Strava is built around social training - leaderboards, segments, kudos. MoveMap is built around looking back at your own history. They solve different problems, so the question isn't "which is better" but "which one fits the part of training you actually care about."
Pick Strava if you train with friends, chase segment KOMs, or use the social feed for motivation. The leaderboard ecosystem is irreplaceable.
Pick MoveMap if you want to see your entire GPS history on one map and you don't need the social side. It's cheaper, on-device, and works with your existing Strava data through Apple Health.
Use both if you want live tracking + social through Strava and a beautiful lifetime view through MoveMap. Many users do exactly this. Strava's free tier covers tracking; MoveMap free covers the last 12 months of your map.
| Feature | MoveMap | Strava |
|---|---|---|
| Lifetime map of every GPS workout | ✓ Up to 10 years from Apple Health | – Only your Strava-recorded activities |
| Personal heatmap | ✓ Free for last 12 months, Pro for full history | ✓ Strava Premium subscribers only |
| Reads from other tracking apps | ✓ Anything writing to Apple Health | – Manual import only |
| Live GPS tracking during a workout | – Not the use case | ✓ Strava's core feature |
| Segment leaderboards | – Not included | ✓ Defines Strava's value |
| Social feed, kudos, comments | – No social layer | ✓ Core feature |
| Routes and training plans | – Not included | ✓ Strava Routes (Premium) |
| Year in Review postcard export | ✓ 1080x1920 PNG, all-year overlay | ✓ Annual feature (auto-generated) |
| Ghost Lap / past-pace overlay | ✓ Quiet overlay when revisiting routes | ✓ Segment efforts (more competitive framing) |
| Country and city coverage stats | ✓ Coverage dashboard | – No equivalent |
| Works with Apple Watch | ✓ Via Apple Health | ✓ Native Watch app |
| Works with Garmin / Wahoo / Suunto / Coros | ✓ Via Apple Health sync | ✓ Native connections |
| Plan | MoveMap | Strava |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Last 12 months of map, one Year in Review per month | Live tracking, basic stats, social feed |
| Monthly subscription | $1.99/mo (7-day free trial) | $11.99/mo |
| Annual subscription | $9.99/yr | $79.99/yr |
| Lifetime / one-time | $14.99 one-time, no renewal | Not available |
Strava's subscription is a meaningful jump - useful if you want segments, route building, and other Premium-only features. MoveMap's pricing is built for people who'd rather pay once than rent the app.
This is the difference most casual comparisons miss. Strava stores all of your activity data on its servers. That has good and bad consequences:
Good: your routes are accessible from any device, sharing works, segments are computed across millions of athletes.
Bad: your GPS history is on third-party infrastructure governed by terms of service that can change. Strava has had public incidents around data exposure (the heatmap revealing US military bases in 2018 was the most-cited example) and your activity data is part of an aggregate dataset whether you opt out of the heatmap or not.
MoveMap stores nothing on any server. The app reads from Apple Health each time you open it. There's no account, no cloud sync, no analytics SDK. The trade-off is that you can't view your map from a web browser - MoveMap is iPhone-only and reads only the data on the current device.
If you use Strava mainly to review your routes after the fact, yes - MoveMap can replace it and works with the data Strava already has via Apple Health. If you use Strava for segments, kudos, and social features, MoveMap doesn't have those. Many people keep both: free Strava for tracking + social, MoveMap for the lifetime view.
Indirectly. MoveMap reads from Apple Health. Strava can write to Apple Health if you enable the toggle in its settings - then any new activities sync automatically. For older Strava activities recorded before you turned that toggle on, you'd need to export GPX files and import them via a third-party Apple Health importer. See this guide.
Yes. Strava Premium is $79.99/year. MoveMap is $1.99/month (with a 7-day free trial), $9.99/year, or $14.99 one-time Lifetime. Over a five-year window, MoveMap Lifetime costs less than two months of Strava Premium.
No. MoveMap has no servers, no account, and no analytics SDK. Your GPS routes are read from Apple Health locally on your iPhone. Even the street coverage feature uses anonymous bounding-box queries to OpenStreetMap that contain no personal data.
No. Segments are a Strava-specific feature tied to their aggregated user database. MoveMap shows your own pace history on revisited routes via Ghost Lap (a quiet personal comparison) but there's no leaderboard, no KOM, and no segment ecosystem.
Yes - this is the most common setup for MoveMap users. Use Strava (free or Premium) to track your activities and engage with friends. As long as Strava has Apple Health sync enabled in its settings, every new activity also appears in MoveMap automatically.
MoveMap reads from Apple Health - including whatever Strava already wrote there. Free to download.
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