Here's a scene every grappler knows. Class ends, you learned a beautiful three-step guard pass, you drive home replaying it in your head — and by Thursday it's gone. Not "a bit fuzzy." Gone. Research on skill retention says this is completely normal: without deliberate review, most of what you learn in a single session evaporates within days. We've written before about why you forget techniques after class, and the fix is unglamorous: write things down, drill them again, and keep doing that for years.
That's exactly the gap BJJ apps exist to fill. Your phone is already in your gym bag, and the right app turns it into a training journal, a drill coach, and a technique library. The wrong app turns it into another $10/month subscription you cancel in February.
We build one of these apps, so let's get the disclosure out of the way: we're biased, and we still think we win this comparison comfortably. DrillBuddy is completely free — every feature, no limits, no premium tier — and most of what it does is exactly what other apps put behind a paywall. But this isn't a hit piece. The other apps below are genuinely good at what they do, and depending on what you need, some of them are worth your money. Here's the honest tour.
What a BJJ app actually needs to do
Before the list, a filter. Strip away the marketing and there are only a few jobs that matter:
- Capture what you learned before you forget it — techniques, details, what worked in rolling.
- Structure your drilling — steps, reps, rounds, timers, so practice is deliberate instead of vague.
- Keep a library you can come back to — your techniques, your drills, your history, searchable and organized.
- Stay out of your way. If logging a session takes five minutes, you'll stop after two weeks. Friction kills training journals faster than laziness does.
Generic fitness apps fail on all four — a treadmill tracker has no concept of a berimbolo. So the real contest is between the BJJ-specific apps.
1. DrillBuddy — best overall, and completely free
Yes, it's ours. Judge the pitch on its merits.
DrillBuddy is built around one idea: consistent, deliberate drilling is what actually makes you better, so the app should make drilling and logging effortless. Concretely:
- Build custom drills with individual steps, rounds, and timers — gi or no-gi. Break a submission into its component movements, drill each one, then chain them back together. (This is the whole philosophy behind why drilling beats rolling for beginners.)
- Train in real time with built-in timers and step tracking, so mid-session you're thinking about technique, not your stopwatch.
- Log every session — rounds, rest times, total mat time — and watch your history and consistency build up over weeks.
- Keep a personal library. Every move, drill, and session you create is saved, organized, and yours to revisit. This is the feature that quietly matters most: six months in, your own library becomes the best instructional you own, because it's made of things you actually learned.
- Import pro-level drills from a curated collection when you don't feel like building your own.
- Plus the small stuff that adds up: session sharing, smart session titles, everything working offline in your gym's dead-signal basement.
And the part that genuinely sets it apart: all of it is free. Not "free tier with limits." Not "free for 14 days." There's no subscription, no locked features, no cap on how many drills or sessions you can log. The features other apps sell as premium — unlimited logging, custom drills, progress stats — are just... the app. We built DrillBuddy because we wanted it for our own training, and a training tool you have to ration defeats its own purpose.
The honest caveat: DrillBuddy is a training tool, not a video instructional platform. It won't teach you a new guard system — it helps you retain and drill the one your coach is teaching you. For instructionals, see entries 5 and 6.
2. BJJ Notes — solid journaling, at a price
BJJ Notes is a well-made digital training journal: log sessions, define techniques you want to master, track injuries, set goals. If your style is long-form written reflection after class, it does that well. The catch is the business model — the good features sit behind a subscription (around $7/month), which is $84 a year for a notebook. It's a nice notebook. But it's a notebook.
3. MatTime — progress tracking with a lifetime price
MatTime leans into motivation: belt progression tracking, a "10,000 hours" mastery visualization, multi-gym support, and community features. Its one-time price (about $10 lifetime) is refreshingly fair in a subscription-soaked market, and if watching a big progress number climb keeps you showing up, that's worth ten dollars. It's lighter on the drilling side — it tracks that you trained more than it structures how you train.
4. Marune — the social network for grapplers
Marune is less a training tool and more an Instagram-for-grapplers: share training clips, follow teammates, log sessions socially. The base app is free with a premium "Peak" subscription for advanced statistics. If the social loop motivates you, it's a pleasant corner of the internet. If you want structured drilling and a technique library, it's not trying to be that.
5. Submeta — the best instructional subscription
Different category, worth knowing about. Submeta is Lachlan Giles' instructional platform: structured courses from world-class competitors, organized like an actual curriculum instead of a six-hour video dump, for roughly $20–25/month. As a way to learn new material, it's probably the best value in online BJJ instruction. Pair it with a drilling app (ahem) to actually retain what you watch — watching technique videos without drilling them is the BJJ equivalent of buying cookbooks and ordering takeout.
6. BJJ Fanatics — own your instructionals
BJJ Fanatics is the à-la-carte option: buy individual instructionals from names like Danaher and Gordon Ryan, own them forever. Individual titles run from about $27 into the hundreds, and the eternal sales rotation means nobody should ever pay full price. Great when you want to go deep on one specific system; expensive as a general learning strategy.
The bottom line
If you want to learn new techniques from elite instructors, a Submeta subscription or the occasional BJJ Fanatics sale is money well spent. But for the app you open after every single class — the journal, the drill builder, the library, the thing that actually compounds over years — the choice is easier than the market wants you to believe, because the best tool in that category doesn't cost anything.
The best BJJ app, like the best training plan, is the one you'll still be using in six months. Free removes one excuse. Fast logging removes another. After that it's on you — and if you want help making it stick, start with a five-minute daily drilling habit and a proper training journal routine.
Download DrillBuddy on the App Store — it's free, it'll stay free, and your future self will thank you for every drill you log today.
Prices and features checked July 2026 and may have changed — check each app's store listing for current details. And yes, DrillBuddy is our app; we've tried to be fair to everyone else anyway.
Sources: Best BJJ Apps in 2026 (MatTime), 7 Best BJJ Apps (BJJ Notes), Marune, Submeta review and pricing (BJJMore), BJJ Fanatics pricing overview (BJJ Success).
