2026 Comparison
Best Commander Life Tracker Apps (2026)
The short answer: TurnZero HQ is our pick, and it's free on iOS, Android and the web. It tracks life and Commander damage like every counter here, then keeps going — one join code for the whole night, live standings across every pod, deck MMR, and an AI recap when it's over. Lifetap, Lotus, Carbon, Lifelinker, Mythic Tools and Playgroup.gg are all worth trying too, and all are free to start: Playgroup.gg is the other one built around a session rather than a game; Lifetap and Lotus have the deepest single-game counters; Mythic Tools pairs a customizable counter with a card scanner that pulls prices and rulings; Carbon and Lifelinker are the fastest to pick up and put down. Here's how they actually differ.
Our pick
TurnZero HQ
Best for playgroups who want the whole night tracked, not just one game
TurnZero HQ handles life totals and Commander damage at the table like any good tracker, but it's built around the idea that a Commander night is more than one game, and more than a scoreboard. One join code brings the playgroup into a shared night that splits into as many pods as the room needs, all feeding live standings, while Moments capture the big plays as a shared feed tagged to the turn they happened. Every deck earns an Elo-style MMR from real results, friends can follow the night live from home, TV mode puts it on a screen, and AI writes a recap of each game and the night. Free to use, supports 1v1 up to six-player pods and Two-Headed Giant.
Lifetap
Best for a clean, no-frills counter with a lot of counter types
Lifetap is a fast, free, ad-free life counter that supports up to six players plus Planechase, Archenemy, and Bounty variants. It tracks a wide range of counters (Infect, Treasure, Experience, Commander tax, Monarch, Initiative, Energy, Day/Night) and lets you set card art as a background for each player. Recent updates added a searchable game history with per-deck win rates.
TurnZero HQ vs. Lifetap →Lotus
Best for players who want card search and prices built in
Lotus is a free all-in-one companion that covers life totals, Commander damage across partner commanders, and a wide range of counters, plus card search with prices and legality lookups, dice rolling, and built-in timers. It supports pods up to ten players.
TurnZero HQ vs. Lotus →Carbon
Best for the simplest, fastest tap-based counter
Carbon is a clean, minimal life counter built around fast, intuitive tap controls, supporting up to six players with commander damage and poison tracking. It's especially well-regarded for 2-player Commander and non-Commander formats. Some players report it can't cleanly separate Commander damage from two different attackers hitting the same player in bigger pods, and extras like a monarch marker sit behind a $4.99 Pro unlock.
TurnZero HQ vs. Carbon →Lifelinker
Best for the simplest possible setup
Built by The Command Zone podcast, Lifelinker is intentionally minimal: life totals for 1-6 players, name/color/emblem customization, a dice roller, and match history you can rewind to any prior point. It doesn't break Commander damage out by attacker or track counters beyond the basics, but for a pickup game or a new player, that simplicity is the whole point.
TurnZero HQ vs. Lifelinker →Mythic Tools
Best for card lookup and prices alongside the counter
Mythic Tools bundles a heavily customizable life counter for up to eight players (Commander damage, poison, and Monarch trackers, plus custom art backgrounds, fonts, and animations) with the best card scanner in this list: point the camera at a card in any language and get Oracle text, official rulings, and live prices from TCGplayer and Cardmarket. A free account adds playgroups, friends, decklists, and saved games with per-deck and per-playgroup win rates.
TurnZero HQ vs. Mythic Tools →Playgroup.gg
Best for ELO player rankings and a tunable points system
Playgroup.gg tracks life, Commander damage, poison, and turn times, then layers on ELO leaderboards, custom Leagues (group games however you like, by night, pod size, or format), and a deck power-level estimate benchmarked platform-wide rather than against your own group. It's free for core tracking, runs on desktop as well as mobile/web, and is the closest thing to TurnZero HQ in this list in terms of tracking a whole session rather than one game.
TurnZero HQ vs. Playgroup.gg →Paper, Dice, and a Notepad
Still the baseline every app is trying to beat
Plenty of tables still play with a d20 spindown or a scrap of paper, and there's nothing wrong with that for a casual pod. The tradeoff shows up the moment the table gets loud or a game runs long: dice get bumped, handwriting gets sloppy, and nobody remembers who dealt what Commander damage by turn twelve.
Feature Comparison
Blank cells mean we couldn't confirm the feature at time of writing, not that it definitely doesn't exist. Apps in this space update often.
How to Actually Choose
If your group plays once and moves on, any of these will serve you fine. Pick whichever interface you like best. If you want the deepest single-game counter, Lifetap or Lotus covers the most ground. If you want the fastest, simplest UI, Carbon or Lifelinker will get out of your way. If you want card prices and rulings scanned off your camera at the table, Mythic Tools does that better than anything else here. If you want ELO rankings and to see how your deck stacks up against a broad pool of tracked games, look at Playgroup.gg. If your group has a standing night, a regular table, and decks that stick around for months, the more useful question is which app remembers what happened last time and turns it into a story. That's the gap TurnZero HQ is built to fill.
That gap is mostly social, and it's worth being specific about what it means. A gathering holds as many pods as the room needs, all playing at once under a single standings race, so eleven people across three tables are still one night rather than three disconnected games. Moments give the night a shared feed: a photo, a note, or the exact cards behind a big play, tagged to the turn, with reactions and comments. Friends who couldn't make it can open the app from anywhere and watch it happen live. TV mode puts the whole thing on a screen for the room, and tournament mode adds Swiss-style pairing when a store is running an actual event.
The rest is what survives the night. Every deck earns an Elo-style MMR from real results, globally and inside your playgroup, and keeps a version history so a rebuild's effect is measurable rather than assumed. Personal Mode runs the full tracker scoped to just your seat when the rest of the pod is playing off spindowns, Board State turns a once-a-round photo into an AI-confirmed record of the battlefield, Rulings settles a rules argument with cited sources, and the MCP server hands all of it to Claude and other AI assistants. None of that is what a life counter is for, which is the point.
Worth a quick note: Command Tower is sometimes mentioned alongside these apps, but it isn't a life counter. It's a deck-builder, collection tracker, and price-alert tool. If you're comparing life trackers, it's not really in this race; if you want to build and price a deck before you sit down, it's worth a look alongside whichever tracker you pick for the table.
TurnZero HQ vs. Command Tower →Frequently Asked Questions
What's the best free Commander life tracker app?
Our pick is TurnZero HQ, free on iOS, Android and the web: it does life totals and Commander damage like the rest, and then keeps the whole night — live standings across every pod, shared Moments, deck MMR and AI recaps. TurnZero HQ, Lifetap, Lotus, Carbon, Lifelinker, Mythic Tools, and Playgroup.gg are all free to use as of 2026 (some gate cosmetic extras behind an optional purchase), and the right one still depends on what you want: Lifetap leans into counter variety and card-art customization; Lotus and Mythic Tools add card search and pricing behind a camera scanner; Carbon and Lifelinker are the simplest and fastest to pick up; and Playgroup.gg adds ELO player rankings and a tunable Playscore system.
Do I need an app to track Commander damage, or is paper fine?
Paper works for a casual, quiet table. It gets harder to trust the moment a game gets loud, runs long, or has more than one commander dealing damage to the same player, which is most Commander games by turn eight or nine. An app removes the ambiguity and the arguments.
Can these apps track stats across an entire game night, not just one game?
It varies. TurnZero HQ and Playgroup.gg are both built to connect multiple games into standings and deck records: TurnZero HQ around a single continuous night, Playgroup.gg around user-defined Leagues. Mythic Tools saves every game to a free account and reports win rates per deck and per playgroup, though it doesn't run live standings during the night. Lifetap's recent updates added a searchable game history with win rates by deck. Carbon and Lifelinker are single-game focused. Check the current version of any app before assuming. This is a fast-moving space.
Is Command Tower a life counter app?
No. Command Tower is a Commander deck-builder, collection tracker, and price-alert tool. It doesn't track life totals or Commander damage at the table. It's a different category of tool, useful alongside a life tracker rather than instead of one.
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