What is Elevate for Strava?
Elevate comes in two separate builds, and which one you install decides a lot — including, right now, whether it works at all. The browser extension is the original and the one most people mean. It runs on strava.com itself: open one of your own activities and Elevate has already added time-in-zones graphs for every sensor, best splits, peak power and heart rate values, and stress scores onto Strava's page. It also carries a full analysis app — fitness trend, year progressions, athlete settings — that builds its own local copy of your history by reading strava.com while you're logged in. No Strava API key, no OAuth screen, nothing to authorise.
The desktop app is an Electron rebuild of that same analysis app for Windows and macOS, with a local database instead of browser storage. There's no Linux build; the README says "not shipped yet". It doesn't touch strava.com's web pages at all, so it gets none of the on-page overlay. Instead it pulls activities in through connectors: a Strava connector, and a file connector you point at a folder of FIT, TCX or GPX files. The Strava connector is the awkward one — Elevate asks you to register your own Strava API Application and paste in your own client ID and secret, which is what makes the next part matter.
Everything is free, with no paid tier and no Elevate account, published under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 by one developer, Thomas Champagne. It is also visibly slowing down. The last code commit to the repo was 31 August 2025; the last desktop release, 7.2.2, was 26 August 2025; the last web extension release, 7.2.1, was November 2024, and the Chrome Web Store listing was last updated in December 2024. There are 179 open issues. Individual users have hit STRAVA_API_UNAUTHORIZED on the desktop Strava connector since early 2025, and from 1 July 2026 the reports become a steady run, which lines up exactly with Strava's developer program change requiring existing Standard Tier developers to hold an active Strava subscription from 30 June 2026 — and every Elevate desktop user is their own developer. Those issues are open and unfixed. The extension, which never used the API, is unaffected and users were still reporting it working in July 2026. Champagne does still turn up: he replied on 2 August 2026 to a community pull request adding a Garmin connector.
Key Features
Fitness, fatigue and form across every sport
The fitness trend chart runs on all your activities at once rather than per discipline, which is the point for triathletes. There's also an estimated mode for people with no power meter or heart rate strap — a phone's GPS trace is enough to get a curve out of it.
Stress scores computed four ways
Heart rate, power, running and swimming each get their own stress score, so a swim set and a threshold ride land on the same chart in comparable units instead of one of them being invisible.
Extended stats bolted onto Strava's own pages
This is the extension's half and the reason it's still worth installing. Time in heart rate, power and cadence zones; peak values for power, heart rate, speed and cadence; best splits; and deeper speed, pace, cadence and power breakdowns, all rendered into the activity and segment-effort pages you were already looking at.
Year and rolling progressions
Cumulative distance, time and elevation plotted day by day against the same date in previous years, plus a rolling view for period-over-period comparison rather than the calendar-year reset.
Athlete settings that change over time
Max heart rate, thresholds, weight and your custom heart rate, power and cadence zones are all dated, so an activity from three years ago is scored against the numbers you actually had then instead of today's.
A file connector that doesn't need Strava at all
Desktop only: point it at a folder of FIT, TCX or GPX files and it syncs from those. Elevate's own docs already used this to shortcut a slow first Strava sync via a Strava bulk export, and it's what desktop users have fallen back on since the API connector broke.
Nothing to sign up for
Your data lives in the browser's storage or in a local database on your machine. The privacy policy says Elevate holds no data relating to an identifiable individual — only machine-level usage data such as app version, hardware and activity stats — and there's no Elevate login anywhere in the product.
Who It's For
- Strava users who'd rather not open another tab who want zone graphs, splits and peak values to appear on the activity page they're already reading
- Triathletes and multisport athletes who need one fitness and fatigue curve covering swim, bike and run rather than three separate ones
- People who won't pay a subscription for analytics who are fine with a local, open-source tool that has no cloud service behind it
- Windows and macOS users who already pay for Strava who want the desktop app's Strava connector — without a Strava subscription it currently won't authorise
