Sitting on a bike in a dimly lit spare room, window open, fan blasting, and a glowing screen urging to push through another 20-second interval – this is indoor cycling in 2024. It’s a far cry from clunky stationary bikes doubling as clothes hangers or early setups with dumb trainers and VHS tapes. Over the past decade, indoor cycling has transformed into a high-tech ecosystem of smart trainers, immersive apps, and competitive virtual racing –complete with cash prize pools rivaling top-tier outdoor races.
Platforms like Zwift and Peloton have become household names in the realms of indoor cycling – yet they cater to very different markets. Each offers a different experience, from gamified virtual worlds to highly structured training tools. But with so many players in the virtual cycling segment alone vying for attention, what draws us to join them? Furthermore, will these platforms continue to grow? As they do, how will the experience evolve and what’s next? We spoke to the industry insiders and leading experts to find out.
Two whales and a school of fish
There are lots of ways to train indoors, from simple “dumb trainers” and relying on time and feel as performance metrics, or opting for apps – or games – which keep you entertained, allow you to follow a structured training session, or race against others worldwide.
When it comes to the latter, Zwift is the largest dedicated virtual cycling app by a large margin – though it is trumped by the broader fitness segment behemoth Peloton, which started with cycling but now offers a range of activities. The rest follow quite far behind.
But whether Peloton even belongs in the same category as Rouvy, Bkool, Zwift and MyWhoosh is another question – and there is no one answer to that.
“As much as we’d like to think all indoor cycling is equal or at least similar, it’s not,” says Shane Miller, known for his tech YouTube channel GPLama. “There’s a huge gap between indoor fitness cycling – Peloton, et cetera – and any platform that is focused on cycling simulation with the use of smart trainers or bikes. The quickest way to distinguish the two is the fixed wheel on the spin bike and the width of the saddle, which is usually about as wide as a forearm.”
Peloton, founded in 2012, has seen its ups and downs over the recent years but in December 2023, it reported to have three million people subscribed to Peloton’s connected fitness membership. That’s more than any of the cycling-specific virtual cycling apps, even though the membership numbers are down from Peloton’s peak in 2022. At the same time, the platform’s annual revenue was over US$2.8bn between June 2023-24, making it much bigger than any of the cycling-specific apps, including Zwift, which reported it had “over 1 million subscribers” in 2024.
Size doesn’t equal profit, and Peloton has not earned a profit since before it went public. Zwift, which was founded in 2014, has also not had a profitable year yet. But in 2023, its founder Eric Kyoohong Min told Bloomberg he “hopes to increase the subscription prices, get to 10 million subscriptions, and take the company public.” That came off the back of an over £600 million investment that brought the company’s market value to nearly £1 billion in 2023.
As such Zwift is – much like Garmin is in the cycling computer world – a bit of a synecdoche for modern indoor cycling. “Zwifting” has become a verb to describe indoor riding on any platform, and the company holds a firm top spot ahead of the main competitors of Rouvy, Bkool and MyWhoosh. Why is that?
Rouvy, Bkool, and MyWhoosh are not Zwift’s only competitors, and there is a whole host of smaller fish in the pond: Wahoo X, FulGaz, GoldenCheetah, Kinomap, VirtuPro, and the recently revamped Training Peaks Virtual to name a handful. These are not the ones you hear talked about as frequently – perhaps partially because their marketing budget might not be as large as the big operators – but at the same time they offer many of the same functionalities.
“Honestly, I think that we don’t compete with Zwift. We don’t need to be stronger – it’s not our priority,” says Rouvy’s founder, Petr Samek. “I can imagine that users can pay both platforms at the same time and it will make perfect sense because our value and our propositions are completely different. Our focus is on bringing the outdoors inside.” Representatives from many of the other platforms voiced similar sentiments.
But you’d expect them to say that; surviving in the ever-more competitive landscape is still crucial for success, and it’s becoming increasingly hard to achieve.
“The first priority of each platform will be continued sustainability or reaching sustainability. We’ve seen a number of indoor 3D cycling platforms come and go over the years – VirtuGO, RGT, CVRCade, just to name a few – for various reasons,” Miller tells Escape. “RGT is a notable failure from that list as it had a grass-roots supporter base similar to Zwift in the early days, but it never reached Zwift levels of popularity, proving that it takes more than just a strong community to succeed in this field.”
Many indoor cycling apps saw a boom during Covid-19 when people were constrained to their homes for exercise. The bubble that affected all of the cycling industry was bound to burst at some point and left many players folding.
“I don’t see any smaller players in the software game having success in a market where [even] some well-established (and well-loved) products seem to be struggling,” Miller says. “When it comes to indoor cycling apps in general (not just 3D simulators), they’re all still recovering from the post-Covid-19 downturn.”
As an example, he points to the increasing trend of third-party training platforms pushing their users’ structured workouts to Zwift. “The training platform partnerships we’re seeing between Zwift and companies such as Xert, JoinCC, FasCat, and soon TrainerRoad might be an indication of the status of the market. I never thought I’d see the day TrainerRoad would hitch their wagon to the Zwift train, but here we are,” Miller says.
What draws us to these apps?
Indoor cycling is bigger than ever, and even if we leave Peloton out of the equation, at any given moment of the day tens of thousands of people are still cycling indoors on Zwift alone. Though Zwift shys away from revealing the exact its exact user figures, its subscriber base is estimated to hover somewhere around one million, and in January 2021, the company hit peak number of users online at any given time: 49,114.
So is it the chasing of level-ups, race wins, and beating others that have built Zwift’s userbase? It’s probably more than that. Appealing to those who might not want to deal with attaching an outdoor bike to a trainer each time, or use regular gearing, has led Zwift also to develop its own hardware, essentially aiming to make the process of starting indoor cycling as easy as possible with features such as the virtual shifting, having a full smart bike and so on. But isn’t that closer to say, what Peloton offers?
“We are seeing more of those sorts of – what you might describe as Peloton-type customers – coming to the platform, but it’s still primarily cyclists we’re focused on at the moment,” Chris Snook, director of PR at Zwift, admits.
But at the same time, other companies have started their journey in the indoor cycling sphere even before Zwift, yet failed to achieve similar success. At such, some of Zwift’s and many other indoor cycling apps’ success could be also attributed to timing.
Zwift founder Min has talked about the story of the platform extensively, explaining how his move to London left him without a cycling community, and that then turned him to indoor cycling. Inspired by that, he grabbed a few of his mates who luckily were pretty high-caliber tech folks, and started the business.
“Why did Zwift get that critical mass? Timing. Just like the iPod came along when music compression licenses started expiring, storage became cheaper, and technology became smaller – Zwift came along not too soon after Wahoo had released the Kickr… and at a time social media was a place people shared new, interesting, and positive things,” Miller says.
Making it all less boring
Regardless of the size of the company, all of the indoor cycling platforms claim to offer us something more time-efficient and, most importantly, less boring than what came before.
Petr Samek, CEO and co-founder of the Czech platform Rouvy, pointed this out as one of the main inspirations for the app. Samek immediately comes across as very different from media-trained PR directors at larger companies as he recites the origins of ‘Virtual Training’ – the brainchild of Petr and his brother Jiri that they later branded as Rouvy.
“We started even earlier than many think. Back in 2007, when I was at university, my brother and I – both semi-professional mountain bikers – began working on the idea,” Samek explains. “Indoor cycling, as many agree, is boring. We needed a way to motivate ourselves during bad weather or off-season. By 2013, we had signed an exclusive agreement with CycleOps. In 2017, we rebranded as Rouvy.”
Unlike the highly gamified Zwift, Rouvy works with augmented reality (AR), and from the beginning, it’s focused on bringing the outdoors indoors with workouts based on real rides rendered with high-quality video footage. In addition to making training more stimulating than riding rollers and staring at the wall, Samek also notes that indoor cycling can be a much more efficient way of training.
Other platforms, most vocally MyWhoosh, say it’s entertainment that brings users to the app. That was a word that frequently came up as the differentiating factor in interviews with the brand’s PR director, Matt Smithson.
“We work in the entertainment industry, not the cycling industry. My job is to entertain you more indoors than any other platform does and, hopefully, one day, more than riding outdoors,” Smithson says. “At the end of the day, a lot of platforms do the same thing – they allow you to ride indoors, and measure your stats and numbers. But for us, it’s about how do we entertain our users while they’re on the platform. We’re crossing over between the Peloton piece and the indoor cycling piece by building a community around live coaching and engagement.”
Still, saying that indoor cycling is entertainment is a strong statement. More often than that, the factors that draw users are more pragmatic, like limited time or unpleasant weather.
Making the most out of limited time
Though most indoor cycling apps integrate workouts and training plan offerings to varying levels and needs, the newly acquired TrainingPeaks Virtual has the vision to take that even further. As mentioned earlier, the integration of training platforms into virtual cycling apps is becoming more common, but TrainingPeaks Virtual is something a little different.
The newcomer – if it can be called that – was founded as IndieVelo by George Gilbert and in its first year gained over 40,000 users. Until it was acquired by training platform TrainingPeaks in November 2024 the whole platform was Gilbert alone – and scaling up was always in the pipeline.
“The question was with who and when [to sell to], not if, because there’s only so far you can go with one person,” Gilberts admits. “I understood right from the very start that I would need help at some point, but trying to find the right partner, that was the key there. TrainingPeaks has long had this commitment to performance – they provide tools that coaches and athletes use to be their best, no matter what their goals are.”
This acquisition allowed Gilbert to double down on its focus with a partner that he believes will help people to train more effectively – whether indoors or outdoors.
“Indoor training has a whole bunch of advantages around safety and convenience and all those kinds of things that mean that you get a better workout indoors than you do outdoors. If you’re training outdoors and you’ve got to do some efforts and there’s a traffic light or a car – it’s very hard to actually do what you wanted to do precisely,” Gilbert explains. “If you care about doing your workout to that specification, it’s just way easier to do it indoors in a controlled environment. There will be some people who only want to train and race indoors, and that’s fine, but there’s also a very significant number of people whose primary focus is outdoor racing, but use indoor training as a means to further their goals outdoors.”
It’s an unarguable fact that in addition to controlling your efforts very precisely, you are also able to control the external conditions, e.g. temperature and wind, much more effectively indoors. You’ll also be able to avoid any encounters with car drivers or potholes. Many of the platforms mentioned that road safety, both for regular rides and racing, has gotten worse over the years and encourages riders to stay indoors.
When it comes to the reality of why people actually seek out riding on any indoor cycling platform, weather and road safety concerns are also near the top, as many of the experts admitted, too.
“It’s getting harder and harder and harder to race outdoors and it’s getting more difficult to ride outdoors anywhere in the world unless you live in a place that’s really suitable for cycling. It’s dangerous these days – so more and more people are going to come into virtual cycling from our cycling world. I think that racing anything below an elite sort of level is going to become more and more online over time,” MyWhoosh’s Smithson says.
As the weather gets more extreme around the globe, it’s also becoming an ever bigger driver for cyclists to get set up indoors.
“Weather is one of the biggest influences on engagement in Zwift. When it’s raining, more people log on. In places like Spain, California, or Australia, summers are becoming too hot to ride outdoors, so people are moving indoors,” Zwift’s Snook explains. “We see increased engagement during wet and dark seasons, particularly in the UK and Europe. But the environment is also a factor in countries with high pollution levels, like South Korea, where people are advised to train indoors.”
Bkool’s marketing manager Diego Pantoja shares the sentiment that climate will play an ever bigger role in driving the growth of indoor cycling, combined with the other aspects.
“I am sure of it. Our sector has grown considerably in recent years and this trend is undoubtedly set to continue,” Pantoja says. “Not only because of the effects of climate change, which has meant that even in the heat of the summer, many cyclists are training from home but also because of our lifestyles. Especially from Monday to Friday, it is very difficult to find time for quality training.”
Connecting with a community
Indoor cycling has come a long way from those lonely times riding a bike alone with nothing but movies and music as entertainment. Now, most of the platforms offer some sort of community connection to their users – whether it’s group rides, chats, or being part of a club.
“Community and social engagement is a massive drawcard. Look how popular the Zwift Pace Partner rides are, they’re big!” says Miller. “There’s multiple bunch rides happening 24/7 that people gravitate towards because you’re riding with other real people. If you’re riding at the same time every day, you’ll likely be with the same people. People will chat. Friendships will form.”
But in the virtual world, you might be riding with lots of bots, too. If there are not enough people to take part in your race, the solution some platforms have adopted is to create AI bots.
“TrainingPeaks Virtual has a fleet of like 10,000 bots. They’re all highly intelligent and act like real humans out training and racing. They’ve all got their own unique physiology, CP (critical power), power curves, prime energy reserves and so on,” Gilbert explains. “There are sprinters and climbers and wheel suckers and they kind of race intelligently and attack and sprint and sit in reading the race.”
This means that in the app, you’ll never turn up to a race where you’re getting a podium spot just by showing up. There will always be competition. But having bots as companions isn’t for everyone, either.
“Without other real riders or players, a platform is lifeless and less engaging. Indievelo was a case in point for this. MyWhoosh comes in a close second,” Miller argues. “On the flip side, [even] a super-engaged and super-passionate community like RGT doesn’t make a platform either without critical mass.”
Taking part in racing and e-sports
While some take on a session on the indoor trainer to chat with others, it also has a money-making race side. Every day, every hour, a race of some sort takes place in the virtual world.
For the past two years, the virtual cycling races have taken place even at the UCI World Championship level. Zwift hosted the first e-cycling World Championships in 2023 but then handed over the task to MyWhoosh, who’s now signed up to host the races for three years.
“First and foremost, we were originally an e-sports racing platform. That’s really what we existed to do to with our Sunday race club series, and then that’s evolved very much to become how we engage the communities,” MyWhoosh’s Smithson says.
MyWhoosh hosted the 2024 UCI Cycling eSports World Championships in Abu Dhabi, and Smithson says the event was a success in many aspects. The event was broadcast live globally and it was the biggest e-cycling event this far – yet its results are likely not known to many.
Shane Miller thinks it will need a lot of development to reach that stage of mass media coverage and popularity.
“There’s no character building or “today’s hero” style following of eSports riders that we see with Remco [Evenepoel], Pogi [Tadej Pogačar], or [Kasia] Niewiadoma in the real world. I don’t think anyone knows who any of the top eSport cyclists are,” Miller says. “At a technical level, there’s still a lot of work needed to be done to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the equipment used. There are a lot of good people involved in moving the needle here and have been for a while. At the end of the day, the riders are still on mass-produced trainers that are built for the home user, not for people to be winning (or losing) World Championship bands with. It’s F1 racing with competitors on Toyotas from a local dealer. Sure the playing field might be level, but damn, those things are going to overheat with the revs (watts) the pros push.”
Rouvy’s Samek and MyWhoosh’s Smithson both agreed in that the racing side of the apps has huge potential to develop and offers a safer racing environment than outdoors. It’s not to be overlooked how virtual racing can also act as a way for riders stepping up to the “real world” racing.
“eSports provides a pathway for amateur riders to compete at the professional level. Through Zwift’s World Series, riders can qualify for elite-level events – a pathway not available in traditional cycling,” Zwift’s Snook says.
How much are we willing to pay?
Even if there is an overarching sentiment from the indoor cycling apps for encouraging people to cycle more and be active, at their core most of these businesses are money-making enterprises. And in addition to innovation and tech improvements, indoor cycling platforms have also had to compete in price in order to attract users.
Zwift raised its prices by 33%, from US$14.99 a month to $19.99 in May 2024, and that made it one of the most expensive indoor cycling apps. In addition to the app fee, users will also face the cost of the hardware.
“The price is a very important aspect,” Samek admits. And while he says Rouvy has no plans to expand to selling trainers or other hardware, he sees the market becoming more competitive in a broader sense. “I really believe that soon, we will see much lower entry price points for hardware. Besides this, there’s space to improve the feelings of indoor riding in comparison to outdoors. There are so many things that could be improved still.”
MyWhoosh has, in addition to boasting entertainment offerings, positioned itself as the most accessible alternative financially, offering its platform free of charge. By eliminating subscription fees, it hopes to have opened the door to a broader audience globally – though the business model has raised questions since its founding in 2019, and the full story of its plans and backing (MyWhoosh is owned by an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund) remains hidden behind a curtain.
Smithson says that the free nature of the app will not change going forward – though the platform does already have a paid season pass that costs money, too. To fund its running, MyWhoosh’s world is scattered with ads, and it has backing from “stakeholders from the Middle East, involved in a multitude of different businesses.” The details of these stakeholders are not disclosed, nor are the intentions beyond encouraging more cycling.
“MyWhoosh came around in 2019 and was predominantly incepted by our stakeholders in order to be able to allow cycling in the summer here in the UAE. It’s crazy hot here – you can’t go out and ride for probably 12 weeks of the year,” says Smithson. “The vision was something that was accessible for everybody around the world, not just here, and entertaining. Those were the two key pieces – entertainment and accessibility.”
“The core of MyWhoosh will always remain free. Free riding, workouts, community rides, racing – that stuff will always remain what it is,” Smithson says. “It is becoming a national sport here. There’s people that love it, and why shouldn’t it be free inside when it’s free outside?”
He also adds that a large part of MyWhoosh’s income comes from sponsors and “building worlds”: “Our business plan has always been around the idea, ‘We can sell worlds’. So, if the UK government said, ‘We’re going to push massive amounts of tourism into London,’ I can create something that forces tourism – I can create a world around that. I can put any branding in that world that I want. So, I sell the branding in the world. For example, at the World Championships there was Santini, Shimano, etc. There’s branding and bridges and archways everywhere and so we can bring people on to monetize that aspect of it.”
There are a few other free platforms, but most charge their users a monthly or annual fee after a free trial. The new TrainingPeaks Virtual, for example, is to remain free until March 2025, after which it will be part of the TrainingPeaks Premium subscription that costs US$125 a year.
“I think if you look at the industry as a whole – up until now it’s been dominated by commercial companies operating the interests of their shareholders – but now we’re in a position to be able to deliver something that is focused on athletes, that’s focused on coaches, that’s focused on performance rather than shareholder value,” Gilbert says. “We’re turning the sport from something that was originally pitched as a game to something that’s now a serious application for training and racing and something that is different. That’s going to be the really big change.”
What’s next?
Just looking at the last decade, the indoor cycling landscape has become ever more competitive and it has driven innovation and development, all drawing an ever larger number of people to sweat on their bikes indoors. The question that arises from all that is: what’s next, where can the segment go from here? When asking this from the brands and experts, a few things stood out.
“The future of Zwift will involve more innovation in hardware, gamification, and immersion. We’re committed to lowering barriers to entry with affordable and easy-to-use equipment,” Snook says, highlighting the company’s ever growing share in developing the indoor cycling hardware.
And though Zwift’s ‘Watopia’ virtual world is built upon a semi-fictional imaginary world, Snook doesn’t see virtual reality (VR) becoming a thing in Zwift anytime soon, though. Neither does any of the other experts Escape spoke with.
“Virtual reality isn’t there yet for cycling. The headsets are too big, heavy, and uncomfortable for endurance sports where people sweat a lot,” was the common consensus. Sam Matson at Saga, developer of the Holobike, agrees that headsets have too many practical and development issues to be a viable 3D option in the foreseeable future, which is why his system – still in development – is screen-based, delivering what he calls “stereoscopic visuals” on a flat-screen monitor.
AI, however, is an acronym that caused some to sigh in frustration, while others seemed eager to embrace it. Whether we want to admit it or not, the buzzword has become an integral part of much of our digital world, not just indoor cycling apps. Most of the platforms use it in one way or another on the software development side, while others have utilised it for anti-cheating measures in racing.
“I am sure that this will be another of the aspects that will set the tone in the coming years. Just look at how AI has changed everything in just a few months – how could it not have an impact on something as complex and advanced as cycling training?” Bkool’s Pantoja says. “There are few sports that offer the possibility of training from your room, obtaining a deep and detailed analysis of your performance and enjoying a tool that offers you the keys to improve day by day. Of course, we already use AI to grow and improve our platform and we will continue to do so to an increasing extent.”
Not all of the future developments are necessarily positive, either. Rouvy’s Samek was quite quick to highlight how some developments and the booming growth of the indoor cycling segment have also created obstacles for the consumers or the app developers. One aspect he highlighted was the introduction of proprietary equipment, like Zwift’s Virtual Cog – which is only slowly becoming compatible with other partners than Zwift – and Virtual Shifting, which remains only compatible with Zwift.
“We must be very careful about any proprietary protocols or locked-in approaches in the future. It’s important to avoid creating a mess for customers,” Samek cautions.
When it comes to the future, Samek sees the largest shift happening in the merging between outdoors and indoors. He sees this kind of hybrid model gaining traction, especially in racing scenarios – potentially allowing real-life and virtual racing to take place at the same time and work alongside each other instead of separate events.
“We can cooperate with race organisers more tightly and in the hybrid model, we would be able to extend the registration into some real races through the virtual world. It’s a big topic and opportunity for us because we have a quite unique part and market position for this,” Samek adds. “And lastly, we are also able to prepare you for the race because we have the digital version of the courses so you are able to ride the course as many times as you need indoors – you can try different effort, different paces. So there are plenty of possibilities.”
Rouvy is built upon real-life routes that are digitalised, but Samek says that even when possibly all roads in the world are included, the process can start again. “Once we have digitalised all courses worldwide, probably we will start again because we will start with digitalisation based on new technology so it’s better. And we will be able to definitely add a higher level of interactivity on these courses,” Samek says.
Others highlighted the sheer potential for growth in the market.
“In five years, the market will be triple the size of what it is today. Entertainment, better trainers, and improved dynamics will drive this,” MyWhoosh’s Smithson says confidently. Miller, more cautiously, pointed out that the apps are all still recovering from the post-COVID-19 downturn, so whether this will become reality remains to be seen.
Smithson also firmly believes in the growth of the e-sports side, especially as anti-cheating measures improve. “eSports is going nowhere but forward. The prize pools and credibility are growing, and more cyclists are seeing it as a viable pathway,” he contends.
Bkool, Rouvy and TrainingPeaks Virtual all said they believe there’s still a lot of room to develop a more realistic feel in the apps. It’s also what Miller sees as a necessary priority.
“Realism over gamification should be the first priority. Right down to the finer details of making the avatar look like a real cyclist. This is one thing a lot of platforms miss,” Miller states. “As cyclists, we ride behind other riders a lot so we know how a cyclist looks and moves. Once the look and physics are sorted – then it’s on to the gamification. I’d still like to see real-world race scenario replications as an in-game option on a platform. Imagine loading up the last 30 km of Milan-San Remo with all the actual rider positions replicated so we can ‘jump in’ and see how long we can hold on. Maybe an option to dial down the difficulty so we can attack the pros.”
Another thing that Miller mused he’d like to see happen is an improvement in the 3D-rendered environment. “Zwift and TrainingPeaks have 3D rendering platforms with ERG workouts, but there has to be a better way to visually represent riding an ERG workout than going up and down virtual hills that the trainer doesn’t respond to (when in ERG),” he says.
But do all the indoor cycling platforms want us to all move to cycling indoors? No, they don’t. When I asked this from Rouvy’s Samek, he was firm with his answer.
“Honestly, I believe that indoor cycling can be strong, maybe somewhere even stronger, part of the training preparation. But still, the goal is the go train indoors because you will then be ready for outdoors – that’s my opinion. That’s the future of cycling – that you enjoy it outside.”
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