for multiple children (and switching between them is easy to do) and graphs, timelines, and summary data can be filtered and viewed in ranges of seven, 14, and 30 days. 

Downsides include the inability to track developmental milestones using this app. And data can be exported only as a CSV file—converting it to more reader-friendly PDF files is not an option. There’s also no good way to grant access to multiple users, and you’ll just have to share your account information with other caregivers to give them access to it. Users have to share an account email and password—as opposed to properly supporting sharing, which would allow two users to have two independent accounts. “The app should have the ability to easily share log-in or profile data with other childcare providers like parents, grandparents, babysitters, etc.,” one current user said. “It’s frustrating to have to share passwords and then one person gets logged out.”

Plus and Premium subscriptions allow you to unlock the SweetSpot feature, add a widget to the home screen of iOS devices, and enable live activities for nursing and sleeping timers that resemble live updating notification banners. You’ll have to decide whether the perks are worth additional fees, but one note about these upgrades: Ritchey found that the widget tools are sometimes slow to open the specific tracking tool you want to access.

Several people can log into this app at one time—we even tried it out on four different devices and it seemed to work well. “We were just gonna use paper and pen until somebody recommended Huckleberry to us, [we’ve] never looked back,” one user said. “It’s just easy to use. . . . You can share it with other people who might be working with your kid. And you can include anything, food, medicine . . . sleep, all those kinds of things. It’s very helpful.”

Huckleberry has weak security rules, allowing users to create passwords with just six characters and no complexity to them. The app allowed us to set simple, easily guessable passwords such as “111111.” This app was also found to have ad trackers embedded within it, and it doesn’t offer multifactor authentication. On the plus side, it has good encryption of data.

As long as you don’t mind paying a subscription fee after your one-week free trial on iOS and free 20-entry trial on Android (which ranges from $10 to $40, depending on the length of time you want access to the app), Sprout Baby Tracker is an overall solid baby tracking app that supports most users’ needs. Sprout, our second-place app, is relatively easy to use, though some of its tracking tools may take more time to learn. You won’t need to create an account to use it, which can be more convenient for the user, though this detail also negatively affects its privacy and security score.

This is one of the easiest, fastest apps to set up, namely because it doesn’t require users to create an account. However, after entering your baby’s details, the iOS version of the app does immediately push its premium subscription on users, and both Android and iOS versions automatically start a free trial. Once your free trial ends, you won’t be able to log in more information until you pay for a premium subscription, which is offered for a three-month, yearly, or one-time fee. On the plus side, users with whom you share your account will not have to purchase a subscription.

The good news is that your free Sprout trial gives you an opportunity to experience everything the app is capable of if you decide to purchase the premium subscription. The not-so-great news is that it’s less easy to use because logging information such as specific events can take a few extra taps and some icons and buttons lack labels, which means you’ll have to spend time exploring and experimenting to learn what everything does. The nursing timer isn’t intuitive (you have to remember to hit “left” or “right” to start the timer), and some graphs and summaries lack the ability to be interacted with or filtered. There were some differences between the app on Android and iOS, but largely the apps function similarly.

The Sprout app has a ton of features most users will want, including feeding, sleep, diaper, pumping, growth, and milestone trackers. It also has rare features—it’s the only app on this list that can track doctor appointments—as well as export a PDF report specifically designed for doctor’s appointments. However, there are some places where these features could be improved. For example, you can track developmental milestones, which is done with a checklist, but users might not realize how to specify the date the milestone occurred. You also cannot track pumping duration by side in one session, but you can track total volume and volume by side (see screenshot below). If you have an iPhone, the app supports Siri shortcuts and quick tracking by long pressing on the app’s icon on your phone’s home screen.

Sprout is the only app on this list that avoids third-party trackers, and it does a good job of keeping the data on your phone secure. But it has poor targeted advertising controls, and the fact that you don’t need to create an account to use it also means it lacks good authentication practices and multifactor authentication. It’s important to note that the Sprouts iOS app has Google AdMob advertisement trackers. Blair says that seems particularly unusual because the company’s privacy policy states that the information users provide is used only to fulfill their specific request, unless users give permission to use it in another manner—such as ads.

Sprout mentions the use of an analytic service, Google’s Firebase, but fails to disclose AdMob—though it is possible AdMob is utilized without the use of the user-entered data. This differs from the Android version, where it was not seen at all. This is unusual for two reasons, according to Blair: First, they only used AdMob for iOS, and not Android. Second, Sprouts failed to mention an ad tracker embedded in the app but did mention an analytic service in its documentation. This could seem as if it was not disclosed to keep users unaware of it, Blair says.

Scoring slightly lower than the Sprout app in “features,” Ovia has plenty of positive things going for it, including its easy setup, different ways to share access with other caretakers, and the fact that it’s free. If you are serious about analytics and love a good chart, Ovia isn’t the app for you, but it offers quite a few great basic features.

Despite the setup process proving somewhat longer than the other apps, Ovia was found to be the easiest to set up. Ovia does request a lot more information than you might be prepared to give—including asking for your ZIP code so that the app can send you more relevant targeted ads. But the flip side to this is that it’s also transparent about these fields being optional and Ovia explains its intent behind requesting the information, so the user can make a more informed decision while setting up the app. 

If you love simplicity and only need basic tracking options, this pick may be ideal for you. Ovia was the most basic app with respect to its tracking capabilities and features, and was reasonably easy to use. Rather than presenting individual tracking tools on different pages, like other apps do, logging data in Ovia is a bit clunky—you’ll have to fill everything out on one long form throughout the day, and it isn’t always clear which fields are required, which are optional, and which can be filled in. “I think navigating the app can be a little cumbersome at times with Ovia,” said one participant who used the app. “I also feel that entering feeds or growth information can be time-consuming, and I wish it was easier.” 

Finally, there could also be some confusion when it comes to sharing access to your account with other people. Some users might have trouble understanding what non-admin invitees are allowed to do on the app, and managing account access is buried a couple menus deep in your profile—the process of sharing your account with other caretakers isn’t as intuitive as it could be.

If you’re the sort of caretaker who values logging in a lot of details about your baby and their schedule and habits, Ovia may not boast enough rich features for you. It lacks a pumping tracker or timer and, while you can track how many dirty diapers you’ve changed, you can’t specify what time you changed those diapers. It lacks summary data and graphs, which is the biggest difference between this app and the others, and you can only see individual events grouped by day on the calendar tab. You can export your data, but only as a CSV file, not a PDF.

Ovia scored somewhere in the middle in terms of privacy and security— it’s not the best or the worst. It offers secure data and good encryption, but contains third-party trackers and lacks multifactor authentication and targeted advertising controls.

We love an app that’s free, doesn’t push in-app purchases on users, and features a one-time fee (as opposed to subscription fees) to remove ads and allows access to Siri shortcuts and the Apple watch version of the app, if those features are important to you. You can download the free version of this app and then upgrade it or pay for the upgraded Pro version at the start. This simple app came close in scoring with Glow, below, but ranked slightly higher in setup and ease of use. It isn’t the most polished or intuitive, but it offers a robust number of features and is one of the most affordable, even if you count its in-app purchase fee or upgrade fee.

One of the nicest things about the Newborn app is that its setup is simple and you don’t have to create an account to use it. With that said, its setup isn’t without a few hiccups. When you create a profile for your baby, the text fields have labels placed inside the field, but those labels vanish when you begin typing. As a result, once you’re finished inputting your baby’s birth date and due date, you will no longer be able to check those dates because the labels will have disappeared. 

Some of the Newborn app’s icons, on some screens, lack text labels, which affected its score slightly because this can make it more difficult to learn how to use the app. It also isn’t a given that users will know to swipe left or right on weekly or monthly charts to change the dates or tap on the date at the top of the screen to change it. When you’re viewing graphs and charts, you’ll have to manually return to the current date because there’s no faster way to reset the date range, and this can also be frustrating. You can add and manage multiple children, but users may have trouble figuring out that doing this requires tapping on the top section of the home page. Put simply: Some functions just aren’t as intuitive as they could be. 

The Newborn app is rich in features that it doesn’t hold hostage behind paid subscriptions. It has a nursing timer and bottle, pumping, and solid foods trackers, and you can track diaper changes, sleep schedules, growth records, developmental milestones, and medical records like vaccinations and medications (the latter is a less common feature that you won’t find on every app). You can view data by day, week, or month, and export it as a CSV or PDF file. The app’s easy-to-understand graphs and timelines are a standout feature that offer a number of filtering and viewing options. 

If community and resources are a priority, this isn’t the app for you (it lacks tabs for both), but it’s ideal for anyone who wants to focus solely on tracking. One user said that what keeps them using the app is “being able to track both nursing, pumping, diaper changes and sleep all in one place. So that makes it easy for me to remember to input it because it’s all in the same place. I don’t lose anything or get confused. And I just don’t forget because it’s all there and I can pull it back up and see the chart of when everything was.”

Newborn and Hatch Baby tied as the two apps with the lowest security and privacy scores. Newborn was found to have embedded ad trackers and poor targeted advertising controls. Since you aren’t required to create an account to use it, it lacks good authentication practices and multifactor authentication.

You’ll want to love Glow: Track. Shop. Growth. because of its many convenient and useful features, but you may also find it frustrating because it succumbs to annoying, distracting tactics to get you to pay more money to enhance your experience. The app’s charts, graphs, and summaries of the data are good, and it has a standout set of options for exporting data as well, however, those extra export options require the premium subscription. In a nutshell, there’s very little that’s truly free about this app.

The Glow app does boast an easy setup, and the design of its input fields is well done. But you may become fed up by the bombardment of premium subscription ads you’ll encounter during your initial setup. The app also uses less-than-honest tactics, such as promoting an enticing “40% off” offer on the premium subscription that users may think is a monthly charge but that the fine print reveals is a yearly fee. The app requests personal information that isn’t optional, such as your birthday, and even optional information like a request for your address appears on a screen that doesn’t offer a “next” or “skip” button to indicate that it’s optional. This is an example of a deceptive design pattern, one that can result in users being added to mailing lists against their will. Glow’s policy also shows that users’ account and profile data can be used for marketing and advertising as well as disclosed to affiliates, advertising partners, and business and marketing partners, according to Blair.

Even though Glow offers some features in its free version, it constantly reminds you with pop-ups and other distracting notifications that the premium subscription is what you really need to access its content. If you can look past deceptive design patterns, the app is easy to use. If you have a premium subscription, users are able to invite others to log and view data, and this feature works really well. How Glow handles inviting other people is well done and easy for both the user sending the invite and for the invited user to accept (and invited caregivers also have access to the premium features without having to purchase their own subscription).

One of our nonpremium users had this to say about Glow: “There are a lot of different buttons and dropdowns and also a lot of ads mixed in with every feature, so sometimes it is hard to find the exact button you are looking for.”

It’s unfortunate that Glow engages in deceptive design patterns because it’s one of the apps on this list with the most features. Advanced charts, graphs, and the ability to track your baby’s outcomes with other Glow users is part of the premium subscription, as are extra options for exporting your data, which includes in PDF format. The app does have a good set of analysis tools that includes pattern charts, summaries, and even some features that forecast feeding sessions and sleep. We did not evaluate the usefulness or accuracy of these features, and some of them require a premium subscription to gain full access. There’s even a community section where users can interact, though be aware that content isn’t limited to baby care topics, which may be a pro or con depending on your preferences. 

You can use the app to log feedings, diaper changes, sleep patterns, and more. The only minor feature related to tracking that Glow does not support is the ability to time, or log the time, by side when logging a pumping session (only the total pumping session time can be logged; you cannot specify a time for the left and the right side), but you can track total volume while pumping and, optionally, volume by side.

Glow was the only application found to have a way to turn off targeted advertising from within the application. It also offers multifactor authentication. However, it has poor authentication practices and contains third-party trackers.

Hatch was the baby tracking app that received the lowest scores in all categories. Ultimately, there are likely better apps for most users, especially if there are going to be multiple people using the app at once, according to Ritchey. One reason you might want to consider Hatch before the other apps is that it can connect to the Hatch Grow Smart Changing Pad and Scale. Otherwise, it is lacking in data details, can take longer to navigate than other apps, and has poor privacy and security features.

Hatch scored last in our evaluation for a few reasons. For starters, Hatch had one of the least usable setup processes of the apps we evaluated and entering data was more cumbersome. For example, the labels for input fields disappear once you’ve entered data, so it makes it very difficult to check over everything you have entered, especially if you are trying to make sure you put date of birth and due date in the right fields, according to Ritchey. Even though the Hatch Grow Smart Changing Pad and Scale may be perks to using this app, it pushes advertisements for the product in ways that don’t easily allow you to “X” out of the page, which is annoying.

Hatch is a basic app that focuses on tracking and is relatively easy to use. It may require a few more taps than other apps and take a little while to learn to use, but some nice features include the freedom to customize the tracking tools on the bottom navigation bar and the fact that there is a centralized location for graphs and statistics. But this is far from the easiest app to use. “The navigation of the app is a little bit difficult to use,” said one Hatch user. “I wish I had a more streamlined menu function.”

It’s difficult to locate where you can add a caregiver to share access to your data and the setup process for sharing access is cumbersome. Figuring out how to export data also takes time (it’s listed under the settings menu of “Share Hatch Baby,” so it’s not intuitive). The app is slightly different on Android, and iOS has a more easy-to-use interface.

Hatch can track pretty much everything a caretaker would want, including feedings, diapers, sleep, growth metrics, and pumping. (The app doesn’t support logging pumping time for the left and right sides independently but is able to log total volume for a session.) However, there are limitations to what it can do compared with other apps. It offers fewer options for how users can view and filter summary data and graphs and shows summary data for only a seven-day average. You can’t log developmental milestones on the app, and users can track a maximum of two babies. If you have an iPhone, you’ll be able to access some tracking tools by long pressing on the app’s icon on your iPhone home screen. 

When it comes to allowing users to enter passwords that don’t meet industry standards, Hatch was the worst offender on this list, allowing the use of a single character as a password in both the Android and iOS applications (“1” and “a” were used during our testing), according to Blair. Another finding regarding Hatch Baby was that pictures taken with the application (meant to be of the child) were stored in several locations, one of which was a location that other applications could have access to. “We found that behavior to be odd, as the same data was stored in a more secure area of the phone as well,” Blair says. Hatch also lacks multifactor authentication and targeted ad controls.

To evaluate baby tracking apps, we used two small screen size mobile devices that could provide a “worst case” screen size usage: iPhone 13 mini (screen size of 5.42 inches diagonally with iOS version 17.1.1) and Samsung Galaxy S22 (screen size of 6.1 inches, diagonally with Android OS version 13). If significant differences were found between the iOS and Android version of the app during any tasks, the worse of the two versions was used for scoring purposes. All apps were updated to the most recent app version as of Nov. 15, 2023. Prior to the evaluation, 41 current users of these apps were recruited to participate in a preliminary user study so that we could better understand how parents and caretakers use these apps and which features are most important. Their feedback and quotes were used to inform the evaluation. 

To represent the way a caretaker would use each app, Ritchey completed basic setups and created an account and profile for one baby on each app. Once that was complete, the following task were completed using each app.

• Download app
• Create accounts
• Create profile for one baby

• Sleep tracking
• Diaper changes
• Bottle feeding tracking
• Nursing tracking
• Pumping tracking
• Baby’s growth (weight only)
• Viewing graphs, timelines, and summary data
• Setting up multiple users

If tracking your baby’s feedings, naps, and diaper changes gives you a clearer picture of what they need going forward and makes you feel calmer, that’s great. But experts are divided on how well the apps serve caregivers and some advise against becoming too dependent on them. 

Ari Brown, a pediatrician and author of the “Baby 411” book series, told CR she loves baby tracking apps—until she hates them. “Before apps (and smartphones) existed, pediatricians would routinely send new parents home from the hospital with a paper chart to track their newborn’s feeding and ‘output’ (aka pees and poops),” Brown says. “For the first couple of weeks of life, we want to make sure a baby is eating often enough to grow and appropriately get rid of body waste. With breastfeeding, one cannot tell how much volume of milk a baby is taking while nursing at the breast, so tracking those ins and outs is pretty important data to track.”

But once a baby gets past those early weeks, baby app trackers have the potential to become a minor obsession for new parents, Brown cautions. “It isn’t essential to track your baby’s sleep, wake times, or feedings moment to moment or ml to ml,” Brown says. “Unless there are growth issues or sleep issues, it has more potential to be a source of anxiety (than one of comfort)—and there is already way too much of that without an app to fuel it.”

Pediatrician Jaime Friedman tells CR that baby tracking apps can be helpful in those first days and weeks and that in the office, she asks about feeding, wet diapers, and bowel movements. “Many parents will access their apps to give me that information,” Friedman says. “Beyond the newborn period, unless a child has special needs regarding exact volumes of feeds or they take regularly scheduled medications, it’s not likely a tracking app is needed. Even a sleep tracker doesn’t seem necessary as my parents are keenly aware of their baby’s sleep. For acute illnesses, parents tend to keep track of fevers and acetaminophen or ibuprofen dosing on their notes vs. using an app.”

Friedman agrees with Brown that the concern with parents using tracking apps is the hyperfocus and anxiety about information that may not be helpful. “When in doubt, parents can ask their pediatrician what is helpful to track and what is not,” Friedman says.

If you find that you’ve become obsessed with tracking your baby’s every movement and habit, clinical psychologist Rebecca Hershberg, PhD, says she would want to dig a little deeper with that parent and ask what function the app is serving. “You probably have to feel anxiety that your baby is a human being and you can’t control every second of a human being’s life,” Hershberg says. “That’s important anxiety to feel as a parent, and that’s important as your baby gets older, to feel as if they’re going to want more and more autonomy from you. And I think in some ways my advice would be in order to really experience parenthood and to embrace parenthood, the good and the bad and the ugly, it’s important to feel our feelings. And sometimes those feelings are fear or anxiety.”

Hershberg also encourages caregivers to trust themselves and their own instincts, which she says are still superior to apps and technology. “So perhaps you can’t necessarily go cold turkey, but can you, a couple of hours a day, not look at those numbers or set the timer on a particular app so that you can check it maybe once or twice a day, but no more?” Hershberg says.

At the end of the day, if an app can keep you on track during those first few hectic months of raising a baby, effortlessly share your data with other caretakers, or if you simply enjoy the process of tracking their milestones as they grow, there are several out there that offer an abundance of great features. Keeping perspective on how much data you truly need and whether the security and privacy risks are worth it while reaping the benefits of these apps may be the best compromise of all.