Strava's paid-for membership is packed with analytics and mapping features—here's our take on the platform.
Strava is free for runners, cyclists, and sports enthusiasts who want a platform to track, analyze, and share their workouts. However, if you’re here, you’re likely wondering whether it’s worth paying for extra features on the platform.
Strava’s paid tier offers additional features at an extra cost: $11.99/£8.99 per month, or £54.99/$79.99 for an annual membership.
We’ve been long-term users of both the free and premium versions of Strava, using the app standalone and alongside a host of Strava-compatible smartwatches and sports watches, including the Apple Watch. But is Strava’s premium membership worth it?
While it may not be essential for some, we’ve outlined some features that we think are worth paying for with a Strava subscription.
Wareable’s verdict: Is Strava’s paid tier worth it?
While the answer to this will inevitably vary for every Strava user, some considerations apply universally here.
For example, in the last year, Strava has added a slew of new features to entice users to upgrade from the free tier. They include ‘Athlete Intelligence’ AI summaries of workouts, improved leaderboards, and race finish predictions—all added to existing features like Segment leaderboards and the ability to create and export Routes.
At Wareable, our editors dedicate a significant amount of time to testing various companion apps. So what does Strava provide that we don’t get anywhere else–from the likes of Garmin Connect, Apple Health, and others?
We think the primary draw of Strava remains its social features and community, but it’s also true that the core of those is free to everyone. Along with Runna (which Strava acquired in early 2025), it’s a platform that feels buzzing with activity, whether from major brands like Zwift and MAAP (that consistently run challenges) or folks at your run club.
Strava also remains one of the few fitness apps that allows users to export workout summaries neatly to platforms like Instagram. So, if you’re looking for a hub to share your workouts with a small, like-minded audience, Strava remains the best place to do so.
If you enjoy the social aspect of Strava but still spend a lot of time analyzing the graphs or creating ‘Courses’ in Garmin Connect, we don’t think Strava’s premium tier is for you.
Why we think it’s worth it
Instead, we think a Strava membership is worth it to anybody who loves those social features, already spends a lot of time in the app, and is intrigued by those locked-away sections.
We’ve listed seven great features that you only get with a membership in more depth below. However, in short, the real value for us comes from the ease of route planning and syncing, analysis of weekly effort, and viewing our fitness score to see which workouts have the most significant effect on our improvement.
From there, there are numerous extras that may apply. Sure, there are neat tidbits thrown in, such as the ability to alter your phone’s app icon or change the map that appears on your post, but the rest of the value lies in the analysis.
This is worth the outlay if you don’t love what your wearable’s companion app offers, or you’re looking to consolidate activity data from multiple sources into one place. We also believe that something like Athlete Intelligence—although not currently adding much—will evolve over the next year or two to become a more helpful part of the paid experience.
What features are exclusive to a Strava subscription?
So, what exactly are you paying for? Those premium features are categorized into several areas, including Strava Segments, advanced training, route exploration, challenges, and activity recording.
You can see all of the premium features listed here, and you can also view them all from the Strava smartphone app by going to your settings in the ‘You’ tab of the mobile app, then tapping ‘Your Strava Subscription’ and selecting ‘Explore All Features’.
That’s all once you’ve paid up for a subscription.
For Segments fans:
- View Segment leaderboards
- Filter search on Segment leaderboards
- Compare Segment efforts to other users
- View live Segment performance
Advanced training features:
- Set custom goals and view your best efforts
- View relative effort, fatigue levels, and grade adjusted pace
- Set custom heart rate zones
- View power training, pace, and workout analysis
- Follow training plans (runners and cycling only)
If you like to explore, route features unlocked include:
- Creating routes and storing for offline use
- Accessing personalised heat maps
- View suggested routes based on your current location
During activities, you will be able to view:
- Weather data and performance data like speed and distance in real-time
- Use Strava Beacon for live-location sharing
Strava subscription perks include:
- Access to Recover Athletics app for runners and cyclists to use for rehab and in between training
- Discounted membership to services like Open Breathwork & Meditation
- Change the look of the Strava app icon (for iOS only)
7 Strava features you only get with a paid subscription
1. Find new routes in new locations
Arguably, one of the main benefits of Strava premium is the ability to fully utilize Strava’s route creation and discovery features. In addition to allowing you to create routes using data from other users or heatmaps to see the most popular routes, you can also use these mapping tools to find Strava’s Segments to compete for with others.
Strava also allows you to sync created routes to compatible Polar, Suunto, and Garmin watches for offline use, though that support currently doesn’t extend to Apple Watches.
A key point about Strava’s premium features is they mainly target runners, walkers, cyclists, and hikers. If your sporting interests lie outside of that, it might not necessarily be a must-have feature for you.
2. Get your Fitness Score
One of our favorite Strava Premium features is the Fitness Score. Fitness Score is part of a suite of metrics that analyze Fitness and Freshness, including training load and effect.
Each workout receives a Relative Effort score based on heart rate, and points are awarded for each session. Non-workout days will result in a decrease in your score, so the Fitness Score is a useful way to balance training and a great motivator for tracking your fitness progress over time.
You can also quickly compare your fitness score over a month, three-month, six-month, and yearly intervals.
3. Analyze ‘Matched Activities’
If you like using Strava as a training tool and want a better sense of whether you’re making progress on similar routes or courses, the ability to easily compare your stats is a feature we’ve enjoyed using with the premium version.
When you finish a run or ride on a course you’ve done before, Strava uses an algorithm to group similar runs or rides within your activity details. Strava highlights previous workouts on the same course to show whether your pace has improved or slowed down. You can view your past efforts from the Matched screen to see how other metrics besides time and pace compare as well.
It’s a simple feature, but it’s useful to recognize if you’re speeding up or slowing down when going all out.
4. Stay safe with ‘Strava Beacons’
If you often go on runs, rides, and treks alone and like the idea of friends and family being able to monitor your movements and see when you’re nearing the finish line or getting closer to home, Beacons is another useful feature that’s locked behind that premium subscription.
Beacons works by allowing you to share your live location with contacts who can monitor your movements. It is compatible with the Strava smartphone app and can also be used with the Apple Watch, Wear OS smartwatches, and Garmin watches that feature Garmin’s LiveTrack.
Once you’ve set up your safety contacts to share your location, a link to access your live location is sent to those contacts. Beacons require a cellular connection and update your location every 15 seconds.
Beacons does not send an alert if you need to stop for any reason but importantly allows those contacts to be Strava or non-Strava users.
5. Get more from chasing ‘Strava Segments’
If you’re already familiar with all things Strava, then you’ll know about Segments. These are specific sections of popular routes and courses that you can challenge yourself on to record the fastest time or compare your efforts to the quickest recorded by other Strava users.
You can take on Segments for free on Strava and see details of your Segment-chasing performance in the post-workout breakdown. Premium users can also compare efforts on Segments against other Strava members and have better control over viewing leaderboards, whether that’s overall ones or ones you’ve set up to compete with other users.
Besides comparing efforts, you can see how you’re doing on a Segment during a run or ride. You can also check how you’re competing against the Segment King or Queen of the Mountain (KOM or QOM) or the Course Record (CR). It provides an even more motivating way to keep that competitive spirit alive, even when you’re not racing.
6. Find your next training plan
Strava Premium unlocks a range of advanced training tools, including measuring your effort, analyzing power and pace data more in-depth, and assessing your overall fitness and readiness to train. Among all these added features, Strava makes it straightforward for runners and cyclists to begin following a training plan.
For runners, plans are available for race distances ranging from 5K to the marathon, and for cyclists, there is a variety of climb, sprint, and indoor training plans to choose from. These plans are offered in English, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish. Setting up plans can be a bit inconvenient, as it requires using the Strava web app. However, after selecting your plan, it will be emailed to you a day before your scheduled workout.
You can’t pause plans, but you can reschedule days or skip days when you have planned training sessions. What’s great about these plans is there’s no assumption that you’ll know what a fartlek or a progression run is (there’s a glossary for that), and they help you understand your pace for different workouts to ensure you’re doing them correctly and to maximize the benefits of each session.
7. Take advantage of Strava’s Recover Athletics integration
Strava is about tracking, and when you increase that tracking and overall volume of training, stretching, and doing the workouts that will help keep you in shape to run, ride, or trek, it becomes even more important.
Strava’s integration with Recover Athletics isn’t a premium feature Strava emphasizes, but it’s arguably one of its most useful. Once you’ve downloaded the separate Recover Athletics app, it will prompt you to authorize sharing your activity data.
Once you’ve completed the pretty painless setup you can pinpoint areas of the body where you’re feeling some soreness and the Recover Athletics app will provide a program to follow with visuals to explain how to correctly perform movements and exercises.
It’s a well-designed app and the ability to share Strava data to help assess your training load makes it a really useful extra tool at your disposal.
