It is Sunday evening, the week ahead needs building for twenty-odd athletes, and somewhere in the middle of it the thought arrives that different software would have you finished by now.
Which one you need depends entirely on what is costing you the evening, so it is worth naming that first:
The planning itself
Building and rebuilding weeks by hand, reworking a block that is almost identical to one you already wrote, for the fourth athlete in a row.
Going deep on the numbers
Wanting to model an athlete's power-duration curve properly, or to read their data through views built for their sport and level rather than a generic dashboard.
Turning tests into training
Saturday's lactate results are on a spreadsheet and still need to become zones, a report, and next week's intensities.
Athlete follow-ups
Four athletes have not said how the week went, one mentioned a niggle on Wednesday and you cannot find the message, and the picture only assembles once you have gone and asked.
No platform solves all of those equally, and most of them lean hard into one. Five platforms come up again and again, so what follows is a map rather than a ranking: one section per platform, what it is built for, and the coach it fits.
Work out which part of your workflow you want a platform to take off you before you compare any of them. All five host a calendar competently. They diverge almost entirely in what they do about everything around it.
At a glance
| Platform | Best for | Built around |
|---|---|---|
| TrainingPeaks | Coaches who want the industry standard and everything connected to it | Getting plans out and data back in a mature ecosystem, at scale |
| Intervals.icu | Analytically minded coaches on a budget | Modelling and charts you build yourself |
| Coachbox | Coaches who sell physiological testing | The lactate test and everything downstream of it |
| Vekta | Coaches working with competitive cyclists | Elite cycling analysis, kept current automatically |
| Wyder | Coaches losing evenings to planning and admin | A co-pilot that plans, analyses and flags what moved |
What actually separates them
They differ on a handful of things worth weighing:
What work it takes off you
Each of these removes a different chore, and none removes all of them. Deep analysis, test admin, plan drafting, or the coordination of everything at once. Be honest about which one is actually eating your week.
Whether it bends to your method
Your zone model, your metrics, your idea of how a training week is built. Most platforms quietly expect you to adopt theirs, which is why so many coaches still keep a spreadsheet open alongside.
What your athletes open
You will be living in the coach view, but adherence lives in the athlete app. A platform your athletes avoid costs you the data your coaching runs on.
What happens when you need help, or leave
A ticket queue, a community forum, or somebody's phone number ultimately decide what happens when you run into an issue or have an idea of what could be better.
TrainingPeaks
TrainingPeaks
- Best for
- Coaches who want the deepest ecosystem, marketplace income, or federation credibility
- Standout
- Over 100 device and app integrations, a coach directory and a plan marketplace
- Trade-off
- So complete that the few routines you repeat every week sit inside menus built for everyone
TrainingPeaks has been the industry standard since 1999 and became part of Garmin in July 2026. It also carries the sport's common language: the load metrics Andrew Coggan formalised and TrainingPeaks turned into a standard, with TSS, NP and IF registered to the company. Your athletes already know what those numbers mean, and so does every coach you will ever compare notes with.
Its reach is unmatched, and reach is a real feature. Over 1,500 coaches in its public directory, a plan marketplace coaches earn from, long-running federation partnerships with a discount for federation-certified coaches, and WKO5 alongside it for deeper power modelling. The calendar and workout library are the most extensive in the category, and any athlete you take on has probably used it already.
However, after twenty-five years the product covers so much ground that the handful of routines you personally repeat every week sit several clicks deep inside an interface serving everybody's, and there is not much automation to shorten them.
Choose it if you want the safest and most connected option, or part of your income would arrive through the marketplace or the directory.
Look elsewhere if the thing you need most is fewer manual steps in the work you repeat every week or a less dated and cluttered interface.
Intervals.icu
Intervals.icu
- Best for
- Analytically minded coaches who want modelling depth at close to no cost
- Standout
- Power-duration modelling and charts you build on your own computed fields
- Trade-off
- An analysis tool with coaching added, rather than the reverse, and with no mobile app for athletes
Intervals.icu began in 2018 as one developer's side project and now runs with a small team, over 160,000 athletes and more than 193 million activities on it. The free tier is genuinely free rather than a trial: fitness, fatigue and form, interval detection, the workout builder, custom charts and device sync all cost nothing. A low monthly supporter tier, the cheapest paid option in this article by a wide margin, adds the annual plan builder, custom zones and coaching organisations.
The analysis is the reason to be here. Power-duration curves with eFTP, Morton's three-parameter and Monod-Scherrer models, aerobic decoupling, HRV and sleep, and charts built on fields you define yourself. Very little at any price goes deeper, and it rewards the time you spend learning where everything is.
Coaching is deliberately lighter, communication between coach and athlete is minimal within the platform, and it has a steeper learning curve. There is no official mobile app, and athletes tend to run into that before their coach does.
Choose it if you enjoy being inside a data tool and would rather spend nothing, or almost nothing, on software.
Look elsewhere if you want extensive coaching workflow features and an app your athletes can enjoy.
Coachbox
Coachbox
- Best for
- Coaches who run lactate or field testing as a big part of what they sell
- Standout
- The lactate test and the zones that follow from it live in one place
- Trade-off
- Test integration is the centre of gravity, while its new AI functionality remains bolted on top
One of Coachbox's main principles is that for a coach who tests, a lot of the admin tends to cluster around the test itself. So the test happens inside the platform. LT1 and LT2 are detected automatically, with multiple determination methods supported rather than a single fixed one, the curve is analysed there, zones move to match, and the plan follows. Zones keep their history, so a threshold from six months ago is still there to compare against.
That removes hours per testing cycle, and the quieter risk of moving numbers by hand: one value in the wrong field, and a training block built on top of it. A test also ends in a one-click PDF carrying your logo, and the platform itself is localised in five languages. Tests are billed individually, at a few euro each, on top of the subscription.
An AI assistant arrived more recently, and it is a real addition: it will analyse a period, read recovery numbers and draft a workout into the calendar for a coach to approve. What it will not do is start. It waits to be asked, which puts a ceiling on how much of an evening it can absorb. On the testing side the platform does the job end to end; on the planning side it is still a very good manual tool with an assistant beside it.
Choose it if testing is part of your service, you run a multi-coach practice, or your athletes need the platform in their own language.
Look elsewhere if what you need most is a platform that already analyzes and prioritises before you log in rather than waiting to be asked.
Vekta
Vekta
- Best for
- Coaches working with competitive cyclists who want race-level analysis
- Standout
- An athlete profile and power model that maintain themselves without scheduled testing
- Trade-off
- Built for cycling and elite level athletes specifically
Vekta launched in April 2025 and is built end to end around competitive cycling and the analysis that goes with it. Critical power and W prime modelling sit underneath everything, but the point is what they feed: power curves segmented by fatigue, which show what a rider can do at the end of a hard block rather than when fresh, durability tracked as its own quality, fuelling matched to the demands of a session, and load separated into volume and intensity. The athlete profile maintains itself from ordinary training, so nobody is scheduling test weeks to keep the numbers honest.
However, it is priced toward the premium end and billed per athlete, so it costs the coach's own account nothing while every athlete pays each month, which makes it twenty small conversations rather than one decision. And the specialisation is real: no strength module, and running and triathlon training are left as an afterthought to cycling.
Choose it if you coach cyclists at a competitive level and your athletes will fund their own accounts.
Look elsewhere if you coach multisport, or would rather carry the software cost yourself than ask every athlete to.
Wyder
Wyder
- Best for
- Coaches losing evenings to planning, analysis and chasing athletes for feedback
- Standout
- A co-pilot that drafts plans, builds any analysis you ask for, and flags who needs attention
- Trade-off
- No plan marketplace or in-platform invoicing yet, and the shortest track record here
Wyder is built around a co-pilot that takes the grunt work out of the parts of the week that repeat. It drafts seasons, blocks and individual sessions as proposals, working from the methodology defined for each athlete and the coach's own workout library, so a draft comes back looking like something that coach would have written. It is steered in plain language: tell it an athlete's achilles is sore and to keep her off the track this week, and the next draft comes back that way.
Analysis works the same way. Rather than choosing from the charts a product ships, you ask for the view you want, comparing athletes against each other or several of one athlete's sessions together. The whole roster then sits in one view flagging what moved, from HRV and resting heart rate to planned against executed and reported injuries, while post-workout check-ins collect feedback without anyone chasing it.
Wyder also carries something no other platform here does: it grew out of a training community, and that community still runs underneath the coaching tools. More than 1,900 athletes are on its workout marketplace, posting sessions, finding training partners and joining group workouts nearby. That helps most where coaching is hardest to sustain, adherence. An athlete who trains alongside others opens the app without being chased, and that is where the check-in data your coaching runs on comes from.
Every draft is a proposal, and nothing reaches an athlete until the coach sends it: the saving is not in checking less, but in not building from scratch. It is also the newest platform here, which is the honest reason to trial it rather than take its description at face value.
Choose it if the ceiling on your practice is your own admin, and you would rather edit a draft than start from an empty week.
Look elsewhere if you need marketplace income, in-platform invoicing, or the longest track record on the market.
How to actually decide
Before auditing any product, audit one week of your own. Write down every task you did for your athletes and how long each took. Then look at what the biggest number is actually made of:
Moving test results around
Coachbox, where the test and the zones it produces live in the same place.
Wanting a view no platform gives
Intervals.icu, where you build the chart yourself, or Wyder, where you ask for it.
Building and rebuilding plans
Wyder, where a draft arrives from your own methodology and library.
Keeping a cyclist's numbers current
Vekta, where the profile updates itself from ordinary training.
Reach, integrations and credibility
TrainingPeaks, which connects to more of the sport than anything else.
Still not sure
Trial two of them. Every platform here lets a coach in without paying first, through a free tier or a trial, so run one real training block on each.
Common questions
Which is the cheapest? Intervals.icu, comfortably, with a free tier and a supporter tier that costs less than a coffee a month. But the subscription is only half of what a platform costs a coach. The other half is the time it asks for every week, and that half is larger, so an evening a week spent building plans by hand is an annual cost that never appears on an invoice. Judged that way, the cheapest platform is whichever one takes the most work off you, and the most expensive is whichever one is free and leaves you doing everything.
Which has the best device support? TrainingPeaks, with over 100 devices, apps and indoor platforms. The others cover the brands most rosters actually own, so the only check that matters is your own outliers.
Do my athletes have to pay for anything? It depends on the model. Coachbox and Wyder include athletes in the coach subscription. TrainingPeaks gives athletes a free tier and a paid one, with a good deal of the useful functionality on the paid side, so in practice many coaches either carry that cost or ask athletes to. Vekta bills athletes directly.
Can I move my workout library between platforms? Ask whoever you are moving to whether they will do the migration for you as part of onboarding, because some will and it changes the effort enormously. Wyder, for one, does it free of charge for its founding coaches, for as long as spots last. Athlete history is easier: it usually reappears once the athlete connects their device account.
Which is best for triathlon? TrainingPeaks, Coachbox and Wyder all handle multisport properly. Vekta is cycling-first. Intervals.icu is multisport but analysis-led rather than built around a triathlete's week.