Zwift Speed Tests: Bike Frame Ranking Charts

Your chosen bike frame and wheelset both affect speed in Zwift, so it makes sense for racers to do a little research and choose the best tool for the job.

While Zwift’s 4-star rating system for weight and aero is simple and easy to understand, performance varies even among frames with the same star ratings, because the stars are just an approximation. On top of that, Zwift’s addition of bike upgrades means racers need to take into account how a frame will perform when fully upgraded, not only when it’s first purchased.

Therefore, we’ve created several charts ranking all the road bike frames based on their performance on flat roads and climbs, in un-upgraded and fully-upgraded states. These charts are automatically updated with our latest speed data.

If you’re just looking for recommendations on what to buy, here are some helpful posts:

• The Top 10 Road Bikes in Zwift
• Fastest Aero Bike Frames and Wheels at Each Zwift Level
• Fastest Climbing Bike Frames and Wheels at Each Zwift Level
• Zwift Shopping Guide: What To Buy from the Drop Shop at Each Level
• Speed Tests: Tron vs Top Performers Chart (Un-Upgraded and Fully Upgraded Versions)
• Master list of all frames on Zwift

Note: To simplify the charts, we have excluded slow frames and frames no longer sold in the Drop Shop.

Time Savings Over 1 Hour (Stage 0 Frames)

We begin with a simple chart showing how much time a particular frame will save you across 1 hour of riding at 300W (4 W/kg) compared to the stock Zwift Carbon frame. These are “stage 0” frames, meaning no performance upgrades have been applied.

The chart is sorted from the best-performing frames to the worst, and you can sort based on flat performance or climb performance.

Takeaways

When sorted by flat performance, you can easily see that the top 15 frames are very close on flat ground, separated by less than 3 seconds across an hour. There is also a big chunk of bikes near the low end which are all rather slow on flats, but perform within 2 seconds of each other. Our guess is they all have the same frame CdA value in Zwift, and any time differences are due to frame weight variation.

If you sort by climb performance, the speed falloff from one bike to the next is more even across the board. The Specialized Tarmac SL9 is king of the hill, but remember, this is before any performance upgrades. Let’s move on to the next chart to see which fully-upgraded frame climbs fastest!

Time Savings Over 1 Hour (Stage 5 Frames)

This chart is just like the one above, except these are “stage 5” frames, meaning all possible performance upgrades have been applied.

Read all about Bike Upgrades here >

Use the toggle to sort based on flat performance or climb performance.

Takeaways

We don’t see any major ranking changes in terms of flat performance, but that’s no surprise. The Bike Upgrading system is structured so that performance differences between different frame types increase as you progress through upgrade stages. To put it another way: climbing bikes become even stronger climbers, and aero bikes become even more aero.

Sort the results by Climb Performance, and you can see obvious evidence of this. The all-arounder Specialized Tarmac SL9 is no longer king of the hill at stage 5, as the S-Works Aethos has received more weight reduction upgrades than the Tarmac. And the Trek Emonda, the other climbing bike on the list, moves up dramatically in the rankings compared to its stage 0 counterpart, beating the S-Works Tarmac SL9.

The takeaway? If you want a true, pure climbing weapon in Zwift, you’ll want to upgrade the S-Works Aethos.

Time Savings, Stacked (Stage 0 vs Stage 5 Frames)

Next, we have one of our favorite charts, ranking frames based on total time savings across our flat and climbing tests. This chart lets you easily see the best all-around performers, and whether their performance leans to the aero or climbing side.

Use the toggle to see data for stage 0 frames, or fully-upgraded stage 5 frames.

Takeaways

The non-climbing bikes don’t move around a lot between the stage 0 and stage 5 versions of this chart, and this makes sense, since they all receive the same upgrades.

What you do see, though, is the climbing bikes moving up the rankings by several slots for stage 5, since they gain so much time on the climbs thanks to their weight reduction upgrades.

Time Savings for Climbing (2 W/kg vs 4 W/kg)

Some readers have asked us to compute time gaps at lower power numbers, which is a perfectly reasonable request. Making this change has the interesting effect on climb times of making lightweight bikes move up the rankings while the more aero-focused bikes drop.

What About the Halo Bikes (Tron, Project 74, etc)?

Halo bikes are not listed above because it’s impossible to test their frames without also testing their wheels, since they are inseparable.

Here’s a chart where you can compare the Tron and other Halo bikes against top-performing frames + wheel pairings >

Testing Methodology

The data above was generated using our standard bot testing procedure. Our bot rides alone on Zwift, set to 75kg weight, 183cm height, using the Zwift 32mm Carbon wheels. The aero (flat) test route is Tempus Fugit, the flattest course on Zwift, while the weight (climbing) test is done on Alpe du Zwift since it’s a long, steep, and fairly steady climb.

All of the data used by these charts comes from our public Google sheet’s test data.

Questions or comments?

We’d love to know what you think of these charts, including suggestions for improvements. Share your comments below.