What Strava Club Challenges Get Right (and Where They Fall Short)

Strava is great. Strava clubs are fine. Strava club challenges are where things get awkward.

If you have ever tried to organize a real group challenge inside a Strava club, you have probably hit at least one of these walls.

What Strava clubs do well

• Easy to start, anyone with an account can make one
• Built-in feed, comments, and kudos
• Leaderboards for distance and time, rolling weekly
• Great for finding local groups and rides

For casual social use, Strava clubs are excellent. Nothing in this post argues against using them.

Where club challenges get frustrating

Everyone has to be on Strava

This is the big one. If three friends use Strava, two use Garmin Connect natively, and one prefers to log workouts manually, only the Strava three show up on the club leaderboard. The rest are invisible.

That is fine for a Strava community. It is not fine for a friend group. If your group spans devices, the Apple Watch vs Garmin vs Strava comparison walks through the wider problem.

Limited challenge formats

Club challenges are mostly distance and time. Want a streak challenge? A push-up count? A sleep consistency challenge? An elevation goal in meters? You are out of luck or stuck improvising in the comments. There are 27 challenge formats here that Strava clubs simply cannot run.

No custom goals or end dates

Strava runs its own monthly challenges with fixed goals. Club organizers cannot say "we as a group are going for 500 km by April 30." You can announce it in the club post, but the leaderboard will not enforce it.

Premium gates some features

Some leaderboard and segment features sit behind Strava subscriptions. That is reasonable for a business. It is annoying for a casual group challenge where one friend pays and the others do not.

What to do instead

You do not have to leave Strava. You just need a layer on top that:

• Pulls activities from whatever each person uses (Strava, Garmin, manual entry)
• Lets you pick any goal and any date range
• Shows everyone on one live leaderboard

That is what Meryus does. People keep using Strava or Garmin or paper. The challenge runs on top, and everyone sees the same scoreboard. We cover the full lineup in the best apps for group fitness challenges.

When Strava is still the right answer

• You only care about people who are on Strava
• You want segment leaderboards and local social features
• You want kudos, comments, and the feed experience

Use Strava for the social network. Use a real challenge tool when you actually want to run a challenge with mixed friends.

See it side by side

We wrote a longer feature comparison here: Strava Clubs vs Meryus. Or connect Strava to Meryus and keep using both.