What Strava can't do - and when a tour diary is the better choice

What Strava is good for

To be fair, let's start with what Strava can do - and does well. It records your route via GPS, shows pace, elevation profile and heart rate, compares you with others on segments and bundles it all into a social feed. Anyone who wants to see performance, stay motivated and measure up against friends is in the right place there.

The point isn't that Strava is bad. The point is that it pursues a different goal than a diary. Strava answers "How fast and how strong was I?". A tour diary answers "How was the ride - and what do I want to keep from it?". That's a difference you only really notice after a few months.

Where Strava hits its limits as a diary

As soon as it comes to capturing and rediscovering, the gaps show:

• No real rating per ride. "Headwind, lovely all the same" or "first test of the new tyres" - there's no fixed place for that kind of context in the activity feed.
• Focus on performance, not on memories. Pace and wattage take centre stage. Weather, companions, mishaps or a personal note are a side note at best.
• One world for the road bike, one for running. Cycle, hike, paddle and do cross-country skiing, and it all piles up in the same performance feed - but that's not a shared diary across every sport.
• Rediscovering is tedious. That ride by the river last autumn - it's hard to find in an endless feed with no targeted filters by bike, period or remark.
• The social pressure. If you only want to document for yourself, you don't need a feed that publicly compares every ride.

What a tour diary does differently

A tour diary flips the perspective: performance isn't the focus, the ride as a whole is - with everything no GPS signal captures. That's exactly what Tourtagebuch is made for.

• Capture every ride with date, distance, duration, elevation gain, weather, companions and a note of your own.
• Photos straight onto the ride - even offline, they upload once you're back in range.
• All sports in one account: cycling, hiking, running, motorcycling, canoeing, cross-country skiing.
• Filter by bike, period and favourite plus free-text search - so you'll find every ride again.
• Analyses per year, season and bike, including personal bests.
• Take over existing routes via GPX import from Strava, Komoot or Garmin.

And the data stays yours: a database on a German server, no public feed, no ads. For what documenting looks like in detail, see the article Documenting bike rides.

In a nutshell

Strava is strong at recording, comparing and motivating - that's what it's built for. When it comes to capturing and rating individual rides, rediscovering them years later and bundling every sport into one personal diary, it hits its limits. If that's exactly what you're after, a digital tour diary serves you better - and you can combine the two by simply moving the recorded ride into the diary via GPX.