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Best Free Pet Health Tracker Apps

Published August 18, 2026 · PawLife editorial team

"Free" covers a wide range in this category, from genuinely free with no purchases at all to a trial that locks your data behind a subscription. Here is what each free tier actually includes, read off the App Store listings on August 18, 2026.

App	What the free tier includes	Paid tier
PetDesk	Everything. No in-app purchases at all — but requires your vet clinic to be a partner	Free, no in-app purchases
GreatPetCare	Everything. Free with no in-app purchases, and no clinic partnership needed — records, medication reminders, weight, health journal, recall alerts	Free, no in-app purchases
PokiPaw	Unlimited pets, health and journal features, three-tier vaccination reminders, dose-by-dose medication tracking, expense charts, PDF export, family sharing for 2	Free tier, then $2.99/mo, $24.99/yr
PawLife ours	Feeding plans, health diary, medical records, full food safety database (500+ foods, 300+ brands)	Free tier, then $9.99/mo, $49.99/yr
Pet Care Tracker	Core health records and reminders; avatars, videos and advanced features are separate purchases	Free tier, then $4.49/mo, $39.99/yr
11Pets	Basic health record management; over 50 features and integrations require a subscription	Free tier, then $1.99–$17.99 in-app
Pupill	Core tracking; Pro adds the rest	Free tier, then $1.99/mo, $12.99/yr
Vet Record	Basic records only — cloud sync, PDF export, multi-pet and full weight history are all Premium	Free tier, then $6.99/mo, $24.99/yr

App Store figures were read off the public US storefront on August 18, 2026 and drift over time — check the store page before relying on a figure. We compare capabilities and price rather than star ratings: in this category review volume mostly tracks how an app is distributed, so one handed out by vet clinics collects far more ratings for a narrower product than an independent app does.

What "free" means in this category

Two apps here carry no in-app purchases at all. PetDesk is free because veterinary clinics pay for it — which is also the catch, since it only works if your practice is a partner, and it does nothing between visits. GreatPetCare is free without that condition, and covers records, medication reminders and weight in an English-only interface.

Among the apps with paid tiers, PokiPaw gives away the most: unlimited pets, vaccination reminders, medication tracking, expense charts, PDF export and family sharing for two. Family seats past the second cost $1.99–$7.99/month.

What none of the free tiers include is anything that reasons about your pet. Every one of them is a place to put information you already have. That is a real service and worth having; it is a different thing from being told what the information means.

Watch for the export paywall

The question that matters most about a free tier is not what it tracks — it is whether you can get your data out. Years of weight history and vaccination dates are worth having, and an app that holds them hostage is a bad long-term bet.

Vet Record is the cautionary example here: PDF export and cloud sync are both behind its $6.99/month paywall, and even paying leaves you with caps of ten pets and capped at 90 entries even on Premium. Before you commit, look for export in the tier you plan to actually use.

PokiPaw handles this well, including PDF export in its free tier. PawLife goes at it from the other end: rather than a file dump it generates a health report aimed at a specific vet visit, and lets you filter the diary to the window or the symptom you want to show before sharing. Both beat being locked out of your own history.

Where we sit

PawLife's free tier is the only one on this page that includes a feeding calculator and a toxicity database — 500+ human foods and 300+ commercial brands, free, no subscription. Health diary, medical records and weight history are free too.

What costs money is the AI — the assistant, photo analysis and vet report scanning, at $9.99/month or $49.99/year — because each of those runs a model per request. Export is where that deserves an explanation rather than a shrug, because PokiPaw includes PDF export free and we do not.

The two are not the same thing. A PDF export writes out the records you typed in: no per-use cost, and correctly free. PawLife's vet report is not that. When you tap generate, a model reads the pet's history and writes the narrative — the part a vet actually reads first. That costs us money on every single report, which is why it sits with the other AI features behind Pro rather than being bundled as though it were free to produce.

Being even-handed: the plain diary PDF is Pro today as well, and that one we would defend less hard. It is a deterministic render of your own entries with no model involved. If a free PDF of your own diary is what decides it for you, PokiPaw hands you one and we currently do not.

So the free-tier trade is concrete: ours is the only one here that will work out a portion size and answer a toxicity question without payment; theirs is the one that will hand you a PDF without payment.

You can also read the entire food database on this site without installing anything: the dog food safety guide and the cat food safety guide cover 500+ foods with toxicity ratings and sources.

PawLife is free to download. Feeding plans, the health diary, medical records and the full food safety database work without a subscription.

Get PawLife on the App Store