If you use Strava (and if you're reading this, you probably do), you already get basic analytics - weekly distance, pace trends, a fitness score, relative effort. It's clean, it's free, and for a lot of people it's enough.
Baseline doesn't replace Strava. You'll still use Strava for recording, segments, kudos, community. Baseline adds a layer on top that Strava doesn't do.
Here's exactly what's different.
What Strava analytics does well
Strava's analytics are better than most people give them credit for:
- Fitness & Freshness - a simple version of CTL/ATL/TSB, automatically calculated from heart rate or power data
- Relative Effort - weekly training load expressed as a single number you can compare week-to-week
- Weekly intensity - pace/HR zone breakdown
- Monthly activity - volume trends by sport
- Personal heatmap - all your GPS tracks on one map (Subscriber feature)
For the casual athlete training 3–5 days a week in one sport, this is genuinely useful. The Fitness & Freshness chart alone is more than most people will ever use.
What Strava analytics doesn't do
The gaps become clear when you:
- Train across multiple sports and want to see them together. Strava splits run/ride/swim into separate tabs with no unified load view.
- Use multiple devices - WHOOP for recovery, Garmin for training, Apple Watch for daily steps. Strava only shows what it recorded.
- Want to see how recovery metrics (HRV, sleep, RHR) affect your performance. Strava doesn't connect these dots.
- Care about geographic analysis beyond a pretty map. Country/state counts, trip detection, altitude tracking.
- Want training load tracking at the level of specificity that CTS/ATL/TSB provides - with customisable time constants, not a one-size-fits-all formula.
What Baseline adds
1. Cross-source dashboard
Baseline imports your Strava activities alongside data from WHOOP, Garmin, Apple Health, Coros, and Oura. The Overview screen shows them together - including a single training load chart that combines all sources.
This means you can answer questions like "on days I train hard (from Strava), does my HRV dip the next morning (from WHOOP)?" or "does my Garmin Body Battery correlate with Strava relative effort?" The answers exist in your data; you just couldn't see them before.
2. Geographic depth
Strava's personal heatmap is beautiful. Baseline's goes several steps further:
- Country and state coverage stats
- Per-trip activity grouping
- Altitude and depth tracking
- Multi-sport overlay (your runs AND rides on the same map)
If you've trained in multiple countries - and a surprising number of athletes have - Baseline surfaces that story automatically.
3. Training load, properly
Baseline uses the same CTL/ATL/TSB model coaches rely on, with configurable time constants (default 42/7 days, adjustable to your sport). You get a real fitness/freshness balance, not a simplified score.
4. AI insights, not a chatbot
Baseline's daily insights card surfaces three things every morning: what changed since yesterday, what's trending, what to watch. It's AI-driven but not pushy - you read it in 20 seconds over coffee.
5. Data ownership
Baseline stores your actual raw time-series data. Export is a single zip file with your complete history. Delete is a single button that schedules full data erasure (GDPR-compliant, soft-delete with 30-day grace window). Strava's bulk export exists but requires downloading individual archives per activity type. If you have 2000 activities, that is several hours of manual work. Baseline's export produces one file in under 60 seconds.
This matters more than most athletes realise until they need it. If you decide to switch platforms, migrate your data to a coach's software, or simply want a local backup of your entire training history, the ease of extraction determines whether you actually do it or abandon years of data. Baseline was built with the assumption that you own your training data, not the platform that happens to display it. Every byte you upload can be downloaded, reformatted, and taken elsewhere without friction.
Everything Strava records is accessible to Baseline via OAuth. Everything Baseline computes is yours to export (full JSON download, one click). Delete your account and your data is gone - 30-day soft-delete grace window, then hard delete.
Should you use both?
Yes. That's the honest answer.
Baseline complements Strava. Use Strava for recording, social, segments. Use Baseline for the analysis that spans all your devices and all your sports.
Common mistakes
1. Assuming Strava does everything you need. Strava is excellent for recording activities, social interaction, and segment chasing. What it is not designed for is deep cross-source analytics that span multiple devices and sports. Athletes who try to use Strava as their single analytics platform miss the correlations between training load, recovery, sleep, and performance. Each device records a piece of the puzzle, but you need a unified view to see the full picture.
2. Keeping data siloed across apps. A common scenario: you wear a Garmin to record workouts, a WHOOP to track recovery, and you log nutrition in another app entirely - but you never look at the data together. The most valuable coaching insights live at the intersections: how does your HRV respond to hard training blocks? Does poor sleep predict lower power output the next day? Siloed data cannot answer these questions because the relationships exist between sources, not within a single source.
3. Over-relying on simplified fitness scores. Strava's Fitness and Freshness is a helpful starting point, but it is a simplified version of the full CTL/ATL/TSB model with fixed parameters and limited transparency. Athletes who want to customise time constants, adjust for sport-specific demands, or see the underlying daily TSS values need a tool that exposes the full model rather than hiding it behind a single-number summary.
How Baseline handles this
Baseline unifies data from Strava, WHOOP, Garmin, Apple Health, Coros, and Oura into a single dashboard. The Overview screen shows your training load, recovery metrics, sleep, and performance trends on one timeline. Cross-source correlations are surfaced automatically through the daily AI insights card, so you do not need to manually connect the dots between your devices.
Further reading
If you're a casual runner who uses Strava 3x a week and doesn't wear a WHOOP or Garmin, Baseline is probably overkill - stick with Strava's free analytics, they're good.
If you wear more than one device, train across multiple sports, or just want to nerd out on your own data properly - try the demo or start a free trial.