Let's start with the thing most comparison pages won't say: Flighty is the best live flight tracker on iOS. If your question is "which app should tell me my gate changed and my inbound aircraft is running late," the answer is Flighty, and this page isn't going to pretend otherwise.
But that's probably not the only question you're asking, or you wouldn't be here. The real question is what you want a flight app for — and it turns out "watch my flight today" and "do something with all the flights I've ever taken" are two different jobs.
The one-sentence version
Flighty tells you about your flight. Row1 turns your flight history into a game.
Row1 turns your real flights into a game: import your flight history from Flighty, Flightradar24, or your calendar, earn XP, collect 304 badges, and share an animated 3D-globe Wrapped video of your year in the sky.
What Flighty does better
Live tracking, and everything around it. Flighty's delay predictions, push alerts, aircraft-position updates, and where's-my-inbound-plane view are genuinely excellent — years of focused engineering, and it shows. If you fly weekly for work and the thing you care about is operational awareness on travel day, Flighty earns its keep.
It also keeps a log of your past flights, with maps and stats, and its "Passport" share card is a nice-looking summary of your travel year.
What Row1 does better
Everything that happens after the flight.
The game layer. Row1 has 304 badges — aircraft types, airports, route milestones, distance thresholds, the works — plus XP, levels, and King of the Route leaderboards where you and your friends compete over who owns a route. Flighty has no equivalent; it's a utility, deliberately so. If part of why you log flights is the collector's itch, Row1 is the only current app built around it.
Wrapped is a movie, not a picture. Flighty's Passport is a static image. Row1's Wrapped is an animated 3D-globe video — your year of routes drawn across a spinning earth, rendered by the app, ready to drop into a group chat or a story. When you've flown somewhere worth bragging about, a video that shows the journey beats a card that summarizes it.
Import breadth. Row1 imports your history from Flighty (yes, really — bring your Flighty export straight in), Flightradar24, your calendar, and forwarded booking emails. Your logbook shouldn't be hostage to any one app. That includes ours: your flights remain your flights.
Price. Most of Flighty lives behind Flighty Pro, which runs about $49/year — the free tier is thin, and plenty of longtime users grumble about where the paywall sits. Row1 is free to download, free to log flights, free to earn all 304 badges, and free to share your Wrapped. The optional Elite subscription adds deeper stats, but the core game — and everything shareable — costs nothing.
Honest comparison
| Flighty | Row1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Live flight tracking | Excellent — best in class | No |
| Delay predictions & alerts | Yes | No |
| Flight logbook | Yes | Yes |
| Badges & achievements | No | 304 badges |
| XP, levels, leaderboards | No | Yes — King of the Route |
| Year in review | Passport (static image) | Wrapped (animated 3D-globe video) |
| Import from other apps | Yes | Flighty, Flightradar24, calendar, email |
| Full experience price | Flighty Pro, ~$49/yr | Free; optional Elite for deeper stats |
| Best for | Travel-day operations | Your flying history, as a game |
The answer most people actually want: use both, or pick by job
These apps overlap on exactly one feature — the logbook — and differ everywhere else. So the honest recommendations look like this:
Notice what's not on this page: we're not claiming Row1 will replace Flighty's tracking, and we never will — building the world's best delay predictions is Flighty's job and they do it well. Our job is the part of your flying life that starts at wheels-down.
Get started
Row1 is free on the App Store. If you're a Flighty user, export your data and import it into Row1 — your entire history, badged and mapped, in minutes. Then generate your Wrapped and see what your year in the sky looks like in motion: row1.app.
Only if you don't need live tracking. Flighty is the better tool for travel-day alerts and delay predictions; Row1 is the better tool for your flight history — badges, XP, leaderboards, and a shareable Wrapped video. Many people use both.
Yes. Export your data from Flighty and import it into Row1 — your full flight history comes across, and badges are awarded retroactively.
No. Row1 is a flight logbook and game, not a live tracker. It's designed to sit alongside trackers like Flighty or Flightradar24 and import from them.
Row1 is free to download and free to log flights, earn all 304 badges, and share your Wrapped video; an optional Elite subscription adds deeper stats. Flighty's full experience requires Flighty Pro at roughly $49/year.
An animated 3D-globe video of your year in the sky — every route you flew, drawn across a spinning globe, rendered in the app and ready to share. Flighty's equivalent, the Passport, is a static image.
Export your data first, then bring it into Row1 — your logbook stays yours, and it keeps growing for free. ---