Many triathletes will find themselves choosing between TriDot or TrainingPeaks. Strava is all well and good, but many want to follow an effective training plan, rather than simply track their random sessions.
The two apps work quite differently though. TriDot is an AI powered engine which creates a training plan built around you, while TrainingPeaks works in a more traditional fashion. TrainingPeaks can be used to track and plan your own training, purchase and follow a training plan, or work with a coach.
In some ways they are very similar, in other ways they can be quite different. As a quick disclaimer, I am writing this as a coach who has experience with both, but this is purely an opinion piece, I do not stand to gain financially from persuading athletes on way or another. Sensitive information has been omitted where necessary, it is simply designed to help athletes decide which platform to use.
Pricing
It’s 2025 as I write this. The global economy isn’t exactly booming, and people are mindful of their money. Triathlon isn’t a cheap sport, so people will be looking to save where they can.
TriDot
TriDot has four pricing levels. Essentials, complete, legends and premium. Currently priced at £29, £89, £129 and £199 per month. There is also a lifestyle option, but this is designed for off season.
The essentials package is fairly limited. This is the classic low priced option they use to lure people in, and in time hope that they see the value of upgrading to the £89 per month package.
You probably don’t need me to tell you that £89 isn’t pocket change. My bespoke coaching starts at £60 a month. For £120 a month you can get a bespoke plan written and delivered each month as well as a meeting with me to ask questions, and ensure that the next month is written in alignment with your availability. The £129 per month of the legends package is especially difficult to justify in my eyes.
The premium option at £199 includes a coach. If you’re looking at spending £129 a month, you can probably stretch to £199 to work with a coach. This is actually a really good deal to give access to all of Tridot’s tools, as well as a coach. The issue is that this STARTS at £199 a month. An experienced coach will charge more than this.
Back at the start of the year, I signed up with TriDot as a coach. I cannot disclose the pricing structure, but it goes without saying that I would be charging more than my existing rates to deliver coaching through TriDot. They have spent good money on developing the platform, the tools and taken care of the marketing for coaches, so it’s not unreasonable for them to take a cut. Just know that working with a coach through TriDot will likely be more expensive than working with them on another platform.
TrainingPeaks
On the other hand, TrainingPeaks is… free. Admittedly, the basic account is quite limited, and TrainingPeaks have reduced the functionality of the basic account in recent years to push people towards premium. Honestly, I’m not a massive fan of this, but I appreciate that they need to make money somehow. And you can get a year of TrainingPeaks premium for £102, less than the price of a single month of TriDot legends.
The real kicker here is that when you get a TrainingPeaks premium subscription you also gain access to TrainingPeaks Virtual. This is software designed for use with an indoor trainer, allowing you to cycle round a virtual world, participate in races, and train more effectively. When you consider that a subscription to Zwift costs £17.99 per month, this makes it very economical.
I’ll be honest, TrainingPeaks Virtual is not on the same level as Zwift, but for the athlete looking to keep costs down, it’s a great option.
Unless you are very well experienced and educated in the world of exercise science, you will want to purchase a training plan to follow on TrainingPeaks. You can pay a lot for premium plans, or get some plans on quite the budget.
One downside is that TriDot allows transactions in different currencies, while all payments on TrainingPeaks are handled in USD.
The winner?
The best value option between TriDot and Trainingpeaks? This one is a slam dunk to TrainingPeaks, and I don’t think many would argue with me. Yes you will probably want to purchase a plan, yes you will likely want to purchase premium to get the most out of the plan, but this could still be cheaper than a single month with TriDot.
Training Plans
This is where TriDot and TrainingPeaks diverge the most. How they deliver training to you. Let’s see how they differ.
TriDot
TriDot prides itself on being an AI platform. We’re not talking generative AI or ChatGPT, we’re talking about machine learning that has been collecting and analysing athlete data for over 10 years.
You may have seen lots of ads from TriDot offering a free month, or three months? Part of this is to get people on board with their product and nurture potential customers. But a big part of this is collecting athlete data to better inform its machine learning.
TriDot will ask you a series of questions when you sign up. How long you’ve been training for, when you want your rest day, your longest session in each of the disciplines, and several other questions related to your training, it will then create a personalised training schedule for you to follow.
If you miss sessions, or fail them, it will rearrange your calendar for you. It will auto adjust and help guide you towards your best result on race day.
This sounds brilliant, but I was honestly underwhelmed when I tried using it as an athlete. Seven months out from race day, it only gave me one easy session a week. When I strayed from the schedule (because the workouts were too hard), it didn’t seem to pickup on this. It had me doing threshold repeats during my long rides in the winter, a long way out from a 70.3, which seems nonsensical to me. I trusted the process, tried to stick to it, but ended up exhausted and burned out.
I’m not the only one. The majority of athletes who try using TriDot seem to find themselves overtrained. If there was the option to tell TriDot that the sessions were too hard this would be different, but there wasn’t when I used it.
I had hoped that the AI would find a new way forward for me and my training. But instead of learning from my training, it aggressively dragged me back to what it thought I should be doing. It essentially had a training plan it had written for me, and was adamant I was going to follow it by hook or by crook. Personally, I was very disappointed at the lack of actual adjustments and machine learning on display.
I feel that TriDot has a lot of potential, but if after 10 years they still have a reputation for overtraining athletes, that’s not a great sign.
TrainingPeaks
As I referenced earlier, TrainingPeaks delivers training plans that you either purchase from the webstore, or hire a coach to deliver. For the purposes of this section, I will assume you have purchased a training plan you hope to follow with TrainingPeaks.
The downside here is two-fold. On the one hand, the training plan will not evolve as you follow it as it does with TriDot. Additionally, you may struggle to find a training plan that suits your fitness and goals.
There is also the issue that not all TrainingPeaks plans are created equal. Some are written by coaches with 30+ years experience in the sport with qualifications coming out of their ears. However, there would be nothing stopping you from creating a coach account and uploading a training plan to sell on the store tomorrow, so you need to be prudent when choosing your plan.
However, a good TrainingPeaks plan will blow a TriDot plan out of the water. You can message coaches on TrainingPeaks if you have questions ahead of purchase to ensure you are getting the right plan for you.
The winner?
Between TriDot and TrainingPeaks, I’m going to call it a dead heat here. While TriDot is far from perfect, the quality of a TrainingPeaks programme is so variable, that I cannot guarantee you will have a superior experience with either platform.
Data Analysis
Planning your training is only part of the puzzle. We also want to be able to analyse our sessions in detail. Both platforms take a different approach to this.
TriDot
TriDot prides itself on its AI powered analytics. It uses advanced methods to calculate the stress a workout created based on the environment you trained in. It can also analyse your workouts on a broader level than TrainingPeaks to give you a more accurate score of how close you came to completing the workout as planned.
The tools that TriDot use are impressive, and are a direct throw-down to TrainingPeaks’ aging TSS.
TriDot can also use your training data to help you plan your race day performance. This is especially helpful if you don’t have a coach. It’s less helpful if you don’t have performance goals and simply want to finish.
TrainingPeaks
TrainingPeaks uses training stress score (TSS) to calculate the training impact of each session. It was developed way back in 2003 by Dr Andrew Coggan, and hasn’t really been developed much since. The fact that the entire platform revolves around this creaking metric is a definite downside of TrainingPeaks.
This isn’t to say there is anything inherently wrong with TSS, just that technology has developed to the point that there is so much more that could be done to analyse workouts, as TriDot have demonstrated.
The UI for TrainingPeaks is superior to TriDot, and the recent release of their beta charts allows us to access power modelling within the app takes it to another level. However I feel that TrainingPeaks could, and hopefully is looking at ways to improve how it models training stress.
The winner?
TriDot has the edge on TrainingPeaks here. While TrainingPeaks has more data available to athletes and coaches to analyse, the fact that they still base training fatigue on a metric developed back in 2003 does hurt it here.
Coaching
If you are considering working with a coach, then this should be a factor in your choice of platform. Let’s look at what each platform offers.
TriDot
In 2024, TriDot took over IRONMAN university. The university had been collecting dust for some time with limited investment from IRONMAN.
As an IRONMAN Certified Coach, at first I was very cynical. But over time, slowly but surely, I thought I should have a look at what they offer coaches. Maybe I was a dinosaur that needs to embrace technology? I’m in my mid 30s, so I can’t afford to bury my head in the sand and stick to what I know until I retire. So in early 2025 I took a step into the unknown.
TriDot believe that the real value offered by coaches is the human interactions they have with athletes, which I agree with. They want to take care of the programming for coaches. Allowing them to focus on the soft skills that actually deliver results.
The logic is sound, so I signed up. As well as them delivering athletes to you, you can also earn a percentage of fees for every athlete who signs up via your referral link. If I was that way inclined, I could have made this a propaganda piece about TriDot and how brilliant it is, with my referral link at the bottom.
My biggest issue was the lack of influence that I as a coach could have on the programming. The AI has decided what is best, and while I can edit sessions, the AI can change them. From what I remember, every 48 hours or so the AI will do a sweep of the athlete’s calendar, and adjusts if it deems necessary. That includes workouts that I have edited or created for the athlete. While I never worked with an athlete on TriDot in the end, I could see it being a tug of war between myself and the AI, which was a real turnoff for me.
TrainingPeaks
TrainingPeaks was originally designed for coaches. While it has developed in recent years to become more functional for athletes, coaching is still in its DNA.
As a coach with a decade of experience behind me, it doesn’t actually take me an enormous amount of time to write a training plan these days. And I figured that with TriDot, I would spend as much time editing the AI generated programme and repeating work it had undone than I would save.
In TrainingPeaks, your coach generally creates everything from scratch. This gives them far more control over the training, and allows it to be *truly* bespoke to you. With TriDot a coach is essentially guiding you through an AI generated plan, where with TrainingPeaks a coached plan is (hopefully) built around you from the ground up.
The downside here is that your programme is only as good as your coach. However, a highly qualified and experienced coach will create a programme which is much higher quality than AI ever could.
TrainingPeaks is also better designed for communication between athlete and coach, should your coach choose to communicate via the platform.
The Winner?
Between TriDot and TrainingPeaks, this is a clear win for TrainingPeaks in my eyes. There is a reason why the vast majority of coaches continue to use TrainingPeaks. Because it’s the best tool for the job.
There are definitely some triathlon coaches out there to make a quick buck, but most of us are passionate about triathlon, and want the best experience for our athletes.
TrainingPeaks puts is in complete control and allows us to deliver the best possible experience for our athletes. Maybe it’s a bit old fashioned in some ways, but having a coach fully involved in every step of the process will get an athlete the best results.
Conclusion
I could go into more depth here, but I don’t feel it would add an enormous amount to the conversation.
For me, TrainingPeaks is the clear winner here. Not only do I believe it is the superior platform, it’s also a fraction of the price.
While TriDot has some impressive technology behind it which I believe TrainingPeaks would do well to emulate, the fact that TrainingPeaks is a fraction of the cost of TriDot and provides a superior experience means that TriDot is difficult to recommend.
I don’t believe TriDot is a bad product or run by bad people. It just feels that the AI isn’t quite where it needs to be yet, and coaches aren’t given enough tools to influence how the AI writes plans.
The best athletes and teams in the world use TrainingPeaks, where you very rarely hear world championship qualifiers singing the praises of TriDot. It definitely has some avid fans who can’t say a bad thing about it, but I have had a LOT of athletes come to me over the years after they found TriDot left them exhausted and burnt out.
Learn more, and signup to TriDot here: https://www.tridot.com
Learn more, and signup to TrainingPeaks here: https://www.trainingpeaks.com
If you want to see what I can help you achieve using TrainingPeaks, check out my coaching services here.
