Fairway vs Golf Pad: Which Golf GPS App Fits a Casual Golfer?
Comparing Fairway and Golf Pad for everyday golfers: what's free, what costs extra, and which app skips the stats-heavy clutter.
What Golf Pad's free version actually gives you
Golf Pad's free tier covers the basics: GPS yardages to the front, middle, and back of the green, a scorecard for up to four golfers, and aerial views of the hole. The catch is ads. The free version shows ads while you're trying to check a yardage or log a score, and a foursome of five or more golfers doesn't fit in the free scorecard at all.
What you pay for with Golf Pad Premium
To drop the ads and unlock extras, Golf Pad Premium runs about $29.99 a year. That gets you green contours, offline course maps, a bigger scorecard for up to eight players, and stat tracking like strokes gained and shot dispersion. Those extras are built for golfers chasing small performance gains round over round. If you're playing for fun and just want to know the distance to the pin, most of that $29.99 a year is paying for features you'll never open.
Where Fairway is different
Fairway skips the tiers entirely. One payment of $0.99, one time, no yearly renewal to remember. You get GPS yardages, a digital scorecard, and course maps, the three things golfers actually use during a round. There's no ad break while you're lining up a shot, no stat dashboard to ignore, and no upgrade prompt asking you to pay more later.
Which one should you pick
If you're a competitive or low-handicap golfer who tracks strokes gained and wants shot-by-shot analytics, Golf Pad Premium's extra data can be worth the yearly cost. If you're a recreational or semi-serious golfer who just wants accurate yardages and an easy way to keep score without managing a subscription or a stats dashboard, Fairway is built for exactly that, at a fraction of the cost.
Fairway keeps a round to three things: yardages, a scorecard, and course maps.
Get Fairway for $0.99