Best cycling apps – the essential downloads to complement your riding, from tracking rides to AI bike fitting

Komoot is available for both Apple (iOS) and Android devices, as well as on the web and turns your phone into a proper sat nav with voice commands. You can key in your location and where you want to get to before your ride, which Komoot saves as a planned journey, and then it records your activities as ‘completed tours’. 

When choosing a route, Komoot will often give you numerous options for reaching your destination, that aren’t always the quickest. It’s a good app choice for the more adventurous bike tourer, off-roader or just a long commuter who wants to explore a new route home.

You get one ‘single region’ for free but it’s not a huge amount of use for ongoing road riding. You can buy more single regions for £3.99, or ‘bundle regions’ for £8.99, but realistically the spend here is currently £29.99, which buys you the whole world, for online and offline use, forever.

Komoot was controversially bought by Italian tech firm Bending Spoons in March 2025, but not much appears to have changed on the app itself. Despite a different interface, it continues to be one of the most best apps for navigation.

Here’s an app that almost certainly needs no introduction. Yes of course, we mean Strava. Since it launched in 2009, Strava has gone on to become hugely popular and for many, it’s the go-to app for all cycle rides. One of the features that sets Strava apart from other online fitness platforms is that it acts and feels more like a social media platform than something you’re using to improve your fitness or performance.

In May 2020 Strava made the decision to cut back the free version and remove segment leaderboards, effort analysis, and route creation but with the free version, you can still upload your rides, join some clubs and importantly, you get the safety features where you can hide the start and end of your ride so that people can’t see where you live.

The TrainingPeaks Premium subscription gets you a year with a huge number of analysis, planning and workout-building tools. If you’re a data geek you’ll absolutely love it – every chart and graph is customizable to your every need – though this does bring a certain element of complexity. 

The Athlete Premium sub costs $134.99 (currently around £101) per year or $19.95/month, and builds on the functionality of the free version. The free version is actually pretty good, allowing you see summaries of completed workouts and plan training sessions.

To this the Premium sub adds features such as the calculation of fitness and fatigue, weekly summaries, peak performance tracking, workout planning and creation, and more. It also unlocks more analysis tools such as power, pace, and heart rate graphs, and TrainingPeaks Virtual is also included which is an indoor cycling platform.

Bike Citizens is a navigational app and a travel guide in one, providing a huge, constantly updated database of maps worldwide and plenty of tips and points of interest for making the most of your visit to a new destination if you plan on getting around by bike. It has previously won a Eurobike Award for being a ‘must-have’ innovation, so isn’t without plenty of recommendations.

The Bike Citizens map material is based on OpenStreetMap, which is always evolving and you can also add routes to its database yourself; meaning there are plenty of interesting user-submitted rides to check out on the app. The route planner has voice commands so you needn’t be staring at your phone while trying to navigate, and it will choose routes with varying levels of gradient according to what your preferences are. There are over 450 European cities on its database, with many others worldwide.

Many features can be used for free in your self-selected Premium Area (7km diameter) or the premium version is £3.09 per month or £24.49 for the year. 

Maintaining, servicing or fixing your bike can be a little daunting at first, and that’s where this extremely useful app come comes into its own. It provides step-by-step instructions for fixing any sort of mechanical problem on your bike.

The app has been designed to be easy to use, with clear instructions that even a complete beginner can follow. It costs £4.99 on iPhone which is cheaper than visiting the bike shop. 

If you have a Garmin bike computer or watch, you’ll find Garmin Connect Mobile useful. It can connect to your device to upload your rides to the Garmin Connect website, which can then share your data with Strava and MyFitnessPal. There is a free version of Garmin Connect as well as Garmin Connect+ which gives you acess to extra features for either £6.99/month or £69.99/year. 

Connect+ includes things like LiveTrack which lets your family and friends see you as you are riding, as well as performance metrics and training plans. 

AI bike-fitting has been available since 2021 when MyVeloFit launched their online service promising a virtual bike fit using a smartphone video and AI to analyse your ride position. 

The bike fit service promises that no prior knowledge is required, and using artificial intelligence the service is said to help cyclists uncover actionable insights about their riding position that they can use to improve comfort and efficiency on the bike.

Price wise, it’s considerably cheaper than visiting a bike fitter with a $35 (£26) subscription to fit a single bike to oner rider over a period of two weeks or an annual ‘unlimited’ subscription for $75 (£56). 

MyWindsock.com is an online platform that offers a combination of current and historical weather data with ride data from some of the best cycling apps, such as Komoot, Ride with GPS and Strava. This can be valuable for riders who admit to taking their segment ranking seriously and those among us (we all know who they are) that have an eye on the finer details and data analysis. 

It can also simulate your next ride to help you make tactical and strategic decisions of when to push and when to conserve, which is especially useful for time trialists and racers. Like many of the apps and platforms featured here, there is a free version, but to make the most of the app you’ll need a subscription, which starts at around $2/month. 

Refill Return is a super handy app that allows users to find locations where they can refill water bottles for free, as well as places to eat, drink and shop with less waste.

It’s free to download on the Apple App Store and Google Play, and there are now more than 300,000 locations across the UK, making it easy to find a refill point on a long ride.

Cycling UK launched the Fill That Hole service for reporting potholes to local authorities a while ago now (when they were still called CTC), making it easier than trying to find the right department at your local council to flag up a dangerous pothole.

It’s available on iOS and Android but you don’t download the Fill That Hole app from an app store. Instead, you need to load the website from a browser on your chosen device and save it to your home screen. You can then report a pothole from the side of the road instead of waiting until you get home. 

Doing what it says on the tin and then some, Bike Computer is a refreshingly simple app that turns your phone into a GPS bike computer. This free app is available on both iOS and Android( app stores and tracks basic metrics including pace, distance, route and elevation.

It’s compatible with Bluetooth-ready heart rate monitors, and all your rides can be shared straight to Strava or Facebook on completion. There’s a dark screen mode which reduces battery use and makes it viewable on night rides; plus Bike Computer Co. claim their app is also 12% more battery-efficient than any other mobile fit tracker on the market, reducing the chance of running out of charge on a ride.

There are many mapping apps available but one that you might have on your phone already, and not realise it, is Google Maps. It has offered dedicated cycling routes for some time and works very well. It can provide turn-by-turn navigation instructions if you want it as well.

It’s also handy for finding cafes, bike shops and other amenities mid-ride. Routes can be planned quickly on the fly, and changes are recalculated if you miss a turn.

MyFitnessPal aims simply to help you lose weight by making it easy to track calories on a daily basis. A database of over 20 million foods makes it easy to track how many calories your meals are providing. It can also has a recipe counter for tracking homemade meals too.

For cyclists, the app can be a useful companion alongside ride-tracking apps, allowing you to balance training with nutrition and avoid under or over-fuelling. You can also track macronutrients, set personalised goals, and sync data with other fitness platforms and devices. 

A free version gives you access to basic tracking, while a subscription is required for more advanced tracking, costing £79.99/year or £19.99/month. 

This is the official free app for the Cycle Hire London for Santander Cycles bicycle hire scheme and allows you to find your nearest bike and docking station. As well as that, it can plan routes for you, able to offer either the quickest or quieter roads depending on your preference, with handy turn-by-turn instructions. The app usefully has a built-in timer so you can keep on eye on any usage charges that might occur.

Similar apps are available for other hire schemes, such as Lime, so you can download the option that works best in your local area.

Different people will have different preferences here, but the Met Office is by far the most used app on my smartphone when planning what riding I’m going to do and when. 

 You can’t be a cyclist in the UK and not obsessively track the weather forecast before a ride, looking for any hint of rain on the horizon or a change in wind speed or direction. The Met Office app is free to use and makes this easy, while also showing both the actual and feels like temperature, which is particularly useful when deciding how many layers to wear.

It’s also worth understanding how forecasts are presented. For example, a 70% chance of rain means there’s a 7 in 10 chance that precipitation will fall at some point during that period, not that it will rain constantly.