If you have been riding long enough you probably remember the days when bike computers were the size of a silver dollar and tracked only speed, time, and distance. If you were riding some place new, you had to carry a foldable paper map in your back pocket to find good routes. The explosion of different cycling apps that track everything from ride to route to performance is a huge advancement for cyclists.
There are so many cycling apps, with new ones appearing nearly every month, narrowing down the best apps for cyclists can be challenging and often depends on what your individual preferences are. Do you like the social aspect of ride tracking apps or are you primarily interested in accurate performance tracking? Are you more interested in the best navigation app for cyclists or are you looking for the best weather app for cyclists?
Cycling Apps for Ride Tracking
Most likely, you’ll want a mixture of all these types of apps. And certain apps can cater to multiple needs. For instance, an app like Strava not only tracks your rides, it allows you to build a community of cycling buddies all over the world, and it keeps track of metrics that you can use to plot your fitness level too.
In fact, Strava is probably the most widely used cycling app since it gives you the chance to see how you compare to other riders on your routes through the Strava segments, which are user identified sections of roads where fastest times are logged and lauded. Becoming the KOM or QOM of a Strava segment, especially on hotly contested climbs, is an accolade that even the pros find exciting. Indeed, ex-pro Phil Gaimon has made a post-professional career out of KOM hunting.
Though the social aspect of Strava is one of its biggest selling points, there are riders who do like to keep track of their routes but would rather be a bit more private about it. Uploading a ride to Strava at a time when you should be working can get you into trouble with any work associates who follow you. That’s when a tracking app like Cyclemeter can be a great choice.
Cyclemeter tracks rides and offers a wide range of graphs and graphics to help you see how your fitness is progressing. You can share your workouts with friends if you really want to, and you can upload your ride to Strava when you are particularly proud of an effort. You can share your data with your Apple Fitness app, and while you can also send it as a link to view on your desktop, all data is clearly displayed on the phone app. One design feature we particularly like is that your daily activities are shown in a calendar format rather than just a list you have to scroll through.
Best Apps for Cyclist for Route Planning
Most cycling apps have a GPS feature with a map that will help you decide which roads you want to take. But certain apps are focused on building routes and then helping to guide you through the rides. Komoot has taken the cycling and adventure world by storm in recent years with its excellent mapping capabilities. You can pre-map your ride and then send it to your Garmin computer – unfortunately Garmin is the only cycling computer that currently has this ability. Alternatively, if you have a handlebar mount for your phone, you can use the app to track your ride directly.
Similarly to apps like Strava, Komoot offers a social aspect where you can share your routes and use their Community Inspiration uploads to find new routes in your region. It’s also a great way to find great routes in places where you plan to travel with your bike. Komoot offers a free version, but greater functionality comes at a price. The app divides cost according to how much you plan to use it, for instance you can purchase access to maps for a single region, if you are planning on using it just around your home region. You can also buy a region bundle or a world bundle all with reasonable one-time payments. Then there is a premium package that is pricey yearly (currently $60 per year) but includes things like live tracking that you can share with family or friends.
If all that sounds a little too pricey, an app like Bikemap offers a lot of the same functionality of Komoot even using the Bikemap free version. Route planning, ride tracking and access to thousands of community generated routes are all available from the app for free.
Fitness Tracking Apps for Cyclists
All of the apps mentioned in this article so far will help you track your fitness to a certain extent. But programs like Training Peaks, Wahoo Fitness and Garmin Connect put a greater emphasis on this aspect of data collecting.
Of the three, Training Peaks is the most fitness-tracking oriented. It’s not about community or route planning. It’s all about tracking fitness and fatigue using training plans established by real coaches. It generates data from your performance numbers that will give you and your coach, if you have one, a chance to geek out about how you are doing and where you can improve.
Garmin Connect and Wahoo Fitness are great apps for people who use one or the other of those devices. They do a great job of tracking rides and data and presenting them both in app form and desktop versions. Which one you choose has more to do with which head unit you have rather than any particular advantage one app offers over the other. Both will track your rides and generate a cartload of data that you can either decipher on the site or export to one of your other cycling apps – Training Peaks and Strava among them.
Best weather app for cyclists
If you have a busy work and family schedule, you often might have a very strict time window when you can get out and ride. Sometimes we just have to ride in the weather that we’re given. But if you can plan a little more, having access to a good weather app can save you from getting soaked mid-ride or help you plan a route with more of a tailwind. Most smartphones come with weather apps that can give you an idea of the weather you can expect. But the Epic Ride Weather is the best cycling specific weather app we’ve used.
It works by connecting to one of your other ride tracking apps - Strava, Komoot, Garmin Connect are among the options - and then you choose the ride route. The app will show you what weather you can expect, from temperature range to precipitation to wind direction. You can ask the app to show you the best time to ride to get the best weather, and it even has a feature that you can check mid-ride to see any potential weather update.
The app was initially developed using weather data from Dark Sky. Once Dark Sky was acquired by Apple, the app was able to shift over to using the Apple weather app data in 2023. This was good news for all users since the fate of the app hinges on having access to Dark Sky’s which is now Apple's weather data. It also means, though, that the app is only as accurate as Apple’s weather app.
However, the beauty of the Epic Ride Weather app is that it predicts the weather for an entire route, not just your starting point or end point. And the longer the ride, the more valuable this type of personalized information can be. It can help you know how to dress and what extra clothing you might want to take for later in the ride.
Conclusion - Best Apps for Cyclists
There are a lot of app options for cyclists and overlap between app functions is inevitable. Deciding which to choose depends a lot on what your focus will be when you ride. Are you keen to do big rides and share them with your friends around the world? Then Strava will be your go-to app. Similarly, if you want to go adventuring and need some good advice about routes, then Komoot will be a prime option.
The fact that many of these apps do pretty much the same thing doesn’t mean that you can’t have many of them on your phone and find them uniquely effective for your cycling needs.
You may also like our article on best YouTube cycling channels.
