Cycling is a popular sport, practiced by millions around the world. There are different types of bikes, and subdivisions as road, mountain, tour, gravel, and city.
While there are no shortage of commercial non-free apps for cyclists, there are a limited number of usable free open-source apps for cyclists.
Here, in this post, we offer you a list of the best open source free apps for hobby and professional cyclists, that you can download, setup, and use totally free of charge.
What type of apps the cyclist need?
It depends on which type of cycling, for example, off-road cyclists who use mountain or gravel bikes tend to have track and offline maps support. While cyclist who prefer road bikes tend to focus on recording their training sessions and getting analytical charts of their performance and speed.
- Track manager: An app that records training tracks for road bikes, city tours as well as offline tracks for mountain and gravel bikers.
- Tracker app to track and record the cycling activities.
- Offline maps: Sometimes the bikers choose to go off-road or far from city where is the internet connection is limited. It is important to have an offline map with GPS support to aid the cyclist when there is no connection.
- Route Exporting tools: It is essential to have a data portability option for your map and tracker apps, to exchange your route's data easily between apps and share them with your cycling groups and friends.
Therefore, we collected and sorted all type of these open-source apps that cyclists require, and can be free good alternatives to paid apps and commercial services.
Hopefully, this list will be like a guide and head start for open-source cycling apps.
1- GoldenCheetah
GoldenCheetah is a free open-source app for professional cyclists, runners, and triathletes.
The primary goal for this app is to aid professional and hobby athletes manage and analyze their exercises' data.
Hamza Mousa2- Organic Maps
Organic Maps offer an offline-first map support for off-road and open road cyclists, kickers, and any off-road activities. It is built on top of OpenStreetMaps and allows users to download updatable maps with tracks to their phones and use them interactively without worrying about internet connection.
3- BRouter
BRouter is a free open source cycling app for Android devices.
In summary, it is a configurable OSM offline router with elevation awareness, Java + Android. Designed to be multi-modal with a particular emphasis on bicycle and energy-based car routing.
4- FitoTrack
FitoTrack is a free open-source sport logging app for your sport activities as cycling, hiking and running.
The app is true open-source as it is released under the GPL-3.0 License and does not share your information with any third-party. It i also totally ad-free app.
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5- Terkarta
Trekarta (former MapTrek) is designed for hiking, geocaching, off-roading, cycling, boating and all other outdoor activities. It uses offline maps, so you do not need to have internet connection.
You can easily import places and tracks from GPX and KML data formats or create waypoints in application and share them to others. It lets you write the track of your journey, even in the background, so you will never get lost and be able later see where you’ve been.
Hamza Mousa6- Elevate
Elevate is a web-based extensions for serious cyclists or athletes to help them track their fitness, fatigues, and form over time.
By doing so, it aids them to avoid training overload or injuries.
Elevate works with the Strava app, and allows users to export their data, track their progress, evaluate their performance and more.
7- OpenTracks
OpenTracks is an open-source outdoor sport tracking application that completely respects your privacy.
It is available to download for Android devices from F-Droid store and Google Play marketplace.
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8- OsmAnd
OsmAnd aims at providing comfortable map viewing and navigation (routing) application for mobile devices. Particular stress lies with complete offline features (via preloaded offline map data) or economic internet usage.
It is an open-source project that is available for Android and iOS devices.
9- CyclOSM
CyclOSM is a CartoCSS map style designed with cycling in mind. It leverages OpenStreetMap data to create a beautiful and practical cycling map!
The CyclOSM can be used on mobile using these applications: OSMAnd, OpenMultiMaps, and All-In-One Offline Maps.
10- Antother Activity Tracker ATT
AAT or Another Activity Tracker app is a GPS-tracking application with primary focus on cycling and running.
Currently, it is only available for Android mobiles, and can be downloaded from the F-Droid store.
AAT allows you to view live tracking on different cockpit and map views. Moreover, it allows offline map usage which is a handy feature in areas without good internet connection.
11- OpenCycleMap
OpenCycleMap is a free web-based map service that offers a detailed routes for many big cities in the world. It is where cyclists can share their tracks for other cyclists to view and share.
The map is working seamlessly on desktop as well as mobile browsers.
Because it is based on OpenStreetMap, you can view a highly detailed version for many locations by just zooming or adding another map layers.
12- ActivityLog2
ActivityLog2 is a cool open-source and free app that allows you to import your swim, cycling, and running activities to analyze your performance and your progress easily.
It works directly with .FIT files. After you import your data, it allows you to to display plots, scatter plots, histograms, and maps to analyze your data.
The app is build in the Racket programming language, and it is available only for Windows now.
13- Pi Zero Bikecomputer
Pi Zero Bikecomputor is an amazing example of how to transform the Raspberry Pi Zero into a fully functional cycling computer with features that you can custom and control.
It supports GPS and ANT+ and comes with a full guide that aids you in how to setup, create your own cycling computer.
Although, it requires some geek's knowledge, it is not hard to setup if you know your way around Raspberry Pi, Linux, and Python.
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14- Gymnasticon
Gymnasticon is a unique app on this list as it is built to help use and activate old and obsolete as well as proprietary exercise bikes.
It uses the Bluetooth signal and collect data to send it to desktop or mobile apps.
The project is built on top of Raspberry Pi (SBC), and it offers an image which you can easily install on your Pi and run it easily.
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15- Flux Indoor Cycling App for Structured Training
Flux is a free open-source app for indoor cycling to help the cyclist train indoor.
The web version of the app is a free and open-source. It is built on top of JavaScript as a progressive web app (PWA), and can be used on any machine.
The Flux web app can work on Google Chrome for desktop and Android, It also can work on Windows, macOS (M1 or Intel), also Ubuntu.
Unfortunately, it is not working yet on Apple TV or iOS devices.
The current supported browsers are Google Chrome, Opera, Chrome for Android, Samsung Internet Browser.
Final word
Cycling requires a lot of software that include trackers, track managers, performance, and activities trackers and more. While it is hard to track and find the right software in dozens of commercial apps, here offered you a list of open-source free alternatives, which you can freely use without worrying about your privacy.