Loadscope vs. GUNR: Which One Actually Picks Your Load?

GUNR is a genuinely good mobile app — a shooting diary that keeps your rifles, load recipes, range sessions and chronograph data in one place, in your pocket. Loadscope is a desktop tool with a narrower job: take the ladder you just shot and tell you which load won. They overlap less than the feature lists suggest.

Both tools start from the same frustration — velocities scattered across a chronograph, a phone, and a notebook, with no easy way to see what they mean. GUNR solves the organizing problem across your whole shooting life. Loadscope solves the deciding problem for one ladder at a time.

What GUNR does well

GUNR is a suite, and breadth is its play: a firearms inventory, load recipes, range logging, and companion apps for ballistics and cost-per-round, all under one subscription. It imports from six chronograph brands — Garmin, LabRadar and MagnetoSpeed among them — runs both charge-weight and seating-length tests, plots multi-line velocity graphs with per-series ES and SD, and lets you attach target photos to a session. It lives on iOS and Android, so it is with you at the bench and in the truck.

If what you want is a well-organized record of everything you own and everything you have shot, on your phone, GUNR is a strong choice and there is not much point pretending otherwise.

Where it stops

• It graphs; it does not decide. GUNR gives you an interactive velocity table and clean charts, then leaves the read to your eye. It does not weigh velocity consistency against what actually landed on paper and name a winner — and that judgment is the hard part of load development, not the plotting.
• Target photos are stored, not measured. You get a photo gallery attached to the session. Turning those holes into a group size, a mean radius and a vertical number is still a separate job, with a separate tool or a set of calipers.
• No target-app import. Because group metrics do not come in, they cannot feed a decision even in principle — mean radius and vertical spread are exactly the numbers that separate two loads with identical velocity.
• Phone only. There is no desktop version. Comparing a dozen charges across three barrels on a 6-inch screen is a different experience than doing it at a desk.
• It is a subscription. The bill arrives every year for as long as you use it.

What Loadscope adds

• It names your best load. Loadscope scores every powder charge and seating depth you tested across four measures — velocity flat-spot, velocity SD, mean radius and vertical spread — and tells you which one won and how firmly to hold that call. How the scoring works →
• It measures your groups from a photo. Photograph the target, tap the holes, and you have group size, mean radius and vertical — scored, not just stored. A whole ladder can go on one target sheet. How that works →
• It reads your Garmin Xero over the cable. Plug the chronograph into your Mac or PC and every session comes off it at once. The three ways to get Xero data out →
• It predicts your dope and prints a range card for the load it picked, then carries it to your phone.
• You buy it once. $59, one time, Mac and Windows.

So which is right for you?

If you want one place on your phone for every rifle, every recipe and every range trip, and you are comfortable reading your own velocity charts, GUNR is built for that and does it well. If the part you actually want handled is the decision — which charge, which seating depth, and how much to trust the answer — that is a different tool, and it is the one Loadscope is.

Plenty of shooters run both, and that is a perfectly sensible arrangement: log the season on the phone, develop the load at the desk.