TrainingPeaks Alternatives After the Garmin Acquisition (2026)

On 22 July 2026, Garmin announced that it had bought TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic, the strength-training app from the same parent company, Peaksware. The terms were not disclosed. Since then the same question keeps coming up on coaching forums and in our inbox: should I move, and if so, where to?

The short answer is that nothing forces you to move today. The longer answer follows, with the alternatives worth a look and how to take your history with you. We build one of them, OpenAthlete, so read that part with the scepticism it deserves. We have tried to describe the others the way their own users would.

What actually changed

The owner. So far, that is all. The Garmin press release says about 120 people from TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic join Garmin and that the platforms stay in Louisville, Colorado. It says nothing about accounts, prices or device support. No price change has been announced for Premium or Coach Edition, and coach accounts work as they did in June. Some outlets, CycleLytic among them, reported that Garmin said compatibility with other watch brands would not change. We could not find that commitment in writing from Garmin, and we have seen nothing pointing the other way either. Your COROS, Suunto, Polar and Wahoo athletes still sync.

So why are coaches asking? Mostly because of who now sets the roadmap. TrainingPeaks was valuable as the neutral layer between every watch brand and every coach. A watch maker now decides where its engineers spend their time. Garmin may well keep it neutral, since that neutrality is what it paid for. Still, when Garmin bought Firstbeat in 2020 it said third-party licensing would continue, and the5krunner, citing DC Rainmaker, notes that new third-party deals have since dried up. That proves nothing about TrainingPeaks. It does explain why coaches with mixed rosters are paying attention.

Then there is precedent. Today's Plan was owned by Specialized, had a loyal base of cycling coaches, and shut down in March 2024. Coaches with years of athlete history on it had a few months to get it out. Nobody expects the same from TrainingPeaks, which is far bigger, but people who went through it now keep an exit plan. And money was already a topic before July: Premium went from $124.99 to $134.99 a year in April 2025.

Should you switch?

For many people, the honest answer is no, or not yet. Go through the following before you spend a weekend migrating.

Your athletes' watches

If every athlete you coach wears a Garmin, the acquisition is neutral for you, possibly good. If a third of your roster runs on COROS, Suunto or Polar, you are the one with something to watch. Make a list today: which brand each athlete uses, and whether planned workouts reach that watch. Workout delivery is what you would lose first if an integration ever got worse.

What you pay

List prices on November 3, 2026: TrainingPeaks Premium costs $19.95 a month or $134.99 a year. Coach Edition starts at $21.99 a month with one Premium athlete included, then $9 down to $4.50 a month for each extra Premium athlete depending on roster size, plus a $99 set-up fee that a promo code waives (TrainingPeaks coach pricing). Planned workouts only sync to devices for Premium athletes, so a coach who pays Premium for 10 athletes spends about $1,187.28 a year before tax. If that is money you would rather keep, it is a reason to look around whoever owns the company.

What you depend on

Some things have no real equivalent elsewhere. If you sell plans on the TrainingPeaks marketplace, that audience does not follow you. If your athletes ride TrainingPeaks Virtual in winter, or love the native apps, count that in. And if your athletes are happy and you are the only one worried, moving 25 people for a hypothetical risk can cost more goodwill than it saves. Coaches who tried report that clients often simply say no.

Your data

Whatever you decide, export your history now. It takes an evening and removes most of the risk. How to do it is at the end of this post.

The independent alternatives

None of these belongs to a watch maker. Prices are the vendors' list prices on November 3, 2026; check the linked page before you pay.

intervals.icu

Free, with a $4 a month Supporter tier (intervals.icu). For a self-coached athlete who likes data it is the obvious first stop: fitness, fatigue and form, power and pace curves, a workout builder, a calendar, and one of the longest integration lists around (Garmin, COROS, Suunto, Polar, Wahoo, Zwift and many more). Coaches can follow and plan for athletes; teams and coaching organisations need Supporter. There is no official mobile app (third-party apps fill the gap), and many users find the interface dense at first. If you live in the performance management chart, start here.

Nolio

From Grenoble, partner of the French athletics federation and the default in French clubs. Athletes are free (Premium €6.90 a month); coach plans start at €19.90 a month for 3 athletes and €29.90 for up to 25, with cheaper plans for clubs that are registered associations (Nolio pricing). Native iOS and Android apps, a library of strength exercise videos, comments on each session. For a coach or club in France it is the closest like-for-like replacement. Less known elsewhere, and the price climbs by tier as the roster grows: €358.80 a year for a coach with 10 athletes.

Final Surge

American, popular with running coaches, high schools and colleges. Athletes get every athlete feature free; coaches pay a flat $19 a month for 1 to 5 athletes or $39 a month for up to 100 (Final Surge pricing). Native apps and structured workouts sent to Garmin and COROS. The flat price is the draw: 40 athletes cost the same as 10. Little presence in Europe, and no AI features that we could find, which some coaches will count as a plus.

Tredict

German, run by its owner, privacy-minded, and the most outspoken about the Garmin deal (their analysis). It sends workouts to Garmin, COROS, Suunto, Wahoo, Hammerhead and Zwift, and has coaching features and an API. The pricing is unusual: $49 once for twelve months of full access, free read-only access after that, and a two-month trial (Tredict price). A small team and a small community, but close in spirit to what TrainingPeaks used to be for a lot of people.

Runalyze

Made in Kaiserslautern and Kiel, and a favourite of runners who want analysis: effective VO2max, race predictions, a marathon shape score, training load. It syncs from Garmin, COROS, Suunto, Polar, Wahoo, Strava and others. Free, with Premium at €60 a year (Runalyze pricing). It is a training log and analysis tool rather than a planning or coaching platform, so it suits the self-coached runner who mostly used TrainingPeaks to look back, not the coach who plans for others.

Golden Cheetah

Free, open-source desktop software for Windows, macOS and Linux, cycling first, with deep power analysis (goldencheetah.org). No cloud, no coach collaboration, no workouts sent to watches. It earns its place here because nobody can ever switch it off.

OpenAthlete

Ours, so judge accordingly. It is open source (AGPL), free to self-host, or hosted by us in France. Every feature is free on the hosted version, coaching up to 5 athletes included; Supporter, at €5 a month or €50 a year, adds unlimited coached athletes and AI on our keys (pricing). Planned sessions go to Garmin, Suunto and COROS watches; activities come in from those three plus Polar and Strava. Training load is TRIMP from heart rate with session RPE alongside, and fitness, fatigue and form are projected over the sessions you have planned. AI is optional and runs on your own key or the Supporter allowance.

The limits are real. There are no native apps in the stores yet: the iOS and Android apps are in testing, and athletes use the installable web app in the meantime. There is no marketplace for selling plans, no club account (an athlete can have several coaches, but there is no organisation with shared billing), no indoor training app and no workouts sent to Polar watches. The analysis is shallower than intervals.icu, and the project is young and built by one developer. Our answer to "what if you disappear" is the licence: the code and your data stay usable without us. The line-by-line comparison is on OpenAthlete vs TrainingPeaks, how coaching works is on the coaches page, and the other comparisons are here.

How to move without losing your history

Export from TrainingPeaks first

TrainingPeaks' help center describes an Export Data function in the web app: you pick a period of up to 12 months and get a folder with all the workout files from it, and the same tool can produce a CSV summary of your workouts. Single files can also be downloaded from each workout, in the format they were uploaded in (Data Export). A TrainingPeaks blog post says bulk export is for Athlete Edition subscribers, and some forum users say it needs Premium, so check what your account shows. Six years of history means six exports. Do it before you cancel, not after. We found no documented way to export your workout library or future plan in bulk, so expect to rebuild the templates you reuse.

Reconnect your watch accounts

Most platforms pull past activities from the watch brand when you connect it, which is easier than files. How far back you get depends on the brand's API more than on the platform. On OpenAthlete, Strava and COROS give the full history (COROS sends 50 files a day, so a long history takes several days to arrive), Garmin and Suunto the last 30 days, and Polar nothing from before the connection. Other platforms run into similar limits for the same reasons; ask before you count on a full import.

Fill the gaps with FIT files

What the API does not return, your export folder does. Upload the FIT files to the new platform; on OpenAthlete you can drop several at once onto the calendar (20 MB per file). Multisport FIT files from a triathlon are not supported yet.

Run both for one block

If you coach, keep TrainingPeaks for one more block while your athletes connect to the new platform, plan the next four weeks there, and see what breaks. Moving after a goal race or at the start of the off-season is much easier than in the middle of a marathon build.

And if you only do one thing this month, make it the export.