Best Pregnancy Tracking Apps

Most of the apps evaluated by Kathy Trieu, a user experience researcher on CR’s Consumer Experience and Usability Research team, were relatively easy to use. But they differed (sometimes considerably) when it came to the features they offered, how inclusive they were, and how they handled complications, including miscarriage.

Similar to the outcome of our evaluation of baby tracking apps, CR’s Justin Stewart found that all of these apps were mostly disappointing as far as privacy and security, and this is something to keep in mind before deciding if you want to download one of them to use throughout your pregnancy. Here’s how each pregnancy tracking app scored in order from best to worst.

Although advertisements and promotional copy are embedded throughout the app, including the initial account setup, CR’s User Experience researchers didn’t consider these a deal breaker. You’ll have to decide for yourself if you find these ads too distracting. A 32-year-old What to Expect user told CR, “I would get rid of the sponsored content and/or move the advertisements to a specific tab that would not clutter the main feed.”

This app boasts impressive features, including a fun one that lets you compare the size of your fetus to a reference item that you choose, like fruit or a movie, and movie/TV props such as Clark Kent’s glasses or Cher’s cell phone in Clueless. It features a wealth of practical information about your pregnancy, such as weekly updates on the development of your fetus and changes in your own body, such as new pregnancy symptoms and appetite changes, and it delivers information in the form of articles and videos. Two impressive features are a search function that allows you to look up specific topics and a community feature where users can read and respond to other users’ posts and questions.

In addition to a due date calculator, there’s information for alternative ways of conceiving, such as resources linking to an in vitro fertilization (IVF) due date calculator and articles on surrogacy and fertility treatments. One area where this app could be improved is that it doesn’t offer some tracking capabilities that our participants considered to be important, such as tracking doctor appointments and pregnancy milestones, though it does offer capabilities such as the ability to track pregnancy symptoms and weight. “I feel like it’s a solid app,” a 37-year-old What to Expect user told CR. “There are so many unique features to this app that traditionally you would need multiple apps for. It gives you all the things you need in one place.”

Inclusivity in pregnancy tracking apps is important because when information is targeted at your specific demographic, it can be more relevant to your needs and foster a stronger sense of belonging. What to Expect’s app scored high in inclusivity thanks to its educational articles that incorporate pregnancy information on different racial and ethnic minority groups. For example, there are articles that address postpartum depression among Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) parents and the role of doulas and midwives in pregnancies among American Indian and Alaska Native parents. There are also articles and visual content on pregnancies that are relatable to LGBTQ+ couples and a few articles that address expectant parents over the age of 35. It offers more content for this last age group compared with the other apps we evaluated.

What to Expect Pregnancy & Baby Tracker’s privacy and security scores were not as high as its other scores and there are a few concerns to note. Like all of the apps on this list, it encrypts all network traffic, which is important when transferring sensitive data. It also offers a way to disable targeted advertising on Android and iOS. But it has targeted advertising trackers and doesn’t support multifactor authentication. (To be fair, this is true of all of these apps.) Both What to Expect and Ovia have Android mobile apps that store sensitive user data unencrypted on the device, including information about a pregnancy due date, a baby’s name, personal health information, and whether the pregnancy is “active.”

Pregnancy complications are not the most joyful of topics to discuss, but they can happen—and, if they do, it’s really nice to have an app that handles complications and loss with sensitivity. What to Expect stands out from the other apps in how it handles them. Users experiencing a loss can report the event on this app and can immediately see condolence messages. They’re notified about the option to continue using the app in its healing mode. In that mode, the app’s main screen changes to show recommendations on supportive community groups, educational articles, and resources on coping.

Another thoughtful response is that users are then explicitly reassured by the app that they will no longer receive pregnancy newsletters, notifications, or partner emails, but that the user will continue to get group digest emails. (CR didn’t monitor the emails after reporting a loss during this evaluation.) This process can be comforting to those who are grieving. The illustrations, colors, and language used can help a sensitive situation like this feel more calming and less overwhelming.

Ovia Pregnancy has a good onboarding experience. It explains how to use certain features and why the app is requesting specific information during setup. There are advertisements on the main screen, and one ad, in particular, is placed at the top of the screen, making it one of the first things users see when they open the app. There are also ads in the educational articles and community section. Depending on your personal preferences, you may find these advertisements distracting or not a big impediment to your enjoyment of the content.

Ovia is the standout app when it comes to features and functions. It offers a lot of tracking capabilities—perhaps an overwhelming number for anyone who wants a basic app. The app features an impressive 13 different health categories to track daily or as needed, including mood, symptoms, blood sugar, sleep, and nutrition. You can track doctor appointments, pregnancy-related milestones, and more. Its nontracking features include a due date calculator, a calendar, information on how the expectant parent’s body is changing, and options to compare the size of your fetus to reference items like fruit and vegetables and Parisian bakery foods like a macaron or crêpes Suzette.

There are some aspects of inclusivity on the Ovia app, including educational articles that discuss pregnancy information related to Black people, parents over age 35, and LGBTQ+ parents. But there are only a few of these articles, and we were unable to find those for any other racial and ethnic minority groups. On the plus side, the visual content on several racial and ethnic minority groups—for example, images of Black providers, pregnant Black and Asian parents, and individuals with varying skin tones—is embedded throughout the app.

Ovia encrypts all network traffic and is the only app on this list that has good authentication practices that include brute force protection and complex passwords. It doesn’t support multifactor authentication, though, and you can disable targeted advertising only if you’re using this app on iOS.

Although Ovia acknowledges pregnancy complications, it falls short in some of the ways that it handles loss. In contrast to some of the other apps, Ovia doesn’t offer a supportive mode after reporting a loss. Users see a smaller message that confirms they’ve reported the loss on the specified date, but the process can be painful for some users because Ovia requires that they indicate the date of loss without context from the app about why this is requested or required.

You can find articles on Ovia about conditions like preeclampsia and gestational diabetes. The app sends you a condolence message and claims to stop sending emails and updates related to pregnancy, though it doesn’t explicitly indicate a time frame. But there’s room for improvement when it comes to how Ovia handles complications and loss.

Setting up the BabyCenter Pregnancy Tracker is fairly intuitive. But the main issue you may encounter is that you’ll have to get past two screens, including one that’s very long and contains freebies and promotional content, before reaching the main screen. The main screen then contains even more content you may not want to see, such as commissioned and recommended products, while advertisements are seen on the main page, in educational resources, and in the community section.

The BabyCenter app has a number of useful features including symptom tracking, the ability to compare the fetus to fruit (there are no options to change the category as you’ll find on the other apps), educational material about the fetal development stages, and a due date countdown. It lacks several tracking features that participants considered to be important, such as tracking weight, feelings, and doctor appointments. You have access to a due date calculator only once during the initial account setup, where you can plug in your due date or select the date of your last period. If you find out later you were off by a few days, the app allows you to edit your due date, but there’s no due date calculator feature to help you with this, which may be frustrating.

Here’s where BabyCenter shines: It incorporates different races, ethnicities, and cultures into its context. For example, some of the articles discuss baby names inspired by different cultures, and hair-care tips for Black and Hispanic babies. There are also various articles that relate to LGBTQ+ parents and a few (though not as many) for parents over 35.

BabyCenter encrypts network traffic and is the only app on this list aside from What to Expect that offers ways to disable targeted advertising on both iOS and Android. On the other hand, it doesn’t support multifactor authentication and contains third-party trackers.

BabyCenter provides educational articles on complications like preeclampsia and uterine inversion. Users can report a loss and after doing so, they immediately receive a condolence message. The app claims that users will no longer receive emails and updates regarding the pregnancy. BabyCenter gives users the option to either keep or remove the pregnancy information in their profile. Reporting a loss can be done in just a few steps, but there’s no supportive mode afterward, as with some of the other apps, which may not be ideal for some users who are grieving and prefer more support.

We discovered an unfortunate occurrence while evaluating how the app handles pregnancy loss. We opted to remove the pregnancy from our profile, but the main screen continued to show an active pregnancy along with its prior content, which could be painful for users.

The Pregnancy+ App isn’t difficult to use but setting it up presents a few challenges. For starters, there are advertisements on the main screen that blend in with the layout and also take up space—these ads can also appear in educational articles. When we tried to access some of the app’s educational articles, the app responded by showing error messages.

One of the most useful features of this app is the ability to track doctor appointments and weight, compare the fetus’s size to fruit, dessert, or an animal, information about fetal development stages, a due date calculator, and a pregnancy length tracker. Pregnancy+ lacks some of the tracking capabilities that participants considered to be important, such as tracking symptoms and feelings.​​ It also lacks a search function, and you can’t access all of the educational articles and videos unless you accumulate a certain number of points, which you earn by completing certain tasks, such as watching advertisement videos on the site.

Pregnancy+ does a very good job of reflecting different races and ethnicities. There are articles describing pregnancy superstitions reflecting Mexican, Nigerian, and Polish cultures, and the role of acupuncture as a traditional Chinese medicine practice in pregnancy. The app also has an article section tailored to LGBTQ+ families, along with visual content. It could be better at reflecting the needs of parents ages 35 and older, as it lacks resources for this age group.

Pregnancy+ has good encryption practices but lacks a way to disable targeted advertising. It features third-party trackers, lacks strong authentication practices, and doesn’t offer multifactor authentication.

The app contains educational resources related to complications, such as articles on ectopic pregnancies and stillbirth, and mostly handles complications and loss with empathy and sensitivity. Users who experience a loss can report it and will then receive a condolence message and their main screen will convert into one that shows several supportive educational articles. If you choose to continue using the app, it will be in this supportive mode.

During our evaluation, we found two potential issues with this mode. The first is that reporting a loss is done by turning on a toggle feature, which can seem insensitive for some users because if they toggle the feature back “off,” they’ll return to the app’s prior state when the loss wasn’t reported—and will have the same app experience as before their loss. Also, users aren’t explicitly notified that they will no longer receive updates or notifications regarding their pregnancy.

Each of the pregnancy apps were first evaluated on specific tasks using an iPhone 13 mini with a screen size of 5.42 inches diagonally while running iOS version 17.3. They were then evaluated on a Samsung Galaxy S22 with a screen size of 6.1 inches diagonally while running Android OS 14. Devices with smaller screens were purposely used to account for any challenges the user might face on devices with smaller screens. The tasks CR evaluated included: 

Ease of use: How easy it was to complete account setup and common tasks like assessing an educational article to read and comparing the size of the fetus to a reference item.

Features: How well the app’s features and capabilities addressed the common needs and desires of expectant parents, such as calculating the due date and tracking symptoms. 

Handling of complications: How well the app handled pregnancy complications and loss situations, including access to related educational resources and reporting a loss. 

Inclusivity: How well the app broadly incorporated race and ethnicity, age, identity, and sexual orientation into aspects like visual content and educational resources. 

Privacy: How well the app allowed users to control the way their data is tracked and stored and whether the app included embedded trackers. 

Security: Whether data was secure at rest and in transit, and whether the company disclosed what data was collected and with whom it was shared.

Additionally, the evaluation incorporated insights from 36 participants ranging from 28 to 39 years old, who participated in a remote user study in February and March of 2024. They were either currently using one of the four pregnancy tracking apps or had used them in the past. Some parts of the feedback from participants were directly used to come up with the features score for each app. Other feedback from the participants was used to help the User Experience Researchers create a user-centered evaluation based on what participants said was most important to them to have in a pregnancy tracking app.

Your doctor will likely not be surprised that you’re using a pregnancy tracking app, but that doesn’t mean they won’t have thoughts about it. Nathaniel DeNicola, MD, chief medical officer at the Caduceus Medical Group in Orange County, Calif., says he has come to expect that patients are using more than one app to track their pregnancies and health because the apps are “ubiquitous.” He suggests that doctors ask their pregnant patients which apps they’re using to find out what they’re tracking. DeNicola raised particular concerns about apps that say they can help monitor a fetal heartbeat. (None of the apps we evaluated included this feature and it wasn’t a part of the evaluation.) 

“There are a number of apps that either claim to have a plug-in into the phone that will hear the heartbeat, the baby’s heartbeat, or will actually use the phone itself, like the microphone as an amplifier, and claim to track the baby’s heartbeat,” DeNicola says. “That’s a clinical outcome that if you get the wrong answer, it’s a critical consequence. And those are the ones we’re most worried about.”

“If you’re off by, I don’t know, 10 decibels in the heartbeat,” he says, “and you confuse Mom’s heartbeat as a baby’s heartbeat and the baby’s actually in distress and you don’t know it, that’s critical.”

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion, some app users expressed concern that apps like those that track your period and pregnancy could collect health data that may then be used against them in criminal and civil court cases if they ever sought an abortion.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that concern about pregnancy apps and how much of your data a state can access varies from app to app and depends on its privacy policy. According to Galperin, once you’ve shared your data with a third-party app, if governments or law enforcement want to see it, they have to send a court order to the company that made the app, and it’s up to them to decide whether to give them your data—or to even tell you about it. 

Galperin says some apps (though none we evaluated) have been designed in a way that they don’t have your data. Instead, it’s stored locally on your device so that if governments or law enforcement show up with a subpoena or a warrant, the company can say, "We simply don’t have this," and law enforcement will then have to obtain a court order to access your phone.

All four of the pregnancy tracking apps that CR evaluated contain third-party trackers that can compromise a user’s privacy. The apps reveal to third parties that you’re using an app to track your fertility, and may pass along additional information about your use of it as well, says Justin Brookman, CR’s director of consumer privacy and technology. Some apps have settings for disabling targeted ads, but most do not.

Stewart points out that two apps we evaluated—BabyCenter and What to Expect—contain social media features and share a parent company, Everyday Health, and their privacy policies both mention that they collect data from their associated forums. “Sharing only information that you would be comfortable disclosing if required by law enforcement may provide you some peace of mind when using these apps,” Stewart says.