TrainingPeaks vs Final Surge

1k for training peaks? wow

The $1k price is for a full team of premium memberships. There are much cheaper options for individuals and private coaches who pass the expense along to clients.

Nobody has an opinion on either of these?

I was a long time Training Peaks user. In fact, I used TP when it was Training Bible. My coaching company trains runners and triathletes globally. We generally have 250-300 athletes training at any given time. I like my athletes to have premium accounts so they can plan ahead for vacations, life changes, and races. With TP I was paying 9.99 per athlete. That comes out to 3K monthly and my annual fee.

I always thought TP needed a better social function as well. After much thought. You are right about one thing TP is way over the top with data measures. That is more about the ego of the owners and developers. It becomes a baffle them with brilliance product rather than a help your athlete product. Do you know how many times I have heard coach what is TSS?

Well I actually hired a tech team and have developed my own version of TP/Strava currently being Beta tested and soon to be released to athletes and coaches. Coaches will only pay $29.99 a year to use the product and if they want premium accounts for their athletes it will only be $3.99 a year. It is Garmin, Suunto, Polar, Tom Tom compatible with direct API's. And most importantly it has a way better communication integration for everyone.

Let us know when you release this. I've just started using FS with my coach for a short term boot camp.

Coach Dub wrote:

I am a college distance coach and I have used numerous online logs over the years. I was previously with Final Surge but switched over to Training Peaks a couple of years ago. Training Peaks seems to be more advanced but unless you are a triathlon coach, many of the features seem rather unnecessary. Or maybe I just don't understand them. TP costs me roughly $1k/year while FS is just $250/year. I'd like to hear what others think. I'm considering going back to FS as they have made some updates in recent years. This isn't about cost. Simply functionality. Analysis is fun but mostly concerned about planning, logging, feedback, etc. Both appear to accept Garmin input now. That's a popular input method with many of my runners now.

Who prefers which and why?

I love using TrainingPeaks, but I think the value in it is in understanding the metrics and knowing how to analyze the data. I also like how coach athlete focused it is. If you are able to setup thresholds right and your athletes are using good gps devices then I haven't seen anything out there that comes close to beating the value TrainingPeaks gives you.

TP is heavily cycling oriented where data has been available from powermeters for about 20 years (15 years mainstream) so it is going to go heavy into the analytics.

I have coached small numbers of runners at any given time and used Google Calendar.

I can copy and paste workouts from one calendar to another (not as easily as in TP). The runner can put in vacations, etc on the calendar. I can send out reminders. It has the functionality I need. If the runner uses Garmin, then I get connected to that account and can see the workouts. (I usually only care about 1 or 2 of them a week to be honest).

Hey Coaches,

I'm a college student who ran in both high school and college. During my 6 years of running I tested a bunch of running log apps. A lot of them were good at keeping track of what I was doing, but I always felt they neglected the general team atmosphere. They didn't make it easy for coaches to connect with their athletes.

I also had coaches who tried using different team management running apps. They were always pretty complex and offered no incentive for us (the runners) to log our miles. My coaches also always struggled to input workout results, so even if we logged all of our miles we only had half of the puzzle.

Alongside my cofounder we built an app that works as a training log for athletes and a stopwatch for coaches. The stopwatch uses the volume buttons of the iPhone to get splits. At the end of this post I'll include a link to the video of the app and a link to the App Store.

Our app Trackster is completely FREE!

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2J3KwBdy4w

App Store:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trackster-stopwatch-log/id1207582363?mt=8

Hi Coach Dub!

Late to the party for sure but wanted to drop my own platform into the mix. We've been serving coaches with our platform that aims to combine a bunch of different types of apps into one to save time and help coaches be more efficient and offer a streamlined experience to their clients.

Our Business Toolkit includes e-commerce, communication and planning features but we also have our Coaching Tools plan for those that just need the training plan tools.

Our metrics are much simpler than tools like Training Peaks and we only offer accounts directly to coaches who in turn can offer accounts to their clients through the platform. We don't charge the athletes themselves to use the platform but we do have tools that allow coaches to do that themselves. If so inclined you can create your own training platform to resell to athletes or use it for your own coaching groups.

We've recently had a lot of interest from running groups because of our broad feature set to combine tools and save money overall.

You can check us out over at website if you just Google Training Tilt

Thanks

Cam

Founder of Training Tilt