Introduction
In April I tested the premium version of Strava called “Strava Summit”. It cost me £6.99 for one month of all three packages. Along the way I explored many of the premium features on their mobile app and Strava website. Writing down notes after every run or cycle and when I was looking around the app please enjoy reading this review.
Initial Thoughts
Physically on the feed page there is no difference between the free and premium version. One of the many great features of the free version is that there are no adverts at all on Strava. My first run with Summit I decided to do a 5K route that I did regularly, but I also knew had a popular segment on it. (A segment is a section of road or path where users can compare times) The reason I did this is part of the Analysis pack you get a feature called “Live Segments” however no such feature appeared when I was running on this run. I was a little disappointed with this I won’t lie.
Something I did like was on your profile page was the ability to set distance or time goals for the week and year. To test this, I set myself what I think is an achievable running distance of 20 Miles a week and 500 miles for the year. It will then tell you below if your ahead or behind achieving that distance. You can set these targets for running, cycling and swimming.
Around a week now into using Strava summit and I decided to go for a bike ride. On my bike I can mount my phone to the handlebars allowing me to use Strava as a bike computer. I like the simple design of the screen you see however I later learned that being able to view the current speed when cycling is a premium feature not a free feature and something so simple should be a free feature in my opinion. If you have the free version, it instead displays the average speed for your workout as the biggest number on your screen.
This bike ride was also the first time I saw the Live segment feature I previously mentioned. I’ll be honest it does look pretty cool, it displays a race track like interface with you in the middle and the crown and the PB symbols ticking away indicating how close you are to beating the time (Or losing in my case) when you get to the end you cross a virtual finish line and your time is displayed.
In the free version you can only see the current time for the segment, so this feature is pretty cool if you want to beat your personal bests or others.
How easy can it be to compare 3 runs?
During the month I wanted to beat my personal best for a 5K run. I went for two 5K runs and failed to beat it on both occasions because of that I wanted to compare these two runs with the run that my current PB is on.
So how hard can it be to compare three runs on a premium version of Strava. Well as it turns out its not possible. It is possible to compare three runs if they are the same route but as the my personal 5K is in a different place it won’t let me compare it with that.
I suppose it does make sense in terms of keeping it fair but I was a little disappointed as I wanted to compare my paces for each mile on the runs so I could work out what pace I needed to achieve.
This brings me to the layout of the app which I think can be a little confusing. On the app I wanted to see the distance of miles I ran last month. This is not possible you can only the distance per weeks and year to date.
Exploring Strava Summit Online
Strava on the desktop is like another world to the Strava mobile app. You get all the same
features from the phone but more features and not just that the layout and design of the site is so much better than the mobile app. When exploring the Summit features my first go to was the heatmaps. This feature will produce a map which shows where you have run or cycled the most, it’s pretty cool to look at but does feel like more of a gimmick. Cycling and running are both different maps as well you can’t see both at the same time.
Training features online is where it really gets cool, however. As part of summit you can sign up to training plans. There’s many to choose from but the four main ones are 5K, 10K, Half marathon and a marathon. You select how many runs you want to do a week and when you want to start the training, or you can start it based on when your competing in an event.
Once this is all set up it creates the training plan for you. For the purpose of this blog I created a 5K plan starting on the week beginning next. This feature I think is really cool if you are new to running and want to get in shape or if you are training for an event. It keeps you motivated and allocates rest days, so you don’t get overwhelmed.
If you have Summit you also get special offers (Perks as they called it) These include discounts from a selection of companies mainly sport companies. Not an amazing feature but not a negative one.
There’s a lot of other features which I can’t go into detail as I would be writing all day and some of them (Like the power when cycling) don’t really make much sense to me, but I do have some screenshots of some below from my personal activities.
Privacy, Price and customisation
Privacy online is talked a lot about now and I think Strava slacks when it comes to privacy a little. When you buy Summit, you get a little symbol next to your name which indicates that your Summit member. All your friends can see this, and it shows up next to your name on workouts in your follower’s feeds. This cannot be turned off and I think it should be, why should everyone have to know you spend your money on Strava. When doing some research on if it can be removed, I come across this article [1] where people even said, “This is basically the only thing which prevents me from getting premium”.
Another annoying thing is that if you want to make a run private it doesn’t update, your progress to challenges. To do that your activities must be public. One thing you can do however is that you can tell Strava to change the start and finish point so people can’t see where you live. For you the map will stay the same but everyone else will see something slightly different, it keeps all your original timings and distances. This is a cool feature to consider.
£6.99 is the amount I paid for the month which includes all three packs, you can pay for the year which does work out a little cheaper at £47.99 previously you have been able to purchase just one of the packs for £2.49 per month and I had been reading a thread on reddit [2] that people liked buying just one for example as they liked to support what is a really good app for free however from around the middle of February Strava removed this ability and now you can only buy the £6.99 version.
People on the £2.49 version got an email letting them know about the changes [3] and the only place I could find a reference to it on Strava was when changing the subscription on the iOS App store.
Summary
The best way to think about my overall thoughts of Summit is to answer a simple question. Will I continue my subscription after the month? The short answer is no. For £6.99 per month it doesn’t do enough for me but if for example I was training for the London Marathon 2021 I would defiantly purchase the annual subscription and start the special summit training plans I mentioned earlier.
What’s upsetting about them getting rid of the £2.49 per month (Or £18.99 annually) version is I actually would consider purchasing this as I do like being able to set week and annual targets and I do agree that it is a great app to support. Strava summit has some really cool advanced features but also lacks some basic features I think and why on the free version we can’t view the current speed only the average I don’t understand.
Thanks for reading my review and if you want to read more about Strava check out my other blog posts below.
Kyle Wilkinson
May 2020.
UPDATE 20.05.20
Since writing this review and testing Strava during the month of April. Strava have done several changes to the service. They’ve dropped the Summit brand and several free features have moved to the premium version of the app. They’ve released a post on their site where they promise to create more and more features for the subscription version of the app.
Strava say they are dedicated to the community however they admit that they are not yet a profitable company. I recommend you view this post here where the founders of Strava talk about some of the changes.
References:
The rest is written by myself, all screenshots are taken from the official Strava app and web app during the period of April 2020 – May 2020.
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