Strava vs Runkeeper

A decade ago these were near-identical products: press start, run, get a map and a pace. Both are still free to download, and if all you want is a record of how far you went, either will do the job and you should stop reading and pick the one with the nicer icon.

Where they diverged is what they built on top of the tracker, and it is a clean split. Strava built outward — other people, feeds, leaderboards, comparison. Runkeeper, now owned by ASICS, built inward — plans, guided workouts, a voice telling you what today's session is. One turned into a network, the other into a coach.

Strava's free tier covers recording activities, the community feed, safety features, basic route browsing and your training history. Its subscription adds routes and offline maps, advanced training and workout analysis, segment leaderboards, custom goals, fitness score tracking over time, and creating or joining challenges.

The reason people pay is usually segments: the same stretch of road timed across everyone who has ever run it, turning an ordinary route into a standing competition. There is nothing quite like it elsewhere, and it is a paid feature.

ASICS Runkeeper is free to download with in-app purchases, and its App Store listing describes audio-guided workouts, personalised plans, goal setting and tracking across multiple activity types. The paid tier, Runkeeper Go, is described as adding tailored race-training plans and detailed progress insights.

That is a meaningfully different pitch from Strava's. Runkeeper is trying to answer what should I run today. Strava, on its own, is trying to answer how did that go and who saw it. Neither is a lesser question; they are just not the same question, and a lot of the frustration people report with either app comes from having asked it the wrong one.

The trade-off is community. Runkeeper has one, but nothing on Strava's scale. If the reason you keep running is that other people are watching, that gap is the whole comparison.

Strava's missing coaching layer is no longer missing, but it is no longer free either. On 17 April 2025 Strava announced an agreement to acquire Runna, a running coaching app, and said it planned to keep the two apps separate for the foreseeable future. They are now also sold as a combined subscription bundle.

So if you are comparing paid tiers rather than free ones, compare carefully: Runkeeper Go is one subscription that includes plans, while the Strava equivalent is Strava's subscription plus a coaching app bundled alongside it. Two apps, two feature sets, one bill.

Neither app handles the interrupted week well. Miss three sessions and Strava shows a gap in the history while Runkeeper's plan carries on toward a date that has not moved. The decision — repeat the week, skip ahead, shorten the goal — arrives on a Sunday night and both apps are silent on it.

That is not a knock on either. It is the shape of the whole category, and it is worth knowing before you conclude that a different tracker would have fixed it.