Zwift Year in Review 2025

2025 was a busy year for Zwift, which means it was a busy year for us at Zwift Insider. We published over 650 posts last year covering important Zwifty news and tips, but we only scratched the surface. There are always more stories to tell!

Zwift turned 11 this year, and inside sources tell me subscriber numbers and corporate financials are strong as we head into 2026. Streamlined onboarding, purpose-built hardware, and training platform partnerships have helped Zwift become even more accessible and useful in recent years, and the end result is lots of new riders in Watopia.

This is my look back at all things Zwift for 2025. Enjoy the ride!

New Roads

Zwifters love new roads, and two expansions were released in 2025. First, France got some fresh cobbles in early April, then New York more than doubled in size in October.

29 routes were released using these new roads, but Zwift added a total of 60 new routes to the game in 2025. That’s a lot – way more than past years, in fact. Zwift seems to have decided since they can’t build new roads fast enough, they’ll make more routes on existing roads to satisfy all the badge chasers.

Here’s the full list of routes added this year:

(In comparison, 43 routes were added in 2024, 14 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 8 climb portals to the library:

No new climb portals have been added since April 2025, though, leaving me wondering when Zwift will add fresh climbs.

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

Major Events

This year, Zwift replayed some popular events, while totally revamping/rebranding others. Without going into too much detail, here are the big new events I think were most worth mentioning:

• Tour de Zwift: the biggest annual tour on the platform, because it happens at the Peak Zwift! 2025’s Tour included the first-ever Ultimate Challenge: riding all three routes for all six stages to earn additional unlocks.
• Zwift Games: The second edition of the Games brought out lots of racers, and elite riders battled for the largest total prize pot ever on Zwift.
• Zwift Big Spin: This fun ride series saw the return of the prize wheel and the introduction of the first-ever BMX bike to the game.
• Tour Fever: As the Official Training Software Provider of the Tour de France, Zwift has held Tour Fever events in past years. This year was no different, with a Climb Portal Challenge and other special events surrounding Le Tour.
• Zwift Unlocked Tour: This tour was sort of a replacement for the Tour of Watopia, awarding double XP and a cool new urban kit as riders took on new routes across several maps, including New York’s expansion.
• Zwift Camps: Zwift organized a three-camp series this year in leiu of the Zwift Academy. Zwift Camp: Baseline and Zwift Camp: Build are already completed, with Zwift Camp: Breakthrough coming in February.

Zwift brought back the zFondo Series this year, but using the same routes and kits as past years, making it fall a bit flat for Zwifters who have been around a while.

The Zwift Camps initiative shows potential and indicates that Zwift rightly understands that a Zwift Academy-style talent search can’t have the same structure as a community-friendly training camp. (Zwift didn’t hold a Zwift Academy this year, but said it will return in 2026 better than ever.) The concept of a community-friendly training series holds much potential, but Zwift has yet to support it with the necessary planning and front-end tools.

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!

While not a group event, Zwift’s Weekly Challenges are worth a mention here. Rolled out this year, the Route of the Week, Climb of the Week, and Workout of the Week featured routes, climbs, and workouts that awarded an XP bonus when finished. These have seen a lot of participation from Zwifters looking for a weekly challenge or a bit of direction on a free ride. And while Zwift has done away with the Workout of the Week due to low engagement, Routes and Climbs are still going strong (see calendar).

Lastly, Zwift Community Live deserves a mention. This was Zwift’s first-ever large-scale real-world meetup, a sort of “ZwiftCon” in Mallorca. It was an incredible experience for me and (I believe) just about everyone who attended (read my day 3 post). Unfortunately, I think ZCL may have been a victim of its own success. While it seemed like everyone who attended in 2025 thought the event was amazing and should be held again in 2026 on an even larger scale, what I’m hearing internally at Zwift is that it’s being scaled back to more of an “industry event” this year with mostly partners and influencer athletes attending. Folks at Zwift HQ who I spoke with agreed that the 2025 event was amazing, but expressed that it’s challenging, expensive, and frankly, too big of a distraction from their business goals to organize an even larger event for the general Zwifter population.

I won’t list all of Zwift’s major events for 2025 here, but you can certainly browse the events archive to see what was highlighted throughout the year, including many community-organized events.

Racing Changes

As I see it, there were four key developments in the world of Zwift racing for 2025.

First, Zwift Racing Score was released in earnest in October 2024, and really became the standard categorization scheme for Zwift racing in 2025. This includes Zwift’s use of multiple category ranges in their monthly ZRacing series, allowing riders to choose between categories where they rank near the top or the bottom.

Next, web-based standings were rolled out for the ZRacing series this year (see zwift.com/racing/zracing), giving riders access to a GC leaderboard at zwift.com for the first time ever. Is this Zwift moving away from ZwiftPower for race results? Absolutely. They want to simplify access to results and have the tech stack and branding all live within Zwift’s ecosystem. But will Zwift’s new web leaderboards ever have what it takes to host results for community races? That remains to be seen.

Next, Zwift rolled out Bike Upgrades in March, a feature that allows Zwifters to purchase a bike upgrade for a particular frame after putting in the time/elevation/distance to unlock that upgrade. This feature had the effect of driving riders to push hard to upgrade bikes for maximum performance, while also changing the way we thought about bike choice in each and every activity. Which bike do I choose for this free ride? This workout? This event? Bike upgrades changed everything.

Lastly, in July, Zwift announced they would not be hosting an Elite World Series in the fall. It wasn’t entirely surprising, given the challenges they faced in the previous year’s World Series as inaccurate data from approved trainers came to light, calling into question race results tied to real cash prizes. MyWhoosh has certainly stepped in to fill the gap for prize-driven elite racing, but without a significant viewing audience, Zwift’s concentration on the much larger community-racing market may turn out to be the smarter move.

Fitness and Training

Zwift began partnering with third-party workout and training plan providers near the end of 2024 via their new Training API, and finished that year with six partners. Now as 2025 draws to a close, that list of partners has more than doubled and includes TrainerRoad, the largest player in this space:

Seamless integration with a broad list of providers is a win for everyone, since Zwifters now have access to virtually unlimited workouts and training plans within Zwift.

Zwift has also turned their sights outdoors this year, which is a very interesting move. In April, Zwift announced that outdoor rides recorded with Garmin or Wahoo (and eventually Hammerhead) could be brought into your Zwift history to support Zwift’s new Fitness Metrics.

This is an important development, but there’s more to come. As I explain in this week’s post, Fitness Metrics is a part of something bigger:

Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that these metrics are just one part of the more robust training platform Zwift is building. You can see the pieces coming together: first, third-party workout syncing brought all the big training plan providers to the table. Then revamped automatic FTP detection made it easier to set your power zones. Next, Zwift started bringing in outdoor rides and computing training metrics.

To what end? We don’t know for sure, but Zwift recently announced the limited release of daily Personalized Recommendations based on your habits, fitness, and freshness…

Hardware

Zwift released the Zwift Ride smart bike in June 2024, and it was an immediate success. In April 2025, Zwift released an adjustable crank arm option for the Ride, then in September, the Ride package got an upgrade as its bundled trainer (the Wahoo KICKR CORE) was replaced by the new KICKR CORE 2 with WiFi capabilities, race mode, Bluetooth bridging, and more.

Heading into 2026, I wouldn’t want to be a smart bike manufacturer. Zwift’s goal is to keep the setup experience simple and price low. Because in the end, they’re looking for subscribers, not hardware sales. So Zwift built the Ride as a budget-friendly solution for people looking to get into indoor cycling, and they’re able to sustain a profitable business while offering the Ride at a very low price.

Zwift released the new Click v2 controllers in September, effectively replacing the original Click and the Play controllers. The affordability of the new Click controllers and the long list of trainers supporting virtual shifting means we’re seeing a huge number of Zwifters shifting virtually nowadays.

New Features

Along with everything listed above, Zwift released or improved many game features in 2025. While most of these changes are small on their own, their combined weight helps drive the platform’s continued adoption. Here’s a complete list in chronological order:

• Elevation Display Sensitivity
• “Factory Tour” Challenge
• Bike Upgrades
• Streak Flair with Scotty
• Ventoux Upgrades: Sections and Spinner
• New Splits Feature
• Updated Lighting Effects
• 4 New HUD Metrics
• New Ride Stats Panel
• Route Badge Indicator
• 2 New HUD Metrics
• iOS M-series Improvements
• Event Cooldowns for All
• Join a Friend In-Game Notifications
• Pairing Screen Filtering
• In-Game Emoji Support 🚴l
• Activity Card Updates
• Power PR Highlights
• Power Segments
• New Level Up Celebrations
• Apple M5 & A19 Visual Upgrades
• Personalized Recommendations
• Draft Indicator
• New Progress Report Screen

Game Updates

Zwift kept a steady cadence of bi-weekly game updates for nearly all of 2025. 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: 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. This year they added the GPXplore feature so more iconic routes can be added to the platform, including a “My Routes” option of riding any GPX file. (And while Zwift chose to end their Free Monthly 25 km program this year, TPV has “Free Tuesdays” on the first Tuesday of each month, and offers other free riding opportunities. Seems like a smart way to entice people to try the platform who may have signed up months or years before…)
• MyWhoosh hosted the UCI Esports Worlds for the second time this year and will be hosting it next year as well. They’ve added some new roads and features also, but in talking to other riders, clearly the main reasons people are on MyWhoosh are because 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 2026? Here are a few things I know about:

• Personalized Recommendations: This feature tries to easily answer the question, “What should I do today to get stronger?” It’s already released (in beta) to a small cohort of Zwifters, and lots more will probably see it in the next month (read more here).
• More Levels: Eric Min has said they’re coming soon, and internal sources tell me the same. I would expect to see level 150 or even 200 within the next month or two, although Zwift hasn’t promised any delivery date.
• Refreshed Zwift Academy: Zwift said in their forum, “Zwift Academy returns in 2026, with work already underway to make the 10th edition our best yet.”

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

Regardless, I’m looking forward to 2025 and all the Zwifty upgrades it will bring. Hopefully you are, too.

Your Comments

What are your thoughts on Zwift’s 2025? Favorite new features, things you wish Zwift had released but didn’t? And what would you most like to see in 2026? Share below!