What is the best free alternative to Strava?

Intervals.icu, by a wide margin, if you want analysis. It is free, it ingests from Garmin, Wahoo and Strava itself, and its load modelling is deeper than Strava Premium's. What it has no version of is the social feed, which for many people is the actual product.

Does Strava track weight training?

It accepts a weight training activity as a block of time and a heart-rate trace. It does not record sets, reps, load or proximity to failure, so nothing about the session is queryable afterwards. You cannot ask Strava what your squat did over eight weeks, because it never held the numbers.

Why do people leave Strava?

Three reasons, in order: the Premium price against what Premium adds, the analysis being shallower than free alternatives, and the fact that half of a hybrid athlete's training is invisible in it. The social feed is why most people stay despite all three.

Is Garmin Connect a good Strava replacement?

If you already own a Garmin, yes for data and no for community. Connect's load and readiness modelling is better than Strava's, it is included with the watch, and its strength logging exists but is shallow. Its social layer is functional and nobody you know is on it.

Can I keep Strava and add something for lifting?

Yes, and it is the common stack. The limit is that nothing then holds both halves, so no number that requires both ever gets computed — recovery read against total load, or a calorie target that knows a long run happened. That reconciliation stays in your head.

Strava Alternatives for Athletes Who Also Lift

What has no substitute

The network. Segments, kudos, clubs, the fact that everyone you train with is already there. No alternative replicates it and none will, because network effects are not features.

If the social layer is why you open the app, the honest answer is to keep Strava and add something alongside it rather than replace it.

What has better substitutes than you would guess

The analysis. Strava Premium's load and fitness modelling is genuinely shallower than what free tools offer, and this surprises people who have only ever used Strava.

Intervals.icu — free, and deeper than Premium

Full CTL/ATL/TSB modelling, power and pace curves, custom fields, and a load model you can inspect and argue with. It ingests from Garmin, Wahoo, Zwift and Strava itself, so adopting it costs you nothing and changes nothing about how you record.

It is built by one developer for serious endurance athletes and looks like it. No social feed, no polish, no hand-holding. Where it stops for hybrid athletes.

Garmin Connect — included, if you already paid for the watch

Better readiness and load modelling than Strava, free with the hardware, and it holds the raw physiological data rather than a derived summary. Strength logging exists and is thin — an exercise name and a set count, no RIR, no e1RM tracking worth the name.

Its weakness is that Garmin's own numbers are opaque. Body Battery and Training Readiness are proprietary composites that do not show their arithmetic, so when one disagrees with how you feel there is nothing to inspect. What Connect does and does not model.

Runna — if what you wanted was a plan

Strava records what you did. It does not tell you what to do. Runna writes a structured running plan and adapts it, which is a different job and a common reason people look elsewhere. It has no interest in the weight room beyond generic strength add-ons.

TrainingPeaks — if you are coached

The standard for athlete–coach workflows. Deep endurance load modelling, prescription and compliance in one place, and a price that reflects it. Resistance training is not modelled at all: TSS is defined against an endurance threshold, and a squat session has neither an intensity factor nor a normalised power. Why half your load is invisible to any TSS-based system.

Every option above is an endurance tool. Strength appears, at best, as an activity type with a duration.

That matters because the decisions a hybrid athlete makes are cross-discipline. Whether today's intervals should happen depends on Monday's squat volume. Whether to deload depends on both. What to eat depends on both. None of these tools holds both sides of that, so the reconciliation happens in your head or in a spreadsheet. What it costs to keep doing that by hand.

The comparison

	Strava	Intervals.icu	Garmin Connect	Runna	Base
Social feed and segments	Best	No	Basic	No	No
Endurance load modelling	Shallow	Deepest	Good	Plan-focused	Ramp rate on minutes
Shows its arithmetic	No	Yes	No	Partly	Every derived number
Set, rep and RIR logging	No	No	Minimal	No	Yes
Endurance prescription	No	No	Adaptive	Yes	From your own threshold
Recovery scoring	No	Via HRV import	Proprietary	No	Against your own baseline
Nutrition	No	No	Basic	No	Adaptive, on the same ledger
Cost	Free / Premium	Free	With device	Paid	Beta

The honest recommendation

Keep Strava and add Intervals.icu if you want better analysis and the feed. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and it is strictly additive.

Drop to Garmin Connect if you own a Garmin, do not care about the feed, and want one fewer subscription.

Add Runna if the missing piece is a plan rather than a record.

Look outside endurance tooling if the missing piece is the other half of your training. Every app above will happily track your running forever and never once notice that you also squat. That is the gap, and it is structural.

If you want to see the difference concretely: work out your own threshold pace zones and compare them to the zones Strava assigns you. Most people's easy band is meaningfully slower than the app suggests, and running easy days too hard is the most common way concurrent training fails.