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Over the years Strava (https://strava.com, and "Strava" in the mobile app stores) has become one of the world's most popular — if not the most popular — global sports apps and social media for exercise. Strava covers several needs around your rides and routes:

1. A diary: A log of your own rides and outings. Strava also gives you a personal heatmap, which makes it easy to visualise your rides and routes on a map.

2. Training analysis: Strava has several features that give you summaries and analysis of your own training. On top of that there are plenty of apps you can connect to Strava for even deeper analysis: probably the most popular of these is the intervals.icu website.

3. Sharing your rides: Strava makes it easy to share your rides (with photos) with friends, acquaintances and strangers alike. They can follow you directly on Strava, or you can pick out rides saved on Strava and share them through some other social channel, e.g. Facebook.

4. Route planning, including route ideas from others: On Strava you can follow other people, both people you know and people you don't (unless they have hidden their profile or set it so that you have to send a "follow request"). In this respect Strava is a bit like Twitter: you don't usually send "friend requests" — anyone can follow public Strava profiles. You can then pick up route ideas from other people's rides. Strava has a route planning feature of its own too, with certain strengths, but it generally works best on the road, or if you don't have a better trail map available (like Trailmap in Finland or Komoot abroad). Strava's strength is the heatmap, which shows you which roads and trails other Strava users have travelled.

5. Countless "add-ons", i.e. apps for different needs: Tile hunting, for example, is a hobby for many cyclists — it gives you the motivation to head out to new scenery and ride further than before (Veloviewer tiles). Tile hunting works by connecting to Strava and pulling in all your previous rides, so it can show you on the map which "tiles" you have collected.

Strava is device-independent, and most sports watches, bike computers and apps can be connected to it so that all your new rides transfer there automatically. That way you can, for example, record your rides with a Garmin and your runs with a Suunto, and still have all your outings collected in one place on Strava. And if you swap your Suunto for a Polar, everything carries on seamlessly, because all your rides over the years are still gathered on Strava. This is one of the main reasons to use Strava rather than the device manufacturers' own apps and services.

Strava has fairly extensive free features (a "free tier"), and an annual subscription then unlocks everything.

Trailmap and Strava

Trailmap can also be connected to Strava, and the two apps complement each other in many ways:

1. You can show Strava activities (your rides) on Trailmap's maps. That makes it easy to check where you went on a group ride that took you along routes that were new to you. On the Trailmap map you can see much more precisely where the route ran than on Strava's own maps, which are quite coarse and don't tell you much about the character of the roads, let alone the trails. On the Trailmap map you can also load one or more quarters' worth of Strava activities — you can then use those as a basis for planning new rides.

Strava activities in the Trailmap app

2. Strava activities opened on the Trailmap map can be used in many ways: navigate them with the Trailmap mobile app, share them with other people as Trailmap links using Trailmap's "Share" features, send the track to a Garmin, save it as a GPX file, or save the track to your own Trailmap track library. You can also use Strava activities as a basis for your own routes: pick the best sections out of earlier rides, or draw your own route along roads and trails you haven't got round to yet.

3. You can add Strava's global sport-specific heatmap to Trailmap as an overlay, which lets you use it both for navigation and as an aid to route planning. A basic-quality heatmap is available ready to go in the overlays.

Note: At the moment Strava's higher-detail heatmap only works in the Trailmap mobile app, and even then it requires digging deep into the related settings. Unfortunately I can't offer more detailed support for this here.

Strava's high-quality heatmap