What's the best sudoku app for iPhone?

The honest answer: match the app to your profile

Every "best sudoku app" listicle pretends the ranking is universal. It isn't. The apps below have made genuinely different design bets — teaching versus content, brand polish versus indie principles, one perfect mode versus twelve variants — and which bet is "best" depends entirely on which player you are. So instead of a ranked list, here are the five profiles we actually see, each with the app that serves it best.

You want to get better at sudoku → Good Sudoku

Good Sudoku, by game designer Zach Gage, is the best teaching sudoku on iOS and it isn't close. Its hint system doesn't just fill a square — it walks you through the technique that finds the square, so hints become lessons instead of answers. It's a one-time purchase with no ads and no in-app economy, which also makes it the cleanest "just pay once" option on the platform.

Where it isn't the answer: it's focused on classic 9x9. If you want Killer, Samurai or the more exotic variants, or an Android version for the rest of your household, you'll be looking elsewhere. But if your goal is "I want to stop guessing and actually understand X-Wings," buy Good Sudoku. We mean that.

You want the biggest brand and don't mind the model → Sudoku.com

Sudoku.com by Easybrain is the app most people already have: top of the charts, enormous player base, slick interface, seasonal events, and a well-made Killer mode. The production polish is real, and if social features and a constant drip of events keep you playing, it delivers.

The trade-off is the business model, and it's worth stating factually. The free tier shows ads, and the app uses a mistake-limit system: wrong entries are counted against you, and hitting the limit interrupts the game — the classic lives pattern we've written about in detail in our guide to sudoku without lives. Removing ads is a paid extra. None of this makes it a bad app; millions of people accept the deal happily. Just know that the deal exists before you're three puzzles deep.

You want free, serious training in a browser → sudoku.coach

sudoku.coach is a free website with no ads and a structured campaign that takes you from beginner scanning to genuinely advanced techniques. As a pure training resource it rivals paid apps, and it costs nothing. If you solve at a desk anyway, or want to level up your technique before caring about apps at all, start here.

The limits are the ones inherent to a website: it lives in a browser tab rather than on your home screen, and it isn't designed around the offline, grab-your-phone-anywhere habit that native apps serve. Many people use it as their trainer and a native app as their daily player — a completely sensible combination.

You want an indie that refuses dark patterns → Not Evil Sudoku

Not Evil Sudoku has built its entire identity on rejecting the manipulative mechanics of big-publisher puzzle apps — the name is the mission statement — and its reputation among players fleeing those mechanics is deserved. If your primary criterion is "an app that respects me, from a developer with principles," it belongs on your shortlist.

We'd be a strange judge of this category since we compete in it: Sudoku by Joseph makes the same no-lives, no-coins promise (and has since 2011). The honest difference to check for yourself is scope — compare variant selection, daily-challenge features and platform support on the two store pages and pick the one whose breadth matches your appetite.

You want variants, offline play and no lives in one app → Sudoku by Joseph

Our pitch, with the caveats attached. Sudoku by Joseph ships 12 variants in one app: Classic, Jigsaw and Killer in the free tier, plus Samurai, 16x16, and the multi-grid family — Twodoku through the windmill-style five-grid layouts — in premium. The overlapping multi-grid variants in particular are something no other mainstream sudoku app offers natively. Add a Daily Challenge with streaks, difficulties from Easy to Diabolic, pencil marks, statistics, Game Center, full offline play, 46 languages and 13 themes, and the design rule the whole app is built on: no lives, no mistake limits, no coins, no energy — ever, on any tier.

Now the honest part. The free tier is ad-supported. The one subscription removes all ads and unlocks the nine premium variants (7-day trial; pricing varies by country — check the App Store). It's an indie app, built by one developer in Germany since 2011, with 800,000+ downloads and a 4.66-star average across roughly 2,400 ratings — which is to say: we're the small, focused option, not the chart-topping giant, and the app's teaching layer is hints and pencil marks rather than Good Sudoku's guided lessons. If breadth of puzzles and a pressure-free board are what you're shopping for, this is the profile we built for.

Side by side

Cells marked — are things we couldn't verify to our own standard; check the current store listing rather than trusting a stale table.

Other options worth knowing

If your deciding factor is specifically ads — who really has none, who sells their removal, and how to read an "ad-free" claim before installing — we broke that down separately: which sudoku apps actually have no ads?

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