Study Tracker With Friends: 6 Apps and What They Share

A study tracker with friends records how long each of you studies and shows it to the rest of the group. Depending on the app, friends see your hours, your streak, a live "studying now" status or your place in a ranking. The six apps below share different parts of that, and the part they share changes how much they help.

We make StudyDuo, one of the six, and describe it the way we describe the others. Everything else was checked on each app's own site or store listing on November 11, 2026. App prices are from the US App Store, LionBot's from its site. For video rooms and quiz apps to use with friends, see Best Apps to Study With Friends.

What each app shares, at a glance

How to pick a study tracker with friends

Start from what your group needs to see.

• Who's studying right now: YPT, Group Study Timer or StudyDuo.
• One stake for the whole group: Forest's Plant Together or Flora's group sessions.
• Your group already lives on Discord: LionBot, which needs no new app.
• Each other, not a number: StudyDuo, where friends see you working on camera.
• Hours by subject, for exam prep: YPT, or Forest's tags for labeling focus time.

The six apps, one by one

YPT

YPT times your study by subject and shares it with friends. Make a group, and you see each member's status and study activity; it also ranks you in real time against others in the same study category. During a focus session, it can block your other apps. Its Android listing counts more than 5 million downloads.

• Friends see: time, subjects and who is studying at this moment.
• Keep in mind: the category ranking puts you next to strangers, and the App Store listing doesn't say what Premium adds.

Forest

Forest's group mode, Plant Together, makes one focus session a shared bet. Everyone in the room grows the same tree, and, in Forest's words, "if one person gives up, everyone's tree dies". Friends join with a room code, and iPhone and Android users can share a room. The free plan also lists friends and a leaderboard, which the Android listing describes as competing with users worldwide.

• Friends see: whether the whole room made it to the end.
• Keep in mind: Forest's pages don't say what the leaderboard ranks.

Flora

Flora grows a tree while you stay off your phone, and its groups go further than Forest's rooms. Its Google Play listing describes study groups where members share tasks, check in on each other's progress and compare weekly or monthly focus time. If you all stay off your phones together, each of you wins an extra tree; in a challenge, everyone sees who killed a tree. A chat lets you post progress.

• Friends see: focus time over the week or month, tasks, and who broke the session.
• Keep in mind: neither listing mentions a leaderboard, so comparisons stay inside your group. The Play listing says Flora has no ads.

StudyDuo

StudyDuo shows friends you, not a number. In Focus Room, open 24/7, your task shows under your name, so a friend who walks in sees what you're working on, and sees you if your camera is on. Follow someone, and you get a notification when they start studying. Time in Focus Room, Study Hour and 1:1 sessions adds up to your study hours, and your highest hours shield shows next to your name. A day with 30 minutes in any room counts toward your streak. Streak freezes cover missed days: two a month on the free plan, five on Premium.

• Friends see: you and your task, live, plus your hours shield.
• Keep in mind: there's no leaderboard and no group page. How the rooms, hours and streaks fit together: the study together app.

LionBot

If your group already studies in a Discord server, LionBot adds the tracker there. It counts time in voice channels and keeps stats by day, week, month and all time, plus a study streak. A server leaderboard ranks members by hours, in seasons you can reset. Focus timers can run inside a voice channel.

• Friends see: everyone's hours on the server board, and streaks.
• Keep in mind: someone who manages the server has to add it, and the Add to Discord button on its site asks for Administrator rights.

Group Study Timer

Group Study Timer is a free web app from a small team that signs itself "team GST". Friends start a synchronized group clock, chat, and see who's actively focusing; the board marks each person as studying or idle, and streaks show as a heatmap. Sessions that go idle are paused, so a forgotten timer doesn't pile up "ghost hours".

• Friends see: live status, hours and streaks.
• Keep in mind: the main board is global, and every detail here comes from its own page.

What research says about sharing study time

No trial has tested a study tracker with friends head-on, but a 2016 experiment with students came close. Jingwen Zhang, Damon Centola and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania put 790 students, average age 25, into an 11-week exercise program. Some saw an anonymous ranking against five peers. Some were put in six-person teams with a chat for encouragement. One group got both, as teams ranked against other teams, and a control group got neither.

Seeing a ranking raised attendance by 90%, whether people competed alone or as a team. The chat without a ranking did nothing measurable; its slight dip below the control group wasn't statistically significant. Every network in the trial, the chat teams included, got a notification when a peer went to a class, so alerts alone weren't what moved people.

A team attached to the ranking seems to matter, though. A 2020 meta-analysis of gamified learning by Michael Sailer and Lisa Homner pooled 40 experiments. For what learners actually did, competition alone came out at g = 0.12, not significant, while competition combined with collaboration reached 0.70. That combined figure rests on three studies, so read it as a lead.

Keep the comparison close, too. Todd Rogers and Avi Feller ran a 2016 natural experiment in an online course with 5,740 students. Those who happened to grade excellent essays by their peers quit in large numbers, and a follow-up study tied it to feeling they couldn't reach that level. Running data point the same way. In a network of about 1.1 million runners, Sinan Aral and Christos Nicolaides found that less active runners influenced more active ones, but not the reverse.

Last, hours aren't learning. In a 2005 study of college students, Elizabeth Plant, K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues found that hours alone didn't predict grade point average. Study time mattered only "when the quality of study and previously attained performance were taken into consideration." A tracker counts the hours; the quality is up to you.

How to set it up with your friends

1. Keep the group small and close in level. Sailer and Homner warn that competition between learners of widely different skill can backfire, because winning looks out of reach.
2. Add a team goal next to the ranking. A shared weekly total, a Plant Together room or a Flora group session gives the group something to win together.
3. Log what you did, not only how long. Write the task, or track by subject, so a long day of the wrong work doesn't look like progress.
4. Agree on what counts. The timer runs only while you work: use app blocking in YPT, or an app that pauses idle sessions.
5. Review after two weeks. Give any study tracker with friends that long, then ask each person whether the board makes them want to study or want to stop. If it's stop, keep the team goal and drop the ranking.

A tracker's other half is the streak; how to build one that survives a bad week is in Study Streak. For the sessions themselves, here are the rules that keep a group of friends working.