How to choose (and how this list works)
Maintenance apps differ less in features than in philosophy: who holds your data, what happens when you stop paying, and whether the app will still exist in five years. Every app below does the table stakes — service records, reminders, fuel logging. The real questions are the ones burned users ask on forums: Can I get my data out? Is the price one-time or a meter? Is the developer still shipping? We've answered those for each, from public store listings, pricing pages, and user reviews as of mid-2026.
CARFAX Car Care — best free option in the US & Canada
CARFAX Car Care is free, polished, and hugely popular (4.8★ from around 125,000 iOS ratings), with a genuinely unique trick: service history auto-populated from its partner-shop network, plus recall alerts and registration reminders, for up to 8 vehicles. If your cars are serviced at participating US or Canadian shops and you want zero-effort tracking, it's honestly hard to argue with — and we won't.
Its limits are structural. It's a US/Canada product, so most of the world can't use it. DIY and independent-shop work doesn't auto-populate — the very records DIYers care about. And users report that shop-submitted records, including erroneous odometer entries, can't be edited or deleted by the owner. It's a service-history feed you read, more than a log you own; the free price is subsidized by CARFAX's data business.
Drivvo — most features, subscription economics
Drivvo is one of the category giants (5M+ Android installs) and covers everything: services, expenses, income tracking for professional drivers, reports, reminders, and cloud sync. For gig drivers who want income and expense tracking in one place, it's arguably the most complete tool on Android.
The trade-offs show up in reviews: the free tier carries aggressive ads, sync and export sit behind Pro, long-time users report annual prices that climbed from around $6 to $25 or more, and the iOS app had gone a year without an update as of mid-2026. It's a capable app whose economics run on subscription pressure — which is precisely what a share of its own reviewers resent.
Fuelio — best pure fuel tracker
Fuelio (owned by Sygic) is the fuel-logging gold standard: fast fill-up entry, crowdsourced gas prices, trip costs, and active development. If your main question is "what's my real consumption and fuel spend?", Fuelio answers it excellently, and its core has stayed free.
Maintenance, though, is a side feature — service tracking is basic next to its fuel tools — and after a decade fully free, a subscription tier (around $17.99/yr on iOS) arrived in 2023 for the newer conveniences, which didn't thrill legacy users. Great fuel app; not really a service-history tool.
Simply Auto — the cautionary tale
Simply Auto deserves a respectful mention because it validated an idea we care about: its Gold tier was a $9.99 one-time purchase, and users loved that. It also did GPS mileage tracking for tax deduction, which most log apps skip.
But its trajectory is the category's warning label: the iOS app hasn't been updated since March 2022, Android since late 2024, and users have reported broken sync and unanswered support since early 2025 — some losing receipts and records in migration. An abandoned app with your service history inside is exactly the failure mode a maintenance log must not have.
Spreadsheets — the incumbent that never dies
The most popular maintenance tracker is still Google Sheets, and honestly: a spreadsheet is free, infinitely flexible, and fully yours. Its two real weaknesses, documented across every forum thread on the topic, are mileage-based reminders (calendars remind by date; maintenance comes due by distance) and capture friction at the moment of service. If a sheet works for you, keep it — our maintenance log template is a good starting point, and we designed Odobook's CSV both ways around it.
Odobook — our entry, and its honest trade-offs
Odobook is built around one promise: your car's records belong to you. Data lives on your device (no account needed, works offline), CSV export is free forever, the free tier has no ads and no record caps, and Pro — unlimited vehicles, PDF service history report, receipt photos, CSV import, custom categories — is $9.99 once, not per year. The PDF report exists for the moment the log pays off: selling the car with proof in hand, since a documented history can add roughly 10–20% to resale value.
The honest trade-offs: Odobook won't auto-populate records from shops like CARFAX (nothing outside North America does), it doesn't do gig-driver income tracking like Drivvo, and its fuel features aim for "solid" rather than Fuelio's crowdsourced-prices depth. Cloud sync between devices is deliberately not in the one-time purchase — local-first is the default, and if we ever offer optional sync it will be priced separately and honestly, because servers cost money monthly and pretending otherwise is how "lifetime" promises get broken.