GallopaBest Horse Riding Apps 2026: An Honest Guide for Equestrians
Search for an equestrian app and you get a wall of horse games, racing apps and a handful of genuinely useful tools mixed in between. This guide covers only the second kind: apps riders actually use for training, tracking and improving. One disclosure up front: Gallopa is our own app, so we name it where it fits and keep the rest of the list fair. Every app here earns its place for a specific kind of rider.
What Makes a Horse Riding App Worth Installing
A riding app deserves space on your phone if it does at least one of three jobs well: it measures your riding (routes, speeds, time in each gait), it teaches you something (structured training content), or it manages the practical side of horse life (health records, schedules). No single app is best at all three, whatever the marketing says, so the honest question is not "what is the best horse riding app" but "best at what, for whom".
| App | Best for | Platform | Price model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gallopa | Automatic gait tracking + AI coaching on your riding videos | iPhone, Apple Watch | Free core, optional Pro |
| Equilab | Established tracking with a large community | iOS, Android | Free core, premium tier |
| Ridely | Structured training videos and programs | iOS, Android | Free download, Pro subscription |
| Sleip | Vet-grade gait and lameness analysis | iOS | Professional/veterinary |
| Equestic SaddleClip | Sensor-based training data | Hardware + app | Sensor purchase |
Gallopa: Ride Tracking Plus an AI Coach
Gallopa is our app, built around two jobs. The first is a horse riding tracker that records your route, speed and elevation by GPS and detects walk, trot, canter and gallop automatically, using your phone's motion sensors as well as speed so a slow canter is not mislabelled as trot. The second is an AI coach: film your riding, and it scores seat, hands, leg, rhythm, transitions and harmony with timestamped feedback.
The honest limits: it is iPhone and Apple Watch only, and it deliberately has no social feed or horse-management features. The core is free with no account; a Pro subscription unlocks unlimited AI video analyses. If you mainly want to know what actually happened in your rides, this is the job it was built for.
Equilab: the Established Tracker With the Big Community
Equilab is the best-known name in ride tracking, with over a million riders, and it earns that position: solid GPS tracking, gait breakdowns, a social feed, stable sharing and safety tracking so family can follow your live location on equilab.horse. If you want your yard friends in the same app and enjoy a community feed, it is the obvious pick.
The trade-offs are the flip side of its breadth: an account is required, parts of the deeper analysis sit in the premium tier, and the app carries the weight of its many features. We wrote a fuller Equilab comparison if you are weighing the two.
Ridely: Training Content Between Lessons
Ridely approaches improvement from the opposite direction: instead of measuring your rides, it teaches. Its library of six-hundred-plus videos from professional trainers, structured multi-week programs, journal and horse health tools make it closest to an online riding school in app form. For riders who want guided homework between real lessons, it is the strongest content library on this list.
It is account-based and most of the value sits in the Ridely Pro subscription, and ride measurement is not its focus, which is why riders often pair it with a tracker. Our Ridely comparison covers that pairing in detail.
Pull-tip: content apps and tracking apps are not rivals. Learn the exercise from a video, then track the ride where you tried it. The lesson tells you what to do; the data tells you whether you did it.
Sleip and Equestic: When You Need Deeper Analysis
Two specialist tools deserve a mention even though most leisure riders will not need them. Sleip is a scientifically validated gait analysis app used by vets and physios: it films a horse trotting in hand and quantifies asymmetry, which makes it a lameness tool rather than a riding tracker. Equestic's SaddleClip is a sensor that clips to the saddle and measures rhythm, symmetry and jumping data with hardware precision, at hardware prices.
If you suspect a soundness problem, those are the class of tool your vet may reach for. For everyday training, a phone-based tracker measures plenty.
How to Actually Choose
Start from your real habit, not the feature lists. If you mostly hack and school and want effortless numbers, choose an automatic tracker and check our guide to which riding metrics are worth tracking. If you are disciplined about structured learning, a content app will serve you better. If you manage several horses across several riders, community and stable features climb the priority list.
Then run a two-week test. Install one app, use it on every ride, and see whether you still open it in week two. An app you check after every ride beats a more powerful one you abandoned, and free cores make this test cost nothing but attention.
FAQ
What is the best horse riding app overall?
There is no single best app, only the best fit for the job. For automatic ride and gait tracking with AI coaching on iPhone, Gallopa is built exactly for that. For a large community and cross-platform tracking, Equilab leads. For structured training content, Ridely has the strongest library. Pick by the job you actually need done.
Is there a free app to track horse riding?
Yes. Gallopa's core is completely free with no account: GPS route, speed, automatic walk, trot, canter and gallop detection, a ride logbook and Apple Watch support. Equilab also offers free core tracking with an account. In both cases optional subscriptions add premium features on top.
What app tells me how much trot and canter I did?
That is automatic gait detection, and it is Gallopa's core feature: it combines GPS speed with your phone's or watch's motion sensors to log real minutes in each gait on every ride. Several trackers offer gait breakdowns; check whether the analysis you want sits in the free or premium tier before committing.
Is there a Strava for horse riding?
The closest equivalents are riding trackers like Gallopa and Equilab: GPS recording, ride history, stats and sharing, adapted to gaits instead of pace splits. The main difference from Strava is that horse riding data needs gait context, since a slow canter and a fast trot can be the same speed but mean very different training work.
If your next step is simply seeing your own numbers, Gallopa is free on the App Store: track a ride, look at the gait split, and you will know more about your riding by tonight than any list of apps can tell you.
Track it, don't guess it.
Gallopa records your route, speed and time in every gait automatically, and its AI coach reviews your riding videos. Free on iPhone and Apple Watch.
Deniz works on Gallopa's gait detection, the system that turns GPS and motion data into walk, trot, canter and gallop minutes. A later-in-life rider who came to horses through sport science, he writes about speed, measurement and what ride data can and cannot tell you, and spends his testing hours in the saddle with a phone in every pocket.