Ride with GPS (RwGPS)

Ride with GPS, usually shortened to RwGPS, started in 2006 as a college project in Portland, Oregon, built by co-founders Cullen King and Zack Ham. The company stayed founder-owned and cash-flow positive for its first seventeen years, taking outside investment for the first time in 2023 with a $3 million round. Strava, by contrast, took venture funding early and is now heading toward an IPO. That different path shows in how each platform is built. RwGPS carries fewer social features and puts its depth into route creation, while Strava built its business around the feed, the segment leaderboards and the subscription paywall.

the5krunner (TFK) has covered Ride with GPS since 2019, testing its routing tools directly and tracking the platform through Strava’s most turbulent year. When Strava sued Garmin over patent claims in October 2025, RwGPS’s CMO gave the5krunner an on-record quote about the platform’s own Garmin integration rather than wading into the dispute, and TFK’s reporting at the time called RwGPS the nearest rival to Strava, with route creation and sharing tools that are arguably easier to use than Strava’s own. RwGPS beta features have also been tested here ahead of their public release, and the platform’s overall feature set has been described in TFK’s own coverage as immense in scope, closer to a full route-planning suite than a segment tracker with maps bolted on.

Where Ride with GPS sits in the market

Strava and Komoot are the two platforms RwGPS gets measured against most often, and each competes on different ground. Strava’s segments, heatmaps and social feed still set the pace for route discovery, while Komoot’s turn-by-turn navigation and surface-type analysis sit closer to what RwGPS itself does well. Outdoor Active, Gravelmap and PlotARoute serve smaller or more specialised audiences, bikerouter.de covers a narrower European niche, and Garmin Connect has its own mapping and routing tools but ties them to Garmin’s own hardware rather than selling them as an independent platform.

A better measure of a routing platform’s real standing than any of that comparison is which head-unit and watch makers bother to integrate with it. Wahoo has no in-house routing engine, so the platforms it chooses to sync with are a short, deliberate list rather than an exhaustive one, and Ride with GPS sits on that list alongside Strava and Komoot. Garmin’s own devices support the same short list. That selectivity says more about RwGPS’s market weight than any user number the company has published itself.

Route planning and mapping features

The route builder has always been RwGPS’s core strength, and the feature history below tracks how it has kept pace with Strava’s better-known heatmap and segment tools.

Ride with GPS vs Strava

RwGPS’s clearest point of comparison is Strava itself, and the coverage below runs from club administration to the fallout of Strava’s legal dispute with Garmin.

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