golfity vs The Grint: Which Tracks Your Game Better?
The Grint built its reputation on handicaps, leagues, and a busy social feed. golfity built its on strokes gained. Both log your round in a couple of minutes, but they answer completely different questions about it.
Search for golf apps and The Grint shows up fast. It launched in 2011, has millions of registered golfers, and owns a very specific corner of the market: handicaps, leagues, and the group you play with every weekend. golfity vs The Grint is a fair comparison to make, because both are phone-only apps with a free tier, and both will have your round logged before you finish the beer at the turn.
They diverge on what happens to that round afterward. The Grint turns it into a handicap and a leaderboard position. golfity turns it into a strokes gained breakdown that tells you which part of your game cost you the most shots. Neither is wrong. They are built for different golfers.
What Each App Is Actually Built Around
The Grint is a scoring and community platform. Post a score, get a handicap calculated with World Handicap System math, see how you stack up against your friends, join a league or an online tournament. Score verification, where a playing partner or a scorecard photo backs up what you posted, is a real feature and matters to the people who play in those competitions. GPS yardages cover tens of thousands of courses.
golfity is an analytics platform that happens to keep your scores. Every shot you log feeds a strokes gained engine built on the research Mark Broadie published in Every Shot Counts. You get your index too, but the index is a byproduct. The product is knowing that your approach play cost you 4.1 shots last month while your putting was fine.
That difference explains almost every other difference below.
golfity vs The Grint on Stats Depth
The Grint tracks the traditional counting stats: fairways hit, greens in regulation, putts per round, up-and-downs, sand saves, penalties. Its deeper stat views sit behind GrintPlus, the premium tier that runs roughly $40 a year.
Counting stats have a known blind spot. Two golfers shoot 88 on the same course. Both hit 6 greens. Both take 33 putts. On a traditional dashboard their rounds are identical.
Run the same two rounds through strokes gained and they are nothing alike:
| Golfer A | Golfer B | |
|---|---|---|
| Off the tee | -1.2 | -2.0 |
| Approach | -4.3 | -1.1 |
| Around the green | -1.8 | -1.4 |
| Putting | +0.4 | -3.2 |
Golfer A has an iron problem. Golfer B has a putting problem and should not spend another minute on the range hitting 7-irons. The 6 GIR and 33 putts told them nothing, because 33 putts after missing every green from 40 yards is good putting, and 33 putts after hitting six greens to 15 feet is bad putting. Strokes gained separates the two by measuring every shot against the distance and lie it started from.
golfity calculates that split in four categories, off the tee, approach, around the green, and putting, on the free tier. You can also choose the benchmark you are measured against: PGA Tour, scratch, or a 5, 10, 15, 20, or 25 handicap. For a 17-handicap, seeing shots gained against other 17-handicaps is far more useful than seeing a wall of red against tour pros. There is a longer argument for that in why comparing to a 10 handicap can be better than comparing to a pro.
Handicap Tracking
This is where The Grint has the stronger claim.
Both apps compute an index from your posted scores using WHS math, so the number itself will track closely. The Grint goes further on the social and administrative side: verified scores, handicap-based net competitions inside the app, and a workflow designed for groups who play for something. If your Saturday game settles bets on strokes, that infrastructure is genuinely useful.
golfity gives you the index and the course and playing handicap for whatever tee you play, but it does not run leagues or verify scores against a playing partner. If you want to understand what the number is made of, how to calculate your golf handicap walks through the differentials.
What Logging a Round Looks Like
Both apps are manual entry. Neither uses sensors or club tags, so the comparison comes down to how much you type and what you get for it.
The Grint asks for your score per hole, plus optional stat toggles for fairway, GIR, putts, and penalties. Fast, and you can stay at score-only if that is all you want.
golfity asks for slightly more, because strokes gained needs the starting point of each shot. You log distance and lie as you go, which takes roughly 3 to 5 minutes spread across 18 holes. If that feels like too much on a given day, you can skip club and accuracy detail and still get your full strokes gained numbers. The extra taps are the price of the analysis, and they are the reason the app can tell Golfer A from Golfer B.
Social Play and Community
The Grint wins here without much argument. The feed, the group chat, the leagues, the online tournaments, and the sheer size of the user base make it a place to play with people, not just record what you did.
golfity keeps social light. You can compare your stats against another golfer and share a round, but there is no feed to scroll and no tournament system. If community is the reason you open a golf app, that is a real gap.
Cost Over Three Years
| App | Upfront | Ongoing | 3-Year Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Grint | $0 | ~$40/year for GrintPlus | ~$120 |
| golfity | $0 | $0 for core strokes gained | $0 |
The free versions are not equivalent. The Grint’s free tier gives you scoring, handicap, and basic stats, with the deeper stat views and ad-free experience on GrintPlus. golfity’s free tier includes the strokes gained analysis, round history, club stats, and CSV export. The paid tier adds extras rather than unlocking the analytics.
Who Should Pick Which
Choose The Grint if your golf is social and competitive. Leagues, verified scores, a handicap your buddies trust, and a feed full of people you play with. It does that better than golfity does, and the stat tracking is enough if you mainly want to know your fairway and GIR percentages.
Choose golfity if you want to know why you shot what you shot. Shot-level strokes gained on the free tier, benchmarks matched to your handicap rather than to tour players, and data you can export and keep. It is the better tool for a golfer whose main goal is getting better rather than getting matched.
Plenty of golfers run both. Post scores in The Grint for the league, track shots in golfity for the analysis. That costs nothing beyond a few extra taps and about five minutes.
If you have never seen your game split into strokes gained categories, put one recent round through the strokes gained calculator before you commit to either app. Most golfers find the number that surprises them is not the one they have been practicing. For a wider look at the field, including Arccos, Shot Scope, 18Birdies, and Golfshot, see our honest comparison of the best golf stats apps in 2026.
