Best Indoor Cycling Apps for Indoor Training

The best cycling apps help you stay on target throughout your training and explore the thrills of indoor racing. Whether your workout involves a short, intense ride or a longer endurance session, you can harness the power of the very best indoor cycling apps. Our guide shows you how to reach performance goals and improve your training with cycling apps.

Table of Contents:

• Different Types of Indoor Cycling App
• Best Free Cycling App
• Best Cycling Apps for Recreating the Outdoors
• Best Training Apps for Refining Your Cycling
• Best Cycling Apps for Staying On Top of Your Training
• Best Cycling Apps for Building Community

Different Types of Indoor Cycling App

The best indoor cycling app is one which can enhance your training no matter your goals - whether that’s fitness, training for sportives, or competing in virtual races. The best app will be compatible with your indoor bike trainer, and help to enhance the benefits of indoor cycling.

The different types of cycling apps will cater to your training needs, such as:

• Recreating the outdoors through racing and virtual events
• Refining your cycling technique such as pedalling and testing
• Staying on target through curated plans and improving your fitness
• Building community by sharing your workouts and working with coaches

Best to Connect with a Smart Bike

The best indoor cycling apps will connect seamlessly with the best indoor bike trainers. You'll need a "smart" trainer that can talk to third party training apps to unlock every aspect of your targets. 

With our very own Wattbike Atom smart bike, you can connect to the very best indoor cycling apps, and experience the thrills of the road and the races from the comfort of your own home.

There are 6 Wattbike-compatible indoor cycling apps to support your training and help you complete your goals indoors:

1. Zwift - £12.99/mo, or £129.99/yr
2. TrainingPeaks - Get basic for free, $19.95/mo, or $124.99/yr
3. TrainerRoad - $19.95/mo, or $189/yr
4. FulGaz - £11.99/mo, or £98.99/yr
5. Rouvy - $14.99/mo for single, or $32.99/mo for up to 5 accounts
6. Strava - Get started for free, £8,99/mo, or £54.99/yr

Each of these can be connected to our Wattbike Hub indoor cycling app, so you can see stats and track your training all in one central place. Plus, when you purchase the Wattbike Atom, we’ll give you free trials of training apps, so you can find the very best cycling app for your needs.

Best Free Cycling App

The Wattbike Hub cycling app is free, and we offer 100’s of cycling workouts, training plans, and performance tests, written by world-class coaches and athletes, for you to stay on target.

While other cycling apps do offer free trials, our app provides free access to a whole host of essential cycling data to help you see where to improve - including:

• watts/kg
• Functional Threshold Power (FTP)
• calories burned
• max HR

With the Hub+, you can now subscribe to unlock even more features, like our workout builder. The core features of our app remain free, like workouts and plans.

Cycling Apps for Recreating the Outdoors

The best cycling apps allow you to harness the great parts of getting out on your bike, whilst enhancing your training efficiency and allowing you to compete in races you may otherwise wouldn’t.

Sportive Training

The Wattbike Hub offers the chance to explore climbs from the real-world of sportives. You can select workouts to train for sportives or complete our sportive training plan. With our cycling app, you can make sure you’re in the best physical condition for when it matters. You can even complete time trials on your indoor bike to test your pace and achieve your targets.

Virtual Racing

Zwift was founded by cycling lovers who also loved gaming, meaning it can visually transform the way you ride indoors.

• This is undoubtedly one of the best cycling apps for indoor racing - with their very own Zwift racing league run by World Tactical Racing Leagues.
• The Wattbike Atom is Zwift-certified, so you can make the most of the cycling app and the perfect indoor trainer to go with it.
• You can race against other riders, see their avatars, and compete for crowning glory from your very own home. Not only that, but you can also race against yourself.
• Despite its ‘game’-like appearance, it’s still a serious training tool to push you to beat your targets and achieve your personal bests.

Rouvy also offers the chance to enter online events and races, with augmented-reality video of real-routes. Challenge yourself to complete the rides your favourite athletes are, and see how you compete.

Exploring Real World Routes

FulGaz features more than a thousand real routes from over 40 countries and includes events such as Haute Route, Ironman and Chase the Sun. The cycling app harnesses immersive realism with 4k video and real-world terrain.

Zwift simulates the terrain of your route as you ride so you can feel as connected to the outdoors as possible. The cycling app has nine different virtual worlds to explore, including its very own Watopia.

Rouvy uses augmented reality to combine real recordings of its routes with road elevations to simulate a real-world feel to your riding. There are thousands of miles to complete on the cycling app. Certain routes also offer 3D riders too, which can help you stay motivated and feel a sense of community within the cycling app.

Grand Tour Stages

The Wattbike Hub allows you to explore the most popular routes in the world of cycling Grand Tours.

• From the stages of the Tour de France or the Giro D’Italia stages, you can try your hand at them from the comfort of your own home.
• These workouts recreate the climbs of the most prestigious cycling events: Grand Tours; so you can push yourself to keep up with the pros.

Route Planning

Strava also offers the option to plan your route ahead of time, so you can complete your trail without having to choose as you ride.

• You can also find routes by searching for a name or location.
• The cycling app will also plot your route on a map, alongside your data like speed and duration.

Best Training Apps for Refining Your Cycling

The best cycling apps are the ones which push you to improve for when it matters most. That means tailoring your indoor cycling to improve performance - whether that’s pedalling, cardiovascular fitness, or testing where you’ve improved.

Pedalling Insights

The Wattbike Hub features our unique Pedal Effectiveness Score (PES) and Polar View, the Atom provides live insight into your left and right-leg balance. You’ll see where you need to improve your pedalling technique with our cycling app.

Testing Your Performance

The Wattbike Hub offers the chance to complete performance tests on the Wattbike Atom to assess your training. You can see how you’re performing against your targets to make sure you hit your goals with every session on the cycling app.

Zwift, Rouvy, TrainerRoad, and FulGaz also allow you to complete an FTP test to assess the difficulty of workouts you should be selecting in each cycling app.

Best Cycling Apps for Staying On Top of Your Training

As with any sport, staying on track is key to improving. The best cycling apps will help to keep you motivated, provide a clear structure to your training, and improve your fitness so you can master your craft.

Training Plans

Training plans help keep you on track so you can effectively dedicate yourself to your cycling. The Wattbike Hub cycling app offers free training plans for a number of goals, from pre-season rugby training to getting sportive-ready.

TrainerRoad offers the chance to curate your training plan, by choosing your discipline, development area, and how much you want to train.

• This is the simpler of the best cycling apps, with a focus on getting you fitter and faster on your static bike trainer.
• There are over 100 plans and over 1000 workouts to complete.

Zwift and FulGaz also allow you to follow your own workout schedule, as well as structured plans to support your cycling performance.

Fitness

TrainingPeaks offers comprehensive tools to support your fitness goals, like creating and scheduling workouts designed by athletes and coaches.

• The cycling app provides colour coded cards that show you how close they are to completing each workout.
• With powerful analytics tools, you can follow your progress to improve on past performances to reach your peak fitness.

Zwift also offers training plans and workouts designed to support your fitness. With insight into your speed, power, and cadence stats, you can use the cycling app to see how your fitness is improving with each training session.

Building Workouts

The Wattbike Hub+ is a premium feature of our free app, where you can create custom cycling workouts in order to follow your own plan and refine your technique.

• This is one of the best cycling apps for curating a completely tailored training routine for yourself.
• You can also share your custom workouts for others to ride, as well as riding them in the Wattbike compatible third party cycling apps.

Best Cycling Apps for Building Community

Strava offers you the chance to track your rides out in the real world with the cycling app. When you fancy a spot of outdoor cycling you’ll see your stats after each ride, and be able to share them with your friends and fellow riders.

Zwift also offers you the chance to interact with your fellow riders and even race them within the app itself. You can still enjoy the social benefits of cycling apps while cycling at home.

You also have the option to select a private group ride on any FulGaz route to train with your fellow cycling enthusiasts.

Connecting with Personal Trainers

Whilst the Wattbike Hub offers training plans and curated workouts, there are also other cycling apps which allow you to connect to a real-life trainer too.

TrainingPeaks connects you with accredited coaches to take you through your cycling app training goals and keep you on target.

Tailored Training with Wattbike

At Wattbike, we’re committed to providing the very best indoor training experience.