Endomondo vs Strava vs Runtastic

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Endomondo is a great service, but they removed the Nike+ integration which makes me sad. So like any other disgruntled user I look elsewhere.  Through friends and Google I found Strava and Runtastic.

All of these services have a mobile app, sweet, moving on.

Strava and Runtastic both have Android Wear (a new smart watch platform by Google) Support (yes I got one, its amazing, more on that here).  Endomondo just released Pebble support (its one of the first smart watches), so who knows when they will get Wear. Strava has really clean integration with the smart watches, I can say things like "start run" or "start Strava" to my Android Wear watch and it starts up the app, connects to GPS, and has a big blue go button to click to start. If I say run it defaults to run. If I say Strava it defaults to my default sport (currently set to cycling).  I always have my phone, so it just makes sense to use an app over my Nike+ GPS watch.

Runtastic's app and website is flooded with ads, super annoying ones. I get that its a revenue thing, but wow, its like the ad equivalent of blinky text on websites (Google search "blinky text"). I don't have a desire to pay for a premium service, please stop. Strava has ads for there premium service, but its elegant and not annoying.

None of them support Nike+ integration, which isn't surprising, the Nike+ API is annoying to deal with. If they provided an Export via GPX like every other service they would probably get more of a following. Speaking of, Strava has an export as .GPX file feature. So at anytime I can just grab a workout and put it somewhere else.  They also have a nice API, which I might end up playing with.  Kind of a bummer Strava doesn't integrate with nationalbikechallenge.org though. That was nice as I am in on that for work. Good thing they allow manual uploads.

So this all got me thinking, now that my phone has a great battery life, and I have watch support to see the up to date times I really don't need Nike+.  The only think I really lose is in-door running via the chip, but that thing sucked anyway so whatever.

So I think I'm going to try out Strava for a while, see how it goes. At least until Google Fit becomes a real thing, then I'll probably use that.

If you wanna follow me on Strava I added a badge to the right on my blog.

What do you all use to track your workouts?

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