Zwift Year in Review 2024

2024 was a big year for Zwift, which means it was a big year for us at Zwift Insider. We published over 600 posts last year covering important Zwifty news and tips, but we only scratched the surface. There are always more stories to tell!

It seems like only last year we were lining up for races at the lap banner, hoping our clocks were synced up. But Zwift actually turned 10 just a few months ago, around the same time we saw the fitting resurrection of the beloved Zwiftcast (thank you, Simon), an unwelcome price rise (thanks, inflation), and Zwift’s biggest hardware success to date (Zwift Ride). It’s been quite a year.

This is our look back at all things Zwift for 2024. Enjoy the ride!

New Roads

Zwifters love new roads, and two expansions were released in 2024, both in Watopia. The first was The Grade expansion in June, followed by the Jarvis expansion in November.

Zwift and the racing community used these new roads and existing roads to create an unprecedented number of new routes this year. In total, Zwift added 43 new routes to the game in 2024. That’s a lot of badges! Here’s the full list:

By comparison, 14 routes were added in 2023, 20 in 2022, 26 in 2021, 19 in 2020, and 34 in 2019.

Looking for a complete list of Zwift routes? Check out our Master List of All Zwift Routes.

Additionally, Zwift added 20 climb portals to the library, more than doubling the number of climbs available:

Looking for a complete list of Zwift routes? Check out our Master List of All Zwift Climb Portal Routes.

Major Events

This year saw Zwift create several new major events, which was a refreshing change from recent years where Zwift mostly iterated on events they’d already done. Without going into too much detail, here are the big new events we think were most worth mentioning:

• Zwift Games: this massive racing festival for community and elite racers saw a lot of firsts on Zwift, and it also broke records with over 80,000 riders participating and more than 215,000 races finished.
• Zwift Big Spin: this fun ride series showed just how far we’re willing to go to spin a prize wheel. (Hint: it’s far.) With a prize spinner at the end of every route, and some fun/unique prizes available, Zwifters just kept putting in the laps.
• Tour de France Climb Portal Challenge: this fun series leveraged the Climb Portal to let riders take on the same climbs as the IRL Tour de France was racing, on the same days.
• Zwift World Series: a new flagship race series which acts as both a series of qualifiers for elite racing, plus monthly “classics” style events for community racers.
• Zwift Camp: Baseline: a new style of assessment-oriented training program that is surely a sign of more to come from Zwift.

While the popular Tour of Watopia and Tour de Zwift happened again, Zwift chose to skip the traditional Zwift Fondo series due to all the extra 10-year celebration events.

We also saw this year’s Zwift Academy change direction, with more of a focus on talent ID and less of a focus on community training. Will Zwift Academy continue to move this way in 2025? We’ll have to wait and see…

On the racing side, Zwift Racing League continues to be the biggest racing series on the platform, while Zwift’s ZRacing series (see the current series here) is the most popular scratch race series on the platform. Shameless plug: Zwift Insider’s Tiny Races are still the most popular race each Saturday!

We won’t list all of Zwift’s major events for 2024 here, but you can certainly browse the events archive to see what we highlighted throughout the year, including many community-organized events.

Racing Changes

This was the year Zwift finally launched the long-awaited Zwift Racing Score, effectively reshuffling the deck by bringing results-based categorization to races. Riders are no longer classified purely by power numbers, which means it’s harder to sandbag at the top of a category. It’s a whole new era for Zwift racing.

Related: What’s happening with Zwift Racing Score?

There have been lots of tweaks to Zwift Racing Score since its release, and there are more to come (learn what’s planned here). January 2025 sees Zwift making some radical changes to categorization schemes for ZRacing events – read more about that here.

The racing events calendar was cleaned up dramatically in 2024 as well. It began in August with women’s race events, then the overall racing calendar saw a major cleanup in December. Overall, Zwift is clearly taking control of the public calendar in an effort to deliver consistently good race experiences to Zwifters. It seems to be working with women-only events. As for the open races? A bit too soon to tell.

Lastly, it’s worth mentioning Zwift’s decision to pause the elite side of the Zwift World Series in early December due to concerns over trainer inaccuracy. This certainly threw a hitch into some racer’s plans, but at the same time, it seems like the right move.

Training API

Perhaps the single-biggest new Zwift software feature for 2024 is the Training API, which allows third-party partners to communicate workout data to and from the game. This effectively expands Zwift’s workout library from several hundred standalone sessions to an infinitely-massive library full of workouts and plans built by qualified coaches or AI engines!

It’s up to Zwifters to decide which third-party partners they want to work with, and most come with additional fees. While we’re still waiting on TrainerRoad to release their Zwift Training API integration, six partners have come online since the API went live:

Hardware

In June, Zwift made a huge move into the hardware space by releasing the Zwift Ride smart bike. Where other smart bikes were selling for $2500-$4000, the Zwift Ride was priced at just $1299US, which immediately disrupted the market. A couple of months later the Ride frame became available for purchase as a standalone item ($799US), giving existing Zwifters with virtual shifting-capable trainers an upgrade path.

Chatting with contacts inside the company, it’s clear they’re happy with how Zwift Ride has landed. Tens of thousands of units have sold, and while there have been some hiccups with shipping damage, by and large customers seem quite happy with their purchases. Zwift Ride looks to be the company’s most successful hardware venture yet.

The other big piece of hardware news is around virtual shifting. When 2024 began, just one trainer, the Zwift Hub, supported Zwift virtual shifting. Then the Wahoo KICKR Core got virtual shifting support in February, along with the KICKR v6 and KICKR Move. Later in the year trainers from JetBlack, Elite, and VAN RYSEL would also receive virtual shifting support.

Related: All About Virtual Shifting in Zwift >

Nobody likes the fact that Zwift virtual shifting is proprietary, meaning the Zwift Ride effectively only works on Zwift. But virtual shifting is so good, and Zwift is so popular, that literally tens of thousands of people chose to purchase a Zwift-only setup this year. That says something.

New Features

Along with everything listed above, Zwift released or improved many game features in 2024. While many of the changes are quite minor on their own, their combined weight helps drive the platform’s continued adoption. Here’s a complete list in chronological order:

• New Apple TV pairing wizard
• Workout browsing added to Companion app
• Choose Any Avatar
• New “Intersection Controls” Option
• Player highlight
• Ride On Bombs highlighting
• Online race results
• Confetti Socks!
• Brake sensitivity adjustment added
• Rubberbanding (Keep Everyone Together) Speed Fixes
• “My List” feature added to Companion app
• Refreshed Epic KOM scenery
• Pairing screen no longer auto-brakes
• Force field visuals
• XP and Level changes (July)
• Everest Challenge Auto-Signup
• “Block User” option added
• Three new “mini challenges” released
• HUD update (field options, dynamic elevation display and more)
• KICKR BIKE Gearing Visualization
• Garage Auto-Sorting
• Friend Notifications
• New Minimap Route Profile
• Refreshed In-Game Emotes Experience
• “The Grade” FTP Detection Now Gamewide
• New “Screen Shake Effect” Toggle

Multiple/Continuous Updates

Some parts of the game saw multiple updates in 2024. Rather than listing each above, we’ll just call them out below:

• Homescreen: continuous tweaks to layout, iconography, and elements
• Art updates: updated road surfaces, misc art changes on various maps
• Streaks screen: the streaks metric saw various tweaks in 2024, and the screen was made less intrusive
• Robopacers: run pacers were turned off, and ride pacers saw tweaks made to the Drops multiplier game and other key parts of the experience

Game Updates

Zwift kept a steady cadence of bi-weekly game updates for nearly all of 2024. Here’s the entire list of update releases – click for details:

Competitors

There are still just three companies in the indoor cycling app market that Zwift is competing against: IndieVelo (now TrainingPeaks Virtual), MyWhoosh, and Rouvy. Each is chasing market share in unique ways:

• TrainingPeaks Virtual quickly built a reputation as a rapidly evolving, feature-rich, race-centric platform. Bringing TrainingPeaks into the mix adds a training angle to their offering, not to mention thousands of new users.
• MyWhoosh hosted the UCI Esports Worlds for the first time this year, and will be hosting it for the next two years as well. There are two simple reasons why riders are attracted to the platform: it’s free, and you can win cash in races.
• Rouvy has been advertising heavily this year, and features real-world footage that the other platforms lack.

While Zwift is still the massive leader in terms of user base, these other platforms keep Zwift on their toes by releasing new features and hosting events Zwift would like to see on their own platform. The good news is, we all benefit from this competition.

What’s next?

What’s coming soon to Zwift in 2025? Here are a few things we know about:

• Zwift Community Live in Mallorca: the first ever IRL Zwift meetup is happening in April in Mallorca, Spain. We’re getting prepped for epic rides and community time!
• Garage Upgrades and Halo Bikes: we know this is coming soon, but it sounds like it may be delayed even further, so we’re guessing a February 2025 release.
• TrainerRoad Fitness API Integration: TrainerRoad has already said they’re working on it, but we haven’t seen a target date. Our guess is sometime in Q1 2025.

There’s definitely more to come in addition to what’s listed above, though. Zwift keeps us in the dark on some of their future plans, while others (including map expansions!) we get to peek at, under embargo.

Regardless, we’re looking forward to 2025 and all the Zwifty upgrades it will bring. We hope you are, too.

Your Comments

What are your thoughts on Zwift’s 2024? Favorite new features, things you wish Zwift had released but didn’t? And what would you most like to see in 2025? Share below!