Do you want maintenance and mechanical help?

If you plan to do your own maintenance or you just want to keep tabs on what needs doing when, or if you want to fine-tune your bike and ride position, then an app which covers these as well as your actual riding can help keep everything working at its best.

Best cycling apps: Plan routes, stay safe, track your fitness and more

Photo of female cyclist stood next to a mountain bike while checking her phone

(Image credit: Getty Images)

The best cycling apps can cover all your cycling needs, either for free or for a small subscription.

You can plan your rides and get route ideas from other riders, then navigate your route. While you're riding, you can record where you've been, how fast and with how much effort and you can keep a record of this longer term to see trends. You can also allow others to keep track of where you are and there are apps which will call for help if you have a crash.

1. Komoot

The best route planning app for all terrains

Specifications

Compatibility: Android, iOS

Price: Free – Additional regions for €3.99; Region Bundles €8.99 / €29.99; Premium €59.99 per year

Reasons to buy

Detailed route planning

Social side

Route suggestions and sharing

Interfaces with many bike computers

Reasons to avoid

Need to pay for out-of-region access

Need a subscription for premium features

MapMyRide allows users to create, find, and track rides and routes for more than 600 different types of activities. The free app is nearly on par with Strava, but with one key feature lacking: segment leaderboards. But, what MapMyRide Premium users gain is a number of features not offered on Strava: personalised training plans, audible feedback, and mid-ride performance updates. MapMyRide offers a crisp set of features across the board, with a free version that challenges the premium models of its competitors.

Segments made Strava one of the most popular cycling apps in the world, but it also hosts a number of features including route planning, heat maps, and one-touch recording. You need a paid subscription to access some functionality, including route planning and full segment leaderboards. This costs £55 ($80) per year. Free users can still upload rides to Strava, define segments and follow any one of the 50 million users on the platform and see their top ten times on any segment.

There is hardly a limit to what TrainingPeaks can do when it comes to tracking and analysing your fitness. Carefully calculated algorithms predict fitness, fatigue, and form using an equally complicated set of acronyms, including CTL (Chronic Training Load), TSB (Training Stress Balance), and everyone’s favourite: TSS (Training Stress Score). Competitors have struggled to match both the in-depth analysis that TrainingPeaks offers, as well as its massive following among coaches and athletes alike.

Users can view and upload workouts, see their overall fitness summary, and connect with training plans or coaches, all with the free version of the app. Premium users gain access to in-depth workout and peak performance analysis, unlimited workout libraries, the ability to build an entire prospective training plan, and much more. TrainingPeaks is the ideal platform for any serious endurance athlete looking to keep track of their training and fitness.

What sets this app apart from its competitors is its functional diversity at zero cost. The Wahoo Fitness app allows users to sync workouts from a variety of activities, including those with paired devices such as heart rate monitors, cadence sensors, power meters and smart turbo trainers. Users have access to their heart rate and power training zones, as well as adjustable audio alerts. It can then be connected with other accounts, enabling users to upload activities to a community feed such as in Strava.

Crashes happen, and it’s important to know what to do when a rider goes down. And if you don’t know what to do, it is pretty amazing that you can have an app in your pocket that will walk you through first aid procedures for almost any situation. This free app includes first-aid guidance for bleeding, broken bones, head injuries, heatstroke, panic attacks, and more. There’s even advice for dealing with disasters such as wildfires, tornadoes, heat waves, and power outages. Downloading this app is a no-brainer: it’s free, and it could help save a life.

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What are your goals as a cyclist?

Are you riding or training? This simple question will help you determine if you should download a fitness tracking app like Wahoo or TrainingPeaks. Bike riders don’t necessarily need to track their fitness – they just want a safe and beautiful road to ride. Bike racers, on the other hand, want to know how hard their ride was, how their fitness is improving, and how to peak for their goal event. Fitness tracking apps take much of the guesswork out of training by providing structured workouts and long-term plans to help us reach our fitness goals.

What types of roads do you have nearby?

If you live in the city, route planning is going to be more intentional than exploratory. Features like Strava’s heat map and user-uploaded routes on MapMyRide can help you find the most popular bike routes and cycleways, which typically avoid traffic-laden roads. But if you live out in the country – with trails, paths, mountains, and single track to choose from – an exploratory app like Komoot could be the perfect tool to help fuel your adventure.

Are you more of a social cyclist, or a solo rider?

One of the key features of many of these apps is that they allow us to connect with thousands – and sometimes millions – of other cyclists around the world. How else could you directly compete against a Tour de France winner other than challenging his KOM on a Strava segment?

We can even keep tabs on other riders’ training – from the WorldTour pros to your friend that lives down the street. Apps such as Strava and MapMyRide allow millions of cyclists to interact from around the world, including sharing routes and comparing times on both segments and entire courses.

Solo riders can find everything they need in route planning apps such as Komoot and Strava, from designing epic adventures to optimising their morning commute.

Paul has been on two wheels since he was in his teens and he's spent much of the time since writing about bikes and the associated tech. He's a road cyclist at heart but his adventurous curiosity means Paul has been riding gravel since well before it was cool, adapting his cyclo-cross bike to ride all-day off-road epics and putting road kit to the ultimate test along the way. Paul has contributed to Cyclingnews' tech coverage for a few years, helping to maintain the freshness of our buying guides and deals content, as well as writing a number of our voucher code pages.