Best cycling weather apps: the forecast for the ride, and the day to ride

Cyclists care about weather more precisely than almost anyone: wind direction along a route, rain at the far end of it, the temperature at seven in the morning rather than at three in the afternoon. The apps built for that are good. Here is what the best-known one does, in its own words, and where Perfect Day fits beside it.

Updated 16 September 2026.

Epic Ride Weather: the forecast along the route

Epic Ride Weather's promise is on its front page: Ride in the Best Weather, Every Time, so that you can make confident decisions about when to ride, what to wear, and which route to take (epicrideweather.com, read 16 September 2026). The idea is a forecast for the ride rather than for a place: you give it a route and a start time and it tells you what the weather will be at each point along it as you get there, wind included. For a long ride, or a planned one, nothing that forecasts a single spot can match that. Its site did not state a price on the day we checked, so we will not guess one.

There are other cycling weather apps — several roundups list half a dozen — and we have not read their pages ourselves for this article, so we do not describe them here. If one of them is yours, the comparison below applies to it too, because the difference is not between apps but between two jobs.

Two different jobs

A route-weather app answers: I am riding on Saturday at eight; what will it be like? That is the question once you have decided to ride.

Perfect Day answers the question before it: which morning this week is the one to ride? You describe a good ride once — for most people something like 50° to 80°, wind under 10 mph and gusts under 16, rain chance under 15%, at least three of those hours in a row between 6 and 11 — and it watches the next sixteen days, every three hours, across five weather models. When a morning in the next ten qualifies, you get one message naming the hours. If the forecast turns and it falls through, you get one more. Most weeks, it is silent. $5 a year after a free month.

Used together the order is obvious: Perfect Day says Thursday morning is the one; the route app tells you what Thursday morning will feel like at mile thirty and which way to go round the loop.

Side by side

Descriptions are from the company's own page on 16 September 2026; we recheck quarterly. Perfect Day makes this page.

Who you'll bring

The ride you will remember is the Sunday one with the person who is slower than you, on the still bright morning when the wind never came, to the café that was open. Those mornings are not rare; they are unannounced. Perfect Day's job is to announce them. For couples · For families · How far ahead you can trust the forecast.