ZwiftBikes

zwiftbikes.com — pick a Zwift route, tell it your weight and power, and it ranks every bike frame and wheelset by how fast it would get you to the finish. When Zwift ships new frames or wheels, we aim to add them as soon as possible.

This is a hobby project, built and run in spare time by fellow cyclists and Zwifters, for the fun of it. Bug reports, data corrections and pull requests are all very welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

The heart of the site: any route draws its own profile and tells you its fastest frame + wheelset with an estimated finish time, for the rider in the card beside it - move a slider and every time follows. Beneath it, every other setup is ranked by how far behind it finishes, and says whether its numbers are backed by verified test data or an estimate.

What it does

• Find the fastest bike for any route. Every route gets a ranked list of frame + wheelset combos with an estimated finish time for your weight and power. The rankings aim to reflect how equipment actually behaves in-game — which often differs from real-world cycling.
• Compare bikes and wheels across routes. The Bikes and Wheels pages rank every frame and wheelset by how far behind the fastest it finishes on average over the routes you pick - every route, one world, only the mountainous ones - using the homepage's route filters. See docs/standings.md.
• Explore routes and segments. See each route's surface breakdown (road / gravel / cobbles), climb profile and lap info — and get recommendations scoped to a single climb or sprint, not just the whole route.
• Ride what you own. Keep a Garage of your bikes, wheels and frame upgrade levels, and filter recommendations down to it — or to "verified only" results backed by real test data rather than estimates.
• Browse race events on the events calendar — a hand-picked selection of race series (not every event on Zwift), with bike recommendations for each event's route.
• Set a rider profile once (weight, height, sustained power) and every estimate uses it. It's stored only in your browser — nothing is sent to a server.
• Ask an assistant instead. The site talks to LLM clients directly over MCP, and every route, segment and race page also answers in plain markdown to anything that asks for it — see Markdown for agents.

Each route's speed-by-surface chart: your estimated speed over the elevation profile, where the surface changes, and what each surface costs you in watts.

Where the numbers come from

• Aero/climb performance and rolling-resistance (Crr) figures are sourced from ZwiftInsider bot-test data where available (marked "bot-tested" in the UI); everything else falls back to a labeled heuristic estimate. Huge thanks to the ZwiftInsider team — their painstaking, publicly shared bot testing of nearly every frame, wheel and Crr surface value in the game is what makes this app's numbers possible at all, and their articles are just a genuinely great read on their own if you're into the game's mechanics.
• Catalog data (routes, frames, wheels, segments) comes from the zwift-data npm package.
• Route surface percentages (gravel/cobble %) are an app-computed estimate, not official Zwift data. Which worlds are known to contain gravel/cobble sections at all is cross-checked against community-mapped surface data adapted from zwiftmap (MIT licensed — see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md).

Using it from an assistant or a script

• MCP server — https://zwiftbikes.com/api/mcp, streamable HTTP, access gated at the edge. Set a rider profile, then ask for a route or a segment. Details and design notes in docs/mcp-server.md.

• Markdown — every route, segment and race page (plus the homepage, the segments index and the World pages that list them) returns markdown instead of HTML when the request sends Accept: text/markdown, and /llms.txt indexes the whole catalog. See docs/markdown-for-agents.md.

• JSON — GET /api/recommend/{routeSlug}?weightKg=&heightCm=&powerW=, plus /api/routes, /api/segments, /api/bikes and /api/wheelsets, and the precomputed standings at /api/standings/bikes and /api/standings/wheels.

  curl -H 'Accept: text/markdown' https://zwiftbikes.com/routes/hilly-route
  

Development

ZwiftBikes is a Nuxt app, so the usual commands apply:

npm install        # install dependencies
npm run dev        # dev server on http://localhost:3000
npm run typecheck  # TypeScript checks
npm run lint       # add -- --fix to auto-fix
npm test           # vitest unit suite
npm run test:browser  # Playwright journeys through the dev server, see tests/browser/README.md
npm run build      # production build; npm run preview to serve it locally

Reporting bugs and wrong data

Use the Report an issue link in the footer of any page (or the "something here look wrong?" link under each results list) — it prefills the report for you and opens it as a GitHub issue (preferred) or an email. Corrections to frame, wheel or route numbers need a source (a ZwiftInsider speed test, an official changelog, another published test) — the numbers here trace back to measurements, not impressions.

Security issues go to private vulnerability reporting instead — see SECURITY.md. Full reporting details and maintainer guidelines live in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Not affiliated

ZwiftBikes is an unofficial fan project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Zwift, Inc. — Zwift is a trademark of Zwift, Inc. It is likewise not affiliated with ZwiftInsider, zwift-data, or zwiftmap; their publicly shared data is used with attribution and gratitude. The code is open source under the MIT license (LICENSE).