Which one
- A forecast for tomorrow’s route, on your phone: Epic Ride Weather. Load the route, set a start time, and the strip tells you the rest.
- Which way round to ride the loop: either. Both show wind relative to your direction of travel, and Epic Ride Weather reverses a route with one tap.
- Hunting a segment PR or a KOM: myWindsock. It watches the segment and emails you when the wind is right.
- Time trials, or a power meter and an interest in CdA: myWindsock.
- Paying nothing: myWindsock’s free tier. Epic Ride Weather is trial then subscription.
Side by side
| Epic Ride Weather | myWindsock | |
|---|---|---|
| Form | iOS and Android (the iPad app runs on Apple-silicon Macs), Karoo extension. No web app | Web app, add to home screen. Karoo extension. No native app |
| Core output | Wind, rain, temperature, humidity, UV, daylight, air quality along the route at the time you reach each point | Weather Impact %, Feels Like Elevation, Wind Adjusted Time, Air Speed, CdA with power |
| Route sources | Strava, Ride with GPS, Komoot, Garmin Connect activities, Trailforks, MapMyRide, Plotaroute, Runkeeper, GPX/FIT/TCX | Strava activities, routes and segments, Garmin, Wahoo, Ride with GPS, Komoot, GPX/TCX/FIT, its own route builder |
| Strava segments | Starred segments ranked by today’s tailwind | 7-day forecast per segment, Windsock alerts, time prediction; leaderboard weather on Lite and above with a Strava subscription |
| Writes to Strava | Nothing documented | Optional report in the activity description |
| Weather data | Apple WeatherKit since 2023 | Met Office UKV, ECMWF or GFS, its UK example |
| Free | 30-day trial, 1,000 forecasts | Free tier: Strava activity weather, 1 Windsock, planned-route weather |
| Paid | $2.99/mo or $19.99/yr (£2.99/£19.99, €2.99/€22.99) | Lite £9.99/yr, Power £19.99/yr, Unlimited £24.99/yr ($12.99/$24.99/$29.99, €11.99/€24.99/€29.99); monthly £2.99/£3.99/£7.99 |
| Made by | David Green, British Columbia, since 2016 | Ben Norbury, UK, since 2016 |
Epic Ride Weather
Epic Ride Weather still does the one thing it launched with in 2016, and the additions since all serve it. You pick a route, a start time and a pace, and it walks the forecast along the ride so each point shows the conditions at the moment you’ll get there: wind speed and direction relative to the way you’re heading, gusts, the chance and intensity of rain, temperature and feels-like, humidity, UV, sunrise and sunset, and, announced in August 2026, air quality with the individual pollutants. Where the headwind starts and where it turns into a tailwind is the whole point. A one-tap reverse shows you the loop the other way round.
Best Time to Ride compares start times through the day, and the segments screen ranks your starred Strava segments by which has the strongest tailwind today. Routes arrive on their own: Strava and Ride with GPS every 40 minutes, Komoot tours in regions you’ve unlocked, Garmin Connect activities (not courses, which Garmin doesn’t expose), and a long tail of others plus file import. It has looked back at the weather on past rides since 2023 and gained terrain maps in 2025.
It’s a phone app first, on iOS and Android, with the iPad build running on Apple-silicon Macs and no web version. The Hammerhead Karoo extension was announced in March 2025 alongside Hammerhead’s extension library and went live that May. It shows current and upcoming wind, the next hour of rain and the temperature on the head unit, with or without a route loaded, and needs a Forecasts subscription once the trial ends. Epic Ride Weather is also the official weather supplier to Team Visma | Lease a Bike, renewed for 2026 and 2027, and runs a separate Events platform that puts a route-aware race-day forecast on an organiser’s event page.
There is no free tier: a 30-day trial capped at 1,000 forecasts, which the app says is enough for thirty or forty 100 km rides, then $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year. David Green built it in 2016 and still ships it.
myWindsock
myWindsock began in autumn 2016 as a wind chart Ben Norbury drew by hand for a local ten-mile time trial course, and you can still tell. It takes the same route-plus-time input and puts it through an equation of motion, balancing what your legs and the tailwind push against the air and the rolling resistance. Out of that come its trademarked metrics. Feels Like Elevation turns wind resistance into climbing metres. Weather Impact is myWindsock’s percentage for how much the weather cost you, or gave you, against a calm day, and Wind Adjusted Time is its estimate of what the ride would have taken with no wind at all. Air Speed and Air Penalty come with it, and if the file has power, it estimates your CdA. The free tier shows weather on your activities; the fuller metric set starts at Lite.
Then it goes after Strava segments. Load any segment and you get its conditions for the next seven days and any date in the past. Put a Windsock on it and myWindsock monitors the forecast and emails you when the optimum window is coming, up to 24 hours ahead. On Lite or above, with a Strava subscription on top, you can see what weather the top ten had for their times, and a wind rose of the prevailing wind behind them. It will predict your time on a course or segment if you change your watts, CdA or weight, and it forecasts and analyses the routes you create. The Scan Forecast tool compares many times and dates at once, with an assistant that takes plain requests like the best day this week at 1pm. It also carries Zwift routes.
There’s nothing in either app store. You add the website to your home screen, and myWindsock doesn’t pretend otherwise. Its Karoo extension, from March 2025, paints a colour-coded wind field, a feels-like gradient, accumulated headwind, yaw and air speed on the head unit. The Power plan and above can export a Virtual Partner file for a Garmin. A new interface called Surface is in beta, drawing routes on a map with on-road wind estimated from terrain, buildings and land use, and settings for your power, CdA, mass and rolling resistance.
Pricing is in pounds first. The free tier includes weather on your Strava activities, one Windsock and weather on your planned routes. Lite, £9.99 a year ($12.99, €11.99), unlocks five Windsocks, the weather trends, the fuller metrics and leaderboard weather. Power, £19.99 a year ($24.99, €24.99), adds CdA, optimum power plans, course notes and the Garmin file, with fifteen Windsocks. Unlimited, £24.99 a year ($29.99, €29.99), adds unlimited uploads and the aero testing tools, still with fifteen Windsocks. Some features need a power meter, and leaderboard weather needs a Strava subscription as well as Lite.
How each talks to Strava
Epic Ride Weather reads and, as far as anything it documents goes, doesn’t write. It pulls your routes and activities to forecast against and your starred segments to rank.
myWindsock reads more, and can write back if you ask it to. On connection it asks to view your activities, routes, KOMs, starred segments and, with a Strava subscription, segment leaderboards. Private activities are off limits, even to their owner, until they’re made public. In the other direction there is the myWindsock Report: tick a box and every new activity gets a block of weather data appended to its description, or send one to any past activity by hand. You pick the fields, from Weather Impact and headwind percentage down to temperature and CdA.
Three more weather tools
Klimat adds weather to your Strava activities after the fact, free for its first 30 activities and then 3 every 30 days, or unlimited for $15 a year, with a choice of providers, but it doesn’t forecast a route. KOMinator is a free iPhone app, last updated in 2019, that finds segments with the wind behind them now or in the coming forecast. KOM Hunter ranks segments near you by tailwind, with a free tier and paid plans from €9.99, and adds a Windfall Score if you ride with a power meter. Both segment tools are worth a look before paying for either app above.
How to choose
If your question is what to wear and which way round to ride tomorrow, Epic Ride Weather answers it in a native app for $19.99 a year. If your question is whether Thursday at 6pm is the day to go for the segment, or how much of last Sunday’s slow time was the wind’s fault, that’s myWindsock, and you can find out for free before spending £9.99. Both sit under the same weather tag in the directory and answer different questions.
Common questions
What is the difference between Epic Ride Weather and myWindsock?
Epic Ride Weather answers one question: what will the weather be at each point of this route, at the time I will actually be there. It is a phone app, and the output is a strip of wind, rain, temperature and air quality along the ride. myWindsock is a web app that starts from the same route-plus-time idea and then models the physics, turning wind into an artificial elevation profile, a percentage time penalty, an estimated wind-adjusted time and, with power data, your CdA. It also watches your Strava segments and emails you when conditions are right for a PR.
Which one is free?
myWindsock has a free tier: weather data on your Strava activities, one segment Windsock, and weather on your planned routes, with paid plans from £9.99 a year. Epic Ride Weather has no free tier. You get a 30-day trial capped at 1,000 forecasts, then it is $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year (£2.99 or £19.99, €2.99 or €22.99).
Do they work with Strava routes?
Both do. Epic Ride Weather syncs your Strava routes every 40 minutes; myWindsock reads activities, routes, starred segments and KOMs.
Does either one write to Strava?
myWindsock does, if you ask it to. A myWindsock Report can be added to the description of every new activity automatically, or sent to a past activity by hand, with your choice of fields: weather impact, headwind percentage, feels-like elevation, air speed, precipitation, temperature and CdA when there is power data. Epic Ride Weather has no documented feature that writes anything to Strava.
Which is better for Strava segments?
myWindsock. It has a whole set of segment tools: a seven-day forecast for any segment plus any past date, Windsock alerts that email you up to 24 hours ahead when the wind is right, and, on Lite or above with a Strava subscription, the weather the top ten had for their times. Epic Ride Weather has one screen, which ranks your starred segments by today’s tailwind.
Sources
- Epic Ride Weather, its FAQ (pricing, trial, route sync), About, Karoo page, and the App Store and Google Play listings
- Epic Ride Weather blog posts on moving to WeatherKit, segments by tailwind, Best Time to Ride, the Karoo extension announcement and launch, Visma | Lease a Bike, Events and air quality, plus the 2023 year in review (historical weather) and terrain maps
- myWindsock: Metrics explained, How does a myWindsock forecast actually work, and About and Press
- myWindsock help on linking Strava, Segment Windsocks, segment weather, leaderboard weather, adding the report to Strava, the report fields, the app question and Scan Forecast, its features page (Windsock email alerts) and the private activities FAQ
- myWindsock Premium (plans and prices), myWindsock on Hammerhead Karoo, Zwift routes and Surface
- Klimat, KOMinator and KOM Hunter
Related reading
The weather tag in the directory has all five of these. The KOM Hunter page goes into how its windfall scores work, if the segment hunt is the part you care about.
