Health and Fitness is an important part of life, so that’s why we decided to make this week’s battle about fitness tracker apps. Two of the best apps on the Play Store for this category are Endomondo and Strava, and both give their users something to be proud of for using them. I have personally used each and certainly have my favorite for various reasons, but let’s breakdown some similarities and possible differences and see which comes out on top. After going through each app, feel free to cast your vote in the poll at the bottom of this post. Who is the undisputed champion between these two fitness apps? Who wears the crown?
Endomondo Sports Tracker
Endomondo is a beast of a fitness tracker/sports app that offers plenty of features to users. One huge notable feature is the access to the community of users who share your love for Endomondo. Sometimes sticking to your fitness goals can be hard, but having a community around to converse with can help you follow through with them. The community can help you challenge yourself and keep motivated, which can be a useful tool in staying active. Past the community, there are tons of other great features about Endomondo. You can track virtually any distance based sport including running, cycling, and many others using GPS, and in doing so you can view duration, speed, distance, calories and more. After tracking your sport, the app will store the routes of your runs/rides so you can see them later on. The app will also feed you audio at regular time intervals letting you know your progress, and it’ll even lower the volume of your music should you be listening to some during your activity so that you can hear your progress.
Of course it can also track your heart rate, something that we know is important to many who are out being active and engaging in fitness activities. If you use a heart rate monitor to help with this, Endomondo can sync up with a few of them and is compatible with BLTE, BT and ANT + heart rate monitors. If you primarily workout indoors, you can use Endomondo to enter the workout data manually. It’s not as easy as having it auto tracked, but a little manual data entry never hurt anyone right? Not only does Endomondo feed you fitness progress at regular intervals while you’re exercising, but you can even set fitness goals and have a personal audio coach help you reach them no matter how challenging. You can also use the app to analyze you performance by keeping a full workout diary, and you can join challenges to win prizes. If you pick up the premium version of Endomondo, you’ll also get features like an ad free experience, viewing weather information your workout summaries and you can view monthly and annual fitness stats like calories per month or running distance per year. Endomondo is definitely one of the better fitness apps out there, if you haven’t given it a shot, it might be time to do so.
Strava
Strava is definitely a contender in the fitness app space. It tracks your runs and rides using GPS much like Endomondo. It also has the ability to join challenges and you can even challenge your friends and compare statistics. After tracking a route you can go back and follow it later for another workout or you can follow other routes that you stumble upon that have been uploaded by others. Strava will also track your stats and allow you to view them, including heart rate, distance, pace, speed, elevation gained and calories burned. If you like a little competition, Strava has integrated leaderboards so that you can see how you measure up against others whether they be friends, locals or pros. Nothing like a little friendly competition to keep you motivated right?
Strava also has a premium version of the app which allows for a more full featured experience. Strava premium will give you things like leaderboard filters so that you can narrow down the results by weight, age etc. to see how you stack up against others in the same categories. Strava premium also feeds you immediate performance results when you finish a segment, so there’s no need to wait. One cool feature is the ability to see which of your friends are out riding or running, potentially giving you the ability to join them if you live in the same local area. Strava also offers in door training videos to help you stay on top of your game, and you can visualize your training with Power Zone and Pace Distribution analysis. If you like to keep things social, even your fitness, you can share your activities via Facebook or Twitter and share photos of your achievements on Instagram all easily within the app.
So we have two very similar running and fitness tracker applications. Both are free but offer premium versions of the application. Although the free versions do offer many of the good features, some really useful ones are available in Pro or premium only. If you like tracking your heart rate, Endomondo seems to offer support and compatibility with at least one very popular monitor that Strava does not, which is the Ant +. Strava offers in door training videos though which is something Endomondo doesn’t appear to have. So which deserves to be the winner? Make your picks in the poll down below.