How to track strokes gained without sensors or a subscription

April 2026 · 5 min read

Strokes gained is the most useful golf stat ever invented, but the obvious ways to track it (Arccos, Shot Scope, Garmin) all want you to buy hardware and/or pay a yearly subscription fee. You can skip both. Three options, honest pros and cons.

Option 1: A spreadsheet

The DIY route. Build (or find) expected-strokes tables in Excel or Google Sheets, log lie + distance for every shot, and let formulas compute SG per shot. You may be able to track down someone else's published spreadsheet rather than building one from scratch, which saves the worst of the setup work.

Pros: completely free, fully customizable, your data is yours.

Cons: if you can't find an existing template, you have to source or build the expected-strokes reference data yourself, which is the part most people give up on. Mark Broadie's research is published but distilling it into a usable lookup table is a weekend project. Hand entry into a spreadsheet on the course is awkward, so most people end up entering everything at home after the round — which is when memories of specific shots get fuzzy. And you don't get trends, charts, category breakdowns, or any of the dashboards a real app gives you at your fingertips without building all of that yourself. Few amateurs actually keep this up past round 2.

Best for: people who genuinely enjoy spreadsheets and want full control. Otherwise, skip.

Option 2: A "manual entry" tour-stat app

A handful of apps let you enter shots by hand instead of using a sensor. Some still exist, but the category has thinned out as the major brands shifted to sensor-only models or moved manual SG behind a premium tier.

Pros: no hardware, real category breakdowns, mobile-friendly entry.

Cons: most charge a subscription for the SG features, and the SG numbers compare you to PGA Tour benchmarks rather than your own handicap level. (For why that matters, see Why PGA Tour strokes gained benchmarks mislead amateurs.) The tour-benchmark framing makes every amateur's facet look different degrees of bad, which produces generic practice advice. Comparing to an unrealistic skill level doesn't help you identify where your game is actually losing strokes.

Best for: people willing to pay a subscription and who don't mind tour-benchmarked numbers.

Option 3: Data Driven Golf

100% free web app — no premium tier, no upgrade pressure, no hardware, no watch. Calibrated to your handicap and your course, not the PGA Tour. And the entry flow is genuinely fast: lie type and approximate distance for each shot, tapped in after the hole or all at once after the round. Only about 15 seconds of entry per hole once you've done it a couple of times.

The app stores everything, computes SG against an expected-strokes table that's been re-scaled to your target handicap and the specific course you played, and rolls it all up into category breakdowns, trends, and dashboards you can actually act on. Works offline during a round, syncs when you're back on signal.

Pros: completely free, extremely quick shot entry (~15 seconds per hole), calibrated to your level so the SG numbers reflect what a player at your handicap should expect (instead of always reading negative against tour pros), full category breakdowns and trend dashboards, works offline during a round, and you don't carry anything you wouldn't already have in your pocket.

Cons: you do have to remember to quickly enter shots after the hole. If you'd rather forget you're tracking and have a sensor try to capture every swing automatically, this won't meet your expectations.

Side-by-side

Do you actually need to track every round?

Probably not. The big sensor brands sell themselves on automatic, every-round tracking, but you don't have to play that game. Tracking is most valuable when you're trying to answer a specific question — which part of your game is the biggest leak, whether a swing change is actually paying off, how a new putter is performing — and you can usually answer those questions with a handful of rounds instead of a full season of passive capture. More on that in Find your weakest golf skill in 3 rounds.

The nice thing about a tool like Data Driven Golf is that it makes tracking the rounds you do want to track quick and painless — no sensors to charge, no subscription to keep paying, no hardware to remember. Track when it's useful to you, skip when it isn't, and you still get a real SG breakdown out of the rounds that matter.