Pulse vs keybr

keybr is a touch-typing trainer that generates lessons to build muscle memory on your weak letters. Pulse is a macOS app that measures how you actually type — automatically, across every app, all day.

Use keybr to…

Learning to touch-type from scratch or smoothing out weak letters with drills.

Use Pulse to…

See your real, everyday speed and accuracy with a keyboard heatmap, per-app breakdown, leaderboard and streaks — privately, on-device. keybr can't show your real speed in the apps you actually work in.

The honest take

Reach for keybr when you want learning to touch-type from scratch or smoothing out weak letters with drills. Reach for Pulse when you want to know — and improve — your genuine typing over time. Prefer a quick test in our own style? Try the Pulse typing test.

Why the drill score and the real score disagree

keybr's lessons feed you generated words tuned to your weak letters. That's good practice, but it's a controlled environment: no code, no names, no punctuation you actually fight with. People routinely hit a clean number on a trainer and type slower in their editor — because real work has friction a lesson removes on purpose. Pulse measures the friction. It builds a finger heatmap from your own text, so a letter you fumble 9% of the time across thousands of presses shows up where it actually hurts.

The two numbers are meant to disagree, and the gap is the useful part. A drill tells you what you can do under ideal conditions; Pulse tells you what you do when you're writing a commit message at 4pm. Close the gap by drilling the weak letters in Practice, then check whether your everyday speed moves with it — not just your lesson score. The statistics tell you which one moved.

So the honest workflow is to learn on keybr and measure on Pulse. One builds the habit; the other proves it stuck, privately, on your own Mac.