What is it?

Rouvy is an indoor cycling app that gives a flavour of riding in the outside world without you having to leave your home. 

Gone are the days of having to buy a dedicated exercise bike (although Rouvy is compatible with a lot of fancier ones) and stare at the wall while grinding out some miles in your garage. Instead, Rouvy gives users 3500 routes to choose from, working together with smart turbo trainers like the Wahoo Kickr Core that hook up to your existing bicycle. 

As you cycle, you’ll progress along a route. Assuming you have a smart trainer, the gradient of the route will also be simulated by way of extra resistance, helping make your sessions feel more immersive. 

Rouvy plays second fiddle to the world’s most popular training app, Zwift (more about the differences between the two later), but it’s still popular and has a sufficient USP to challenge the latter app’s near ubiquity. 

While Zwift features fully virtual worlds, some fictional and others based on real-world locations, Zouvy features footage on real roads captured by the company’s own content team. The footage then slows down or speeds up according to how furiously you’re pedalling. 

About 1500 of the 3500 available routes feature augmented reality, giving you a cyclist avatar to control as you pedal, and various other bits of overlaid information and animations. On the remaining 2000, you just have the video element. 

You can also shoot your own footage on a GPS-enabled camera and load it in, so you could, perhaps, carry on riding your usual local haunts when the weather makes it a not particularly palatable option in real life. We haven’t tried that feature yet, though.

Is Rouvy free? 

It’s free to register, and there’s also a seven-day free trial. If you cancel after that, you still get 12.4 miles (20 kilometres) of free use each month, which you also receive if you previously had an active subscription which is paused. The full service is charged at £17.99 a month or £159.99 a year.

Is Rouvy any good?

We can report that after using Rouvy for just over a month and many hours, we remain mostly impressed. 

Having used Zwift for many years, it’s quite a change to go to real footage. It’s particularly fun to choose routes in places you might have visited for real. Meanwhile, there are loads of filters on the search function (including distance, estimated completion and elevation gain), making it easy to find something for how much time you have and how energetic you’re feeling.

There are times, though, when the real-world footage doesn’t quite hit the spot. Some routes in seemingly exotic locations are on wide roads without a particularly scenic view and little sense of speed, so they become a bit of a trudge. You’ll also ideally want to be using a pretty good screen to make the most of the more picturesque routes (a TV, perhaps) – a phone attached to your handlebars doesn’t quite do it. 

Also, because these routes have been filmed for real, you will still get cars in them. As someone who’s been knocked off a bike on the road, this did leave me yearning for the escapism of Zwift’s traffic-free virtual world. You’ll even see cars overtake the camera point and then drive through your virtual riding buddies, which is a bit disconcerting. 

Is Rouvy better than Zwift? 

There isn’t an easy answer to this, because a lot of it will come down to personal preference. Do you enjoy the escapism of Zwift and its colourful, playful environments (in the fictional locations, at least), or is the realism of Rouvy with its real-world video more appealing? 

There’s the social aspect to consider – Zwift has a considerably larger user base, chucks them all into a handful of environments so you can ‘ride’ and interact with real people, making it feel a bit less lonely. That might not be as much of a priority for some, of course, and Rouvy does have group riding events to get involved with.

In terms of the monthly price, at the time of writing, there’s nothing in it – each costs £17.99. Rouvy is a bit cheaper when billed annually, at £159.99 compared to £179.99 for Zwift. That still isn’t a massive incentive to keep subscribed for the whole year, given that your usage is likely to drop off or even be non-existent when the outside world warms up. 

Should you buy Rouvy?

Given that there’s a free trial, it’s absolutely worth at least trying Rouvy. If you’re still unsure at the end of it, we’d say Rouvy is worth the monthly cost, especially if you’re only going to be running it over the winter months. And if you don’t get on with it, it’s very easy to cancel it.