Two Wheel Blogs

I just made a reply to a previous post where the commenter was just starting out with a bicycle powermeter and asked which powermeter analysis software I would recommend. The short answer: I recommended GoldenCheetah.

I didn't elaborate on my answer there because I decided it would be better to present them here. These are my 3 reasons why I use and recommend GoldenCheetah to analyze your ride data.

1. GoldenCheetah is free and open
It's free. You'll never have to pay to use GoldenCheetah. What more is there to say about free? Right.

And it's open. Your wattage data is yours and yours alone, right? Open assures users like you and me that our data won't ever be hard to get at and analyze as if it were locked in someone else's safe. Open brings transparency to the wattage and performance analysis tools we use on our data. For the software itself, open means users like you and me can participate in the process of defining and developing features. So if we want to analyze our data in some new way we're free to do it.

For example, suppose you have this bright idea for a new analysis tool that will look back over your last 12 months of wattage data and suggest workout ideas for improving on your weaknesses. You have more than one route to making your idea into reality with an open project like GoldenCheetah. You can write it yourself and submit it to the community for review and inclusion. You can petition the community via feature request, essentially asking them to write it for you. If you like you can even offer a bounty - yes, put money on the table - to recruit help in implementing your idea.

2. GoldenCheetah is powerful and easy to use ride analysis and logging software
In the last year or so that I've been using it, GoldenCheetah has grown from an interesting project with great potential to a full-on wattage analysis and workout logging tool. It's feature list has become incredibly rich, offering more ways to view, review, analyze, and predict your cycling performance than ever.

And it's getting more powerful by the day. I would be astonished if any competing ride analysis / workout logging software could honestly claim a more robust feature set. The rate of development with GoldenCheetah has been incredibly fast. Yet the software remains easy to use. In fact much recent development has had to do with ease of use. GoldenCheetah is both powerful and easy to use; and it's getting more powerful and easier to use with each release.

3. GoldenCheetah runs on your computer
I used to be a die-hard windows fan. I even had a Microsoft certification at one time. Later on I discovered Linux, and more recently Mac OS X. I have run GoldenCheetah on all three. The community provides builds of GoldenCheetah on all these operating systems. If you want it on some other platform, it can be done. The source code is available, free for you to download. You're free to build it and run it on whatever system you like.

Summary
I could go on about GoldenCheetah but I don't want to start sounding like a shill. I do still use some of the other guys' stuff. I've stayed away from pointing out what the other guys don't do or can't do or won't do because I don't generally like the negative game. Those proprietary alternatives I do still use provide me with some key bit of functionality GoldenCheetah hasn't yet replaced - yes, there are a few.

But there are fewer and fewer all the time. I'm now to the point where GoldenCheetah offers enough of the functionality I need to make it my primary choice for workout and ride analysis. For that reason it gets my recommendation, especially if you're just starting out with a bicycle powermeter. Your needs may be different, so by all means try it out and see for yourself. You have nothing to lose.