Twelve ranked, seven more worth knowing, and a way to check every one of them is still alive.
iRacing gives you a car and a track. Almost everything else, telemetry, overlays, a voice telling you the gap behind, custom liveries, comes from apps built by other people.
There are a lot of them, and lists like this one go out of date faster than anyone updates them. So every entry here links to its listing in our app index, where the project's last release or changelog entry is shown with the date it happened. You can check whether an app is still alive rather than trusting that we looked.
This page covers every app in our index that supports iRacing, so an app is missing from it only if it does not support iRacing at all. Prices change too often to quote, so each entry says which model it uses and the listing links to the vendor.
SimHub Best overall
The one most people end up with. Dashboards on a second screen or phone, in-game overlays, LED strips and bass-shaker haptics, and a plugin ecosystem that covers hardware nobody else bothered to support. Its Dash Studio lets you build a dash from scratch or drop in one the community already made, so most racers never touch the design tools at all.
If you install one thing from this list, it is probably this one.
Crew Chief Best race engineer
A voice in your ear calling fuel, tyres, damage, flags and where the car behind actually is. You hear all of it while you are driving, which is the point: nothing to read, nothing to glance at.
It is also the app people most often arrive looking for, and then discover has to be started separately every session.
Garage 61 Best for finding lap time
Upload your laps and see corner by corner where the time went, against a pool other drivers have filled rather than against your own best day. The size of that pool is the point: you can measure yourself against the outright quick, or narrow it to drivers on roughly your own iRating, which is usually the more useful question.
It is also what we reach for on a track we have never driven. Pull a ghost from someone who knows it, run a few laps behind it, and you skip the part where you learn the corners by getting them wrong.
Track Titan Best structured coaching
Driving tips derived from your own telemetry, structured training plans, and setups. It answers a different question than Garage 61: not where the time went, but what to practise next. The closest thing on this list to being coached.
RaceLab Best overlay suite
Standings, relative, fuel, track map, radar, the lot, plus a community library of layouts so you are not building yours from scratch. If SimHub is more breadth than you want and you came only for on-screen information, this is the tighter answer.
Trading Paints Best for liveries
Custom paint schemes that show up on track for everyone else running Trading Paints, which is the whole trick: iRacing has no native way to share a livery. Upload your own or pull from what the community has already painted. Once it is running it is one more background app you forget about.
VRS (Virtual Racing School) Best deep telemetry
Serious telemetry analysis plus data packs from professional drivers: their exact inputs on the same car and track, to drive against. Steeper than Garage 61 and aimed at people who already know what they are looking at.
iOverlay Best first overlay
Standings, relative, spotter, track map and a fuel calculator. A sensible first overlay before deciding whether you need a whole suite.
Race Element Best open-source all-rounder
Overlays, telemetry and setup tools in one open-source package, spanning an unusually wide range of sims for a community project.
Best second-screen timing
Live timing and lap comparison on a second display. Open source, does one job properly, and has been doing it for years.
Digital Race Engineer Best Crew Chief alternative
A spoken engineer and spotter with automatic fuel strategy, weather alerts and a large voice-command vocabulary. Worth trying against Crew Chief and keeping whichever voice you prefer.
SIM Dashboard Best phone dashboard
Turns a phone or tablet into a proper dash, and it covers console titles as well as PC, which almost nothing else on this page does.
Narrower tools. Each of these is the right answer if its specific job is one you have, and the wrong recommendation for everyone else, which is why they are not ranked against the twelve above.
Loads and tunes professionally built setups for you across the major sims, so you are not learning setup theory before you can be competitive.
Compares your throttle, brake, ABS and TC inputs against a reference lap. Genuinely different from lap-time comparison: it shows technique rather than the delta.
A colour-coded live timing table, replays included.
Replaces iRacing’s stock spotter audio with a real crew chief and spotter. Hard to go back from.
League and championship management, and the platform behind a lot of the organised racing you might want to join.
The graphics engine behind iRacing’s own broadcasts and a lot of the big third-party ones.
Broadcast control with auto-director camera switching and incident detection.
Everything above, plus the tools that are not iRacing-specific, is in the full sim racing app index with pricing, supported sims and a dated development status on every entry.