Wahoo Fitness Reviews

I bought the Cadence & Speed sensor pack a couple years ago. Setup of the sensors and app went fine. As a long-time Strava user, I wanted to compare the accuracy of Strava vs Wahoo. I had to fuss with the rear wheel diameter quite a bit from the 700x23 default before the two apps were within 1~2% of each other for distance.
Then, WahooFitness began acting up after an update. Wahoo would drop out every few readings from the sensors, so a 19mph average pace ride would display as 14mph average over ~2/3 my actual distance. Sadly, the Strava app (at the time when it used to connect to cadence & speed sensors) was spot-on using the same sensors.
I reached out to Wahoo support, and they kept in touch with me for months on the issues. Eventually, I was informed of an update that would fix my issue. Sure enough, the update fixed the sensor connections.
Now, Wahoo’s altitude gain is WAY off in WahooFitness based on the GPS and sensors on my phone (1st gen iPhone SE). So, a ride with 1,439’ of climbing (per Strava) displays as 5,401’ in Wahoo. Here’s where that really stinks - if I upload my Wahoo rides to Strava, Strava corrects the altitude, and the calculation results in a ~2/3 decrease in my estimated power average.
I cannot find any way of getting these two apps to work together. So, I just use both apps simultaneously - Wahoo to display metrics during my ride and Strava to log it.

Started off bad as I accidentally clicked on the screen and set a lap time of 1 second, don’t know how but after 187 laps I stopped to figure it out. Those popups are a treat. Went to the work out settings and changed the metric to 1 mile. Started WahooFitness again and wouldn’t you know it still had laps set to 1 second. I even reset the cycling work out to defaults. Restarted the workout and was still receiving 1 second popups. Only fix was to turn-off the auto lap indicator.
So then I go back after ending and restarting the workout but it defaulted to running and I kept getting pace vs speed in my dashboard. Stopped the work out and restarted and it was set to cycling. It still showed pace. Stopped and started again and selected running and re-selected cycling and finally speed showed rather than pace.
I used to use map my run but apparently they do not support wahoo sensors since underarmour took over. Can’t find any documentation on that but assume they wanted money or wahoo figured their app would be better. I liked my wahoo sensors better working out with map my run. I will try it some more but WahooFitness needs some serious work. Reset the lap after each work out and don’t leave it perpetually in memory. And fix the issue with selecting the workout making sure the proper metrics and displayed.

This used to be fantastic. However, in recent updates Wahoo began attempting to track YOUR whereabouts when WahooFitness is not on by requesting ACCESS YOUR LOCATION ALWAYS in location services. That means WahooFitness is tracking when you’re not using WahooFitness . I opt to allow Wahoo to track my location ONLY WHEN USING WahooFitness (as WahooFitness needs your location to track runs and so on). Since selecting this option in location services, I get a horrible and frustrating reminder EVERY TIME I use WahooFitness , stating, “I am not using the proper location services.”
There is no reason why any app should be able to track your location when you’re not using WahooFitness . Wahoo, I’m sure, has some BS and canned response in why it needs to track your location when WahooFitness is NOT BEING USED.
In light of Facebook and other apps gathering your information and selling it to third parties, I will never allow an app to track my location when I’m not using it. Wahoo who should be ashamed of itself for requesting your LOCATION ALWAYS. Uber, if you recall, went through a similar situation. In which users screamed so much that it removed the request to have location services on at all times.
This is disgraceful and makes me think that Wahoo maybe selling our information to third parties.

Was going to refrain from writing a review, but the forced email sign-up was the final straw. WahooFitness now forces you to register to your email. Naturally, Wahoo uses that opportunity to almost immediately send you product spam. As if paying $1k+ for a kickr core was not enough, it needs to bilk you a bit more. Issues with app: - Cadance data from Kickr Core is not visible. - Data screens are poorly designed. Why isn’t HR visible with ERG controls? It makes it difficult to do HR based intervals. - Initial sync with strava was incredibly painful, took 20+ tries to get it to work. You would log in with un/pw but WahooFitness connection would fail to work (i.e. unable to upload a workout). - Occasionally slips out of ERG speed simulation mode, even though the toggle is on. Workaround is to always toggle-on and toggle-off the ERG simulation option prior to starting a workout. Otherwise, you get inconsistent distance measurements across workouts. - Lack of quick ERG power change preset buttons. If you want to switch from temp to threshold during an interval, you are dialing in watts each time. - Bugs when trying to calibrate the kickr core: speed sometimes stays at 0, or the resistance is very high at start of calibration. Workaround is to power cycle the kickr core unit.

I have been using WahooFitness for about a year with my Kickr. Overall, WahooFitness works well. I find the in-ride controls to be fairly easy to use. No issues with connecting to cadence/other sensors (looking at you, Zwift). I like being able to review my stats and have it all connect to the iPhone Health app. My one request would be for the ability to create prefab workouts rather than having to manually adjust resistance on the fly. I would like to be able to open WahooFitness and pick something I have saved in advance, like HIITs or sweet spot training or whatever, without having to adjust the settings while I ride. Thanks!

UPDATE: what is the point of the new statistics feature, when it doesn’t even show indoor cycling? I did a ride and went to check out the new feature . . . made sure every single option is toggled on to display . . . and it says I did nothing today. Is it only for tracking workouts that people do outside??

This is a really good app for indoor use. There are a couple of tweaks to the UI that would definitely make it significantly easier to use by making it easier to change the resistance as you’re biking and it would be nice to have the heart rate monitor on each page since training to heart rate is very effective. As for outdoors the GPS refresh rate is much too slow. For example you could be going down a hill at 30 miles an hour you get to the bottom you’re doing like 5 miles an hour and it takes over a minute to get to 5mph. You will also notice it when you were on a flat and simply accelerate it takes a while before it catches up to what your real miles per hour are. By the way it does the same thing for your cadence only the update is a little bit faster. This has caused me to use MapMyRide when I’m outdoors. It sure would be nice if the wahoo app would work year-round so I have one place to log all my miles The really good news is that WahooFitness has never crashed on me and always works!

It used to be a great app, but over the past few months it’s gotten worse and worse. My data doesn’t sync with major apps like it used to for years (Mapmyrun, Nike, Strava, etc,). I’ve done everything they suggest and it still doesn't work. I even deleted WahooFitness and reinstalled it hoping that would work but it still didn’t work, and I lost my past 3 years of workout data. Luckily, the data synced until just the past few months so I have it, but it’s only on the other apps, not Wahoo. Also, the data it shows in the history is screwed up. The preview screen is correct, but when I click on it, the time data is really screwed up. For example, I ran on the treadmill for 1 hour and 9 minutes. It shows that correct time in the history screen, but when I click on it, the “active time” shows my lap 3 time as 21 hours, 55 minutes, and 37 seconds, and my paused time as over 204 hours. This doesn’t give me the confidence to continue using it. This was my favorite workout app and worked great with all my gear, but with no syncing and major data issues, I’m not going to be using anymore. I’ve done all their tips and still nothing. Too bad.

I used to be able to use this on a new iPod touch but since this last update this stupid thing won’t allow it for some reason. I don’t want to waste valuable iPhone battery while I’m out and could need to make an emergency call. I don’t want location services. I just want my cadence because I have a bad knee and need to keep an eye on my RPM and my heart rate. But thanks to Wahoo and their updates I can no longer do that. Thanks for my now useless sensors, Wahoo - I appreciate sinking hard earned money in your products that are now effectively useless.

And I even tried this on my iPhone just to see if it would work and it asks me if I want to enable location services. When I enter “no” it tells me to enable location services. WHY DOES IT BOTHER TO ASK IF IT WON’T ALLOW TO BYPASS IT???

Wahoo, you need to fix this! No one should be forced to enable location services just to use sensors to collect data related to heart rate and cadence - these have no relationship to location. I don’t care about my route. Let the Strava lovers play with that. I want my health monitored, not letting you people have access to where and when I ride.

I’m an old, slow cyclist who finds WahooFitness very useful and easy to understand. I got a Trek bike recently for errands and recreation. It had a recess on the frame to install a DuoTrap sensor, and with that in place, Wahoo on an iPhone becomes the greatest cyclometer you can imagine: speed, cadence, distance, time all in front of your eyes, and your map, your music and more just a swipe away. Mapping is especially important to me for exploring my city. I feel a little silly calling each ride a “workout,” since I’m often just headed to the grocery store, but no matter. I like that it communicates with the Health app, and I like having no wires and no zip ties. At my age, keeping track can be a great source of encouragement for keeping active. I never imagined I could benefit from something this sophisticated, but it is helping me a lot.

The entire reason I downloaded WahooFitness was because I left my watch on the charger one morning but still wanted to track my heart rate. WahooFitness claims it will link with external devices such as heart rate monitors, and at first it seem to be working just fine. My chest strap linked relatively quickly to WahooFitness and provided my heart rate. However, once I started recording an actual activity, the problems began. Not once string my almost 3 hour workout did it give any heart rate data. Furthermore, the data display screens for workouts are poorly organized. I made the mistake of swiping right eye hoping it might show more data or maybe give me some settings. Instead, it goes to a map view and any further input just moves the map around. There is no useful data displayed on this screen, and if you try to return to the main display, it just moves the map around. If there IS a way to actually return to the home screen, it is NOT intuitive, especially mid work out. I would give WahooFitness zero stars if I could.

I use WahooFitness to track spin bike workouts with cadence, speed, and TICKR sensors. (Speed sensor is not recommended but works well after fine-tuning settings.) It’s almost perfect for my needs as I prefer to watch my stats and listen to my own music rather than take a virtual spin class. I export to the Health app and Strava when finished and everything works great. The only thing that would be better is if you had an Apple Watch component app and my workout could be logged as “indoor cycling” as opposed to “outdoor cycling”. Thanks Wahoo, loving my new setup and your products.

I have been using WahooFitness for 1.5 years with my Magellan Echo watch. Suddenly WahooFitness has many issues with the new update:

1. WahooFitness works only first time I pair the watch immediately after installing WahooFitness . Any further use crashes WahooFitness as soon as the Magellan Echo completes the re-connection. Now, for every workout now I have to uninstall WahooFitness , install, redo the pairing, redo the settings including echo configuration. Then it work only for 1 time. As soon as the workout is completed and the connection is closed, any further connections for workout crashes WahooFitness .

2. If I start the workout from my watch, the home screen of WahooFitness does not change to workout page and it’s impossible to save the workout. So I have to start the workout from app, pause it immediately and then use my watch to control it.

I've been using Wahoo standalone for a couple of years and the one feature it lacks is a cumulative odometer to serve as a proper computer. It would be a great feature to add a cumulative odometer or distance traveled by profile so it could be to track total distances for a specific activity or profile type. It could be used to track mileage by bike or running type, etc.

Another function that's missing that all other GPS cycling apps include is an altimeter. For work outs/trip it's great but as I've gotten into cyclocross an altimeter is becoming important. I have a RFLKT+ adds that feature but the total distance travelled is still crucial as part of overall bike maintenance. The RFLKT+ doesn't seem to enable additional functionality like an odometer. It only has a running 4 weeks worth of mileage. More of a fitness tracker than a true bike computer.

If this isn't the solution I will abandon Wahoo altogether and explore other options.

For what I use it for this is a great app. I have a Cervelo P2 tri bike, a Trek road bike and a CycleOps stationary bike, all three have the Blue SC speed and Cadence sensor. Prior to the update, I consistently had to reboot the sensor each time I changed bikes or it would not link to my app. Now since the update, it works perfectly. I have an IPhone X with a Quadlock case which I mount to each each bike so I can use WahooFitness primarily for speed and cadence during my ride, but also for post-ride data tracking. My only real issue at this point is that I use my Apple Watch to track my heart rate but that does not link up to the Wahoo App, though I think that is Apple’s fault. All told I love using my Phone as a bike computer with Wahoo. If I am going to spend $1000 on a phone, I am going to get as many uses out of it as I can.

This bug has been fixed. Great app for tracking your ride, lots of info. Screen is easy to see while riding.

This was a great app for tracking my bike rides. Unfortunately in Sept 19, an update introduced an error that causes the distance traveled to be doubled. Oddly, speed and elapsed time are correct (so, for example, WahooFitness will say that a ride took 60 minutes, with an average speed of 14 mph, and was 28 miles in length). This makes WahooFitness useless for tracking distance (the error also shows up in realtime, so the distance travelled display is incorrect as well). Support acknowledges that this is a known bug, and suggested waiting for an update, but multiple updates have occurred without this critical error being addressed.

I like that this works with non wahoo products. Been a user of WahooFitness for years on several different phones. The last 3 months I’ve lost several workouts because WahooFitness crashes either in the middle of a workout (losing the first half of data) or it crashes when I go to save the workout (which just happened again today). It’s very annoying to lose a workout like this because I was paddle boarding with my non water proof hr monitor so there was no room for error in falling to get some baseline hr data for the activity. I had 2.5 hrs on the water, hit save workout, and WahooFitness crashes out, all data lost. This is a new problem in the last 3 months with the wahoo app. Very annoying and shouldn’t happen.

I’ve used WahooFitness with my Wahoo TICKR for a bit over a year. As of this morning, WAHOO has decided that I can no longer use WahooFitness and my TICKR hardware unless I create an account with them. That’s not gonna happen, so they’ve effectively stolen my heart rate monitor. Great job, Wahoo. Guess I’ll have to go buy a new HRM from a more trustworthy company.

WahooFitness normally works reliably on my phone, but it has one unforgivable bug. When it can’t communicate with the HRM, or the HRM is unable to get a reading, it continues to display the last reading forever. I’ve had it display my heart rate as 50 beats under the actual heart rate because that’s what my rate was 5 minutes ago when it lost communications. On a dry day when the HRM doesn’t make good skin contact, It’ll normally read over 200 bpm while I’m warming up until I sweat enough to make good contact. A device like this simply can’t display wrong data - if your not getting a reading, don’t display Anything.

They say if you can’t say nice don’t say anything, so the nicest compliment I can offer is that your April 2019 update was so shoddy that it made me look at what other options were available for home trainer workouts. Fortunately it’s a tremendous time for such technology to improve how we work out. It also highlights how lacking Wahoo has been in this domain while others quietly innovate. For a couple of years I thought Burn & Burst were some kind of science, but they do ‘t even scratch the surface of what’s available.

The result:

New training app: downloaded
New power pedals: ordered
New workout goals: planned
Wahoo app: (soon to be deleted)
Wahoo Tickr: can’t throw it away until it totally breaks, but then...

Wahoo, you will never get a cent from me for the rest of my years on this planet. Hope this feedback somehow reaches someone who can fix things there.

Update to Wahoo Fitness Developer: what is broken is exactly what several hundred users are also complaining about with this update. You removed Burn and Burst functionality. Your analysis may have shown that only a minority of people use these functions, but you are aware that these are the hardcore users right? So don’t be surprised when they leave. As your all-knowing founder said, Wahoo is a hardware company and not a software developer. I guess this proves it. I’ve already moved on, I’m so over Wahoo.

When it comes to sports training, very much rests on having reliable kit and support accessory products. The last thing you want to have to deal with when psyching up for a workout after conditioning to hit a personal best is having to tinker about with a heart monitor that doesn’t work. Unfortunately the wahoo heart monitor is plagued with one problem after the next - it’s very temperamental and as and when it chooses, it either doesn’t sync with my iPhone (X10 and prior to that iPhone 8), or doesn’t see it at all; I have done everything from reload WahooFitness , to changing batteries to buying wahoo replacements - I am on my third wahoo heart rate monitor and now I am left in no doubt that it’s an entirely inferior product and a total waste of money. Not for the regular serious sportsman and definitely not for the faint-hearted.

Two stars as a rating is very generous.

If I could give WahooFitness zero stars I would. I can’t describe how disappointed I am that I will be forced to create an account and pay for my continued use of the hardware I previously purchased with my privacy. They apparently did not even think of asking for me to pay for WahooFitness and preserve my privacy. Based on these actions I would say to beware of the intentions of this company and not to spend money on their hardware and not to give them your personal information.

The developer’s response supports my comments. They need money to support continued app and device development and have chosen a business model similar to Google, Facebook, etc where the software comes with a price, our privacy. I would have paid for software updates if asked. My choice is to preserve my privacy to the best of my ability. So I’ll be leaving the land of Wahoo.

Been using WahooFitness pretty heavily for a couple months now. At first I was just using it with a Polar H7 heart rate monitor and worked well with that. Now I’m also using it with a Topeak speed and cadence sensor and it works flawlessly with that as well — unlike Strava which apparently can’t work with cadence sensors, but oddly Strava ingests the cadence data just fine when Wahoo exports it to Strava. I wish the export to Strava were automatic, but it’s just 2 taps, so no big deal.

GPS is glitchy — it’ll show you on a highway instead of the bike path next to the highway — but that’s mostly an Apple problem. I could buy a Bad Elf and connect it to my iPhone if I wanted better GPS.

And it calculates calories based off heart rate rather than stuff like elevation change. Neither calculation is perfect and I like the fact that Wahoo’s logic and number is different from Strava’s. And I like that Wahoo puts total calories for the month front and center.

I just wish the the totals were a rolling 28 days so the numbers didn’t bounce around so much. But that’s a small detail.

All and all — thumbs up!

Using Wahoo Fitness on iPhone 8 with Polar H10 HRM and with Wahoo Blue SC for speed and cadence on bike trainer. Also use it with the Polar HRM on elliptical trainer. WahooFitness has worked well for me the first two week — no problems syncing with sensors, displays are easy to read.

I have used various Polar HRM models over the years for running, biking, swimming, and gym equipment and never found a chest strap uncomfortable. Changing from a wrist watch to the phone for a receiver isn’t a problem now, because at 76 years old and after several surgeries I limit my cardio workouts to stationary equipment. For walking, hiking, or casual bike riding I don’t bother monitoring HR, since we use those activities more for fun than for exercise. If I were still running I don’t think I would want to carry the phone.

The algorithm used by the Wahoo app for calorie expenditure gives a substantially higher result for me than Polar would, probably unrealistically high just like most gym equipment. That doesn’t matter as long as it’s consistent since I only use calories as a rough indication of effort expended when managing cardio workouts from day to day.

I haven’t compared with other similar apps, but Wahoo Fitness works fine for me.

I’m a runner, and this isn’t as great as it was before the upgrade. I used to be able to easily see and track when I was in “burn” and “burst” zones, now there are several page options (none useful to me), and it’s more difficult to monitor my heart rate in real time.

What’s worse, my settings are reset/erased each day or after WahooFitness has been closed for a few hours, which is annoying. I don’t need to see how much time I spent swimming when I don’t swim, but that page comes back each day I open WahooFitness again. I also have to re-enter my heart rate zones every time I start, and now need to use a different app to test my heart rate zones instead of this one.

To the developers: Please allow my settings to stick, to make the interface less clunky, and to bring back some of the benefits from the older version.