WKO5 Is Not A Platform, And That Changes The Question

Every other comparison on this site puts two platforms side by side. This one cannot, because WKO5 is not one.

In TrainingPeaks’ own words, WKO5 is a desktop based in-depth custom analysis app. It is a piece of software you install on a PC or a Mac, which reads data out of a TrainingPeaks account and lets you interrogate it far more deeply than TrainingPeaks itself allows. It does not prescribe training. It does not talk to your athletes. It is not where they log in. It is the machine a coach goes to when the platform they already pay for cannot answer the question.

So the honest framing is not Vekta versus WKO5. It is whether the analysis WKO5 sells as an add-on should be something you buy separately at all.

That means two things follow. First, a fair comparison has to acknowledge that WKO5 does some things Vekta does not attempt. Second, the cost of WKO5 is never $169 on its own — it is $169 plus whatever you are already paying underneath it.

What The $169 Actually Buys

It buys the reference implementation of power-duration modelling, and it is worth being clear that this is not a marketing claim we are grudgingly conceding. It is the foundation.

The Power-Duration Model produces modelled FTP, Functional Reserve Capacity, dynamic FRC, time to exhaustion and maximal power, and gives what TrainingPeaks describes as a full 360-degree view of an athlete’s physiology. Coggan iLevels set training targets from that physiology rather than from percentages of a threshold, which is a better idea than the zone systems most platforms still ship, and they now extend to running. Smart Segments let you capture any climb, lap or segment and compare it against years of your own history.

Then there is the expression language. WKO5 lets you write your own metrics and build your own charts against a published reference, and if you can specify the question precisely, WKO can usually answer it.

Nothing in Vekta comes close to that, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

A generation of coaches learned power analysis inside WKO. Anyone dismissing it has not used it.

The Same Modelling, Without The Purchase

Here is where the argument actually sits.

Vekta is built on Critical Power, W′, D′ and Pmax, and they are not an analysis layer bolted on top. They are the foundation the entire platform reads from. Zone generation reads them. Interval classification reads them. Durability reads them. The carbohydrate target on every session reads them. When the model moves, all of it moves.

That modelling is included. There is no separate purchase, no second application, and no version to upgrade. A coach account is free at any roster size.

For a coach currently running TrainingPeaks and WKO5 together, the analytical depth they bought WKO for is standard in Vekta. That is the whole of the argument, and it does not need dressing up.

A Word About What This Costs

We are not going to claim Vekta is cheaper, because depending on your roster it may not be.

WKO5 is $169 once, with no subscription, and one licence covers your entire roster — you enter your TrainingPeaks coach login and every athlete pulls in. That is genuinely good value for the analysis it provides. TrainingPeaks charges the coach separately for athletes underneath it, and Vekta’s athlete seats are €19.99 a month or €179.99 a year with a free coach account, so the two stacks land in a similar place and the arithmetic depends on how many athletes you carry and who pays for them.

The difference is not the invoice. It is what arrives for it.

You Are Still Paying For TrainingPeaks

This is the part that gets lost when WKO5 is described as a one-off purchase.

WKO reads its data out of a TrainingPeaks account. TrainingPeaks’ own guidance is that new users should start with a basic TrainingPeaks account first, and a coach enters their TrainingPeaks coach login into WKO to pull their athletes in. The $169 is not the cost of the analysis. It is the cost of the analysis layer that sits on top of a subscription you are already paying, which is its own comparison — we cover it in Vekta versus TrainingPeaks.

That also means the ceiling is set somewhere else. WKO can only analyse what reached TrainingPeaks, in the form TrainingPeaks stored it. If a data channel does not survive that journey, no amount of custom charting recovers it.

Vekta pulls raw data directly from the device source — Garmin, Wahoo, Hammerhead, COROS, Zwift and Stryd — specifically to preserve the precision of power, cadence and torque that the model depends on. It does not integrate with aggregators by design, because they process and smooth FIT data before passing it downstream. Streams reach further as a result: Left/Right Power Balance, Heat Strain Index from CORE, respiratory data from Tymewear, skin temperature.

One stack analyses a copy. The other reads the original.

One Machine

WKO5 runs on a PC or a Mac. TrainingPeaks state plainly that download and purchase are not available on mobile devices. There is no web version and no app.

For deep analysis at a desk that is not a problem, and the offline capability is a genuine advantage — WKO works on a plane, in a team car with no signal, or anywhere the connection is unreliable, with your data on your own machine as well as in the cloud.

It becomes a problem the moment the question arrives somewhere else. An athlete messages on a Tuesday evening asking whether to do tomorrow’s session. A rider calls from a training camp. Something looks wrong in a file and you are not at your desk. WKO cannot help with any of that, because WKO is at home.

Vekta runs on the web and as a native app on iOS and Android. Sessions can be created and edited on the phone, including by voice. Streams, peaks, durability and comparison are all there. Coaches move between athletes and see the same data they see on desktop.

It Knows What You Last Synced

This is a subtler difference than the platform question and it matters more over a season.

WKO5 pulls from TrainingPeaks. The model in front of you reflects the last time you synced, and the analysis is something you go and perform — open the application, pull the data, build or open the chart, read it, draw a conclusion.

Vekta recomputes on its own. Critical Power, W′, D′ and Pmax update daily from training as it arrives. Cycling and running zones regenerate from those values without anybody asking. Every session produces a written summary delivered to coach and athlete, with intervals already detected by reading duration, power relative to that athlete’s CP, cadence and torque together, then classified by intensity type against their own physiology. Races are detected and classified automatically.

WKO answers questions you thought to ask. Vekta surfaces the ones you did not.

Neither is strictly better. One rewards a coach with the time and the expertise to interrogate data properly. The other assumes the time is the scarce resource.

iLevels, And What Replaces Them

Coggan iLevels are one of the better ideas in the sport and they deserve saying so plainly.

Instead of setting zones as percentages of a threshold — which assumes every athlete’s physiology has the same shape — iLevels derive training targets from that athlete’s own power-duration curve. Two riders with identical FTPs get different targets, because they are different riders. WKO5 has now extended iLevels to running.

Vekta arrives at the same objection from the other direction. Zones are generated from Critical Power, W′, D′ and Pmax rather than from percentages, so they are individual by construction, and they regenerate daily as those values move. Cycling and running both. No test, and nothing to recalculate.

The difference is not the philosophy, which is shared. It is what happens between analyses. iLevels update when the model updates, and the model updates when you sync and rerun it. Vekta’s zones are simply correct on any given morning, because nothing had to be triggered for them to be.

Climbs, Segments And Simulation

Smart Segments are one of WKO5’s best features. You capture a segment, a lap or a climb, and compare that effort against your own history on it, over years. For a coach preparing an athlete for a specific course it is exactly the right tool, and the custom metrics you have built can be run against it.

Vekta covers the same ground differently, and in one respect goes further.

Climbs are a first-class interval source rather than something you capture. Vekta scans elevation and grade to find continuous ascents on their own — sustained positive grade, meaningful elevation gain, limited downhill interruptions — and turns each one into an interval with a clear start and end. It is built precisely for pacing review on long climbs and for comparing repeated climbs across different days, and nobody has to remember to define the segment first. Alongside it sit AI-detected intervals and device laps, so the same file can be read three ways.

Session Comparison then uses a proprietary similarity score to retrieve the most relevant past sessions and display them side by side, rather than waiting for a coach to decide which effort was the comparable one.

Where Vekta goes further is forwards.

The Climbing Calculator simulates an ascent from the athlete’s own physiology and real physics: Critical Power, W′ and maximal power, system weight, gradient, rolling resistance, air density, frontal area and drag coefficient. It runs in both directions — the fastest time available from an athlete’s current CP, or the power required to hit a target time — and it can be pointed at Alpe d’Huez, Ventoux, the Galibier or the Tourmalet before anyone has ridden them.

Smart Segments tell you what happened on that climb. The Climbing Calculator tells you what would need to happen next time, and what changing weight, position or conditions would do to it. Those are different questions and WKO does not answer the second one.

The honest boundary is scope. WKO’s segments are arbitrary — any stretch of any ride, with your own metrics applied to it. Vekta’s automatic climb detection is climbs, and currently cycling only. If you need to compare a flat ten-minute section of a specific road across three seasons with a metric you wrote yourself, WKO does that and Vekta does not.

What Vekta Does That WKO Does Not Attempt

It would be unfair to hold WKO5 to standards it never set out to meet, so this section is about scope rather than quality.

WKO5 is an analysis application. It does not prescribe workouts, and it does not push them to devices. It has no chat, so the conversation with the athlete happens elsewhere. Athletes can buy WKO themselves, and some analytical ones do, but it is not a shared space: your athletes do not log into your copy, and whatever you find in it has to be carried somewhere else to be acted on.

Vekta closes that loop. Sessions are built from a plain-language description or by voice, and push to Garmin, Wahoo, Hammerhead, COROS and Zwift. Carbohydrate targets are calculated per session from that athlete’s Volume and Intensity and appear on the workout before they start. Chat sits inside session analysis so the conversation happens next to the data it is about. Recovery comes in from WHOOP, Oura, Tymewear and CORE Body Temperature and surfaces at roster level alongside load, sleep, HRV and resting heart rate.

The coach dashboard is the clearest expression of the difference. WKO shows you one athlete at a time, chosen from a dropdown. Vekta shows you all of them, with the ones who need attention surfaced by their own data.

You Have To Be The Analyst

WKO5 has the highest ceiling of any tool in endurance sport. Reaching it requires two separate skills, and most coaches have one of them at best.

The first is physiological. To get an answer out of WKO you have to know what to ask — which relationship matters, over what duration, against what baseline, for this athlete. The software will not suggest the question. The second is technical. WKO’s expression language is a programming language with a published reference, and building a custom chart means writing the expression that produces it. That is not a metaphor. You are writing code against your athlete’s data.

The clearest evidence of this is that learning WKO is itself accredited professional development.

The $169 purchase comes bundled with the WKO Education Center. There is a dedicated online course, Coaching and Training with WKO5. TrainingPeaks University runs courses carrying CEUs toward TrainingPeaks Certification. Fast Talk Labs runs an Advanced Performance Data Analysis pathway. WKO product lead Tim Cusick and the software’s architect Kevin Williams teach a two-part webinar series built specifically for WKO5 users, and coaches earn two continuing education credits with USA Cycling for attending it.

You can earn professional credits for learning to operate the software. That is a remarkable statement about a piece of software, and it is not one anybody could make about a tool you can simply pick up.

It cuts both ways, and it would be dishonest to use it only as evidence of difficulty. Those credits have real professional value — a coach maintaining a certification needs them, and TrainingPeaks University and Fast Talk Labs turn learning WKO into something that advances a career rather than only a workflow. Vekta has no accredited education programme and no certification. Our support articles explain Critical Power, W′, Volume and Intensity and the load model in genuine depth, but depth is not accreditation, and if CEUs matter to you that is a point for WKO.

There is a second tell. Search for WKO charts and you will find coaches publishing their favourites for other coaches to copy — whole articles built around three or four dashboards somebody else designed. That is what a community does when the ceiling is real but out of reach for most of the people underneath it. The majority of WKO users are working from charts they did not build and, in many cases, could not.

None of this is a design flaw. It is what a tool built for expert analysts looks like, and the people who reach the ceiling get something no other platform in the sport offers. But it is worth being honest about who that is. A coach with thirty athletes, a Monday morning and no background in data analysis is not going to write expressions. They are going to open somebody else’s chart and hope it answers the question.

Vekta makes the opposite trade, deliberately and with a cost attached. There is no expression language and no custom charting. The platform decides what to put in front of you, using standard vocabulary — Critical Power, W′, Pmax, VO2max, zones, peak power — that means what the field means by it. A coach is productive on the first morning without a course, a certification or a webinar.

What you lose is the ceiling. If you are the coach who reaches WKO’s, Vekta will frustrate you, and we would rather you knew that before you moved than after.

Seven Years, And A New Owner

WKO5 was released in 2019. As of September 2026 there is no WKO6, and no successor has been announced.

That is not automatically a criticism. Mature software that does its job does not need replacing on a schedule, and WKO5 has been maintained rather than abandoned. But seven years is a long time in a field where the science has not stood still, and it is reasonable for a coach to ask what the next seven look like.

There is now a second reason to ask. In July 2026, Garmin acquired TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic. WKO sits inside that portfolio, and what a hardware company chooses to do with a desktop analysis application aimed at a small population of expert coaches is not yet knowable.

We are not going to speculate about it, and nobody honest can tell you the answer today.

What we can say is what our own record looks like: 80 new features between January and August 2026, across 23 releases, roughly nine days apart, published openly.

For Coaches

This is a coach’s decision more than an athlete’s, because WKO is not somewhere your athletes log in.

If your bottleneck is analytical depth on a specific question — you want a chart nobody else has, you are investigating something unusual, you work with a handful of athletes and enjoy the interrogation — WKO5 is superb and $169 is not much to pay for it.

If your bottleneck is volume, the calculation changes. Thirty athletes at four or five sessions a week is well over a hundred files. WKO will let you analyse any one of them beautifully. It will not tell you which one to open. Vekta reads all of them, writes a summary for each, classifies the intervals, flags the races and surfaces the athletes who need you, and it does that on a phone as readily as a desktop.

A Vekta coach account is free at any roster size, so the comparison can be run in parallel with what you have rather than instead of it.

For Athletes

Most athletes reading this will not have used WKO5, and that is largely the point — it is built for coaches and expert analysts. There is a downloadable trial, so you can find out before paying.

If you are self-coached, analytical, and you want the deepest possible look at your own power data, WKO5 is a legitimate purchase and the power-duration model behind it is excellent. You will need a TrainingPeaks account underneath it and you will be doing the analysis at a desk.

Vekta gives an athlete the modelling without the second application: Critical Power, W′, durability in every session, W′ Balance, peaks, trophies and a written summary after every ride, on the phone. An athlete seat is €19.99 a month or €179.99 a year with a 14-day trial. If what you want is to write your own metrics, WKO is the better answer and it always will be.

If You Decide To Move

There is no export, and nothing to rebuild.

Athletes connect their device accounts directly — Garmin, Wahoo, Hammerhead, COROS, Zwift, Stryd — and history imports on its own with the performance context intact. Because Vekta reads from the device source rather than an aggregator, what arrives is the raw file rather than a processed copy.

Critical Power, W′ and the zones that follow are computed from that history rather than carried across as settings, so there is nothing to transfer and no test to sit before the platform is useful. If you have years of modelling in WKO, the underlying data that produced it is what Vekta reads.

A coach account is free, so a roster can be built and populated before anyone commits. The 14-day trial covers every athlete on it.

Who Should Stay On WKO5

Coaches who write their own metrics. That is the honest answer.

If the expression language is part of how you work, if you have charts you have refined over years, if Smart Segments are how you track a rider on a specific climb, or if you need to analyse offline, WKO5 does things Vekta does not and there is no version of this page where that stops being true.

It is also the right answer if your roster is small and the analysis is the enjoyable part. A one-off $169 for the best power-duration modelling in the sport is a reasonable trade, and we would rather say so than pretend the choice is obvious.

Where Vekta earns the difference is when the analysis needs to happen a hundred times a week, arrive without being requested, reach an athlete’s phone, and turn into a prescribed session with a fuelling target on it — all in the place where the coaching actually happens.

Still Weighing It Up?

This page compares two platforms. If you are earlier than that and still drawing up a shortlist, we have reviewed every credible WKO5 alternative — including the ones that beat us — with 2026 pricing for each: WKO5 alternatives.