Comparison

Bicycle Radar vs CycleHUD

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Bicycle Radar

Features
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Bicycle Radar turns your iPhone into a rear-view safety radar for your bike. Mount your phone facing backward, start a ride, and on-device AI watches the road behind you. When a car or truck approaches, you get a clear audio alert and vibration, so you can keep your eyes ahead. WHY CYCLISTS USE IT - Real-time vehicle detection with your phone's camera, no extra hardware to buy - Audio and vibration alerts tuned for approaching vehicles, so you never need to look at the screen while riding - Distance and speed estimates for detected vehicles - Ride recording: save videos of your rides, with detection overlays, to your photo library - Ride stats: speed and location tracked on your device during rides TRY IT BEFORE YOU RIDE The built-in demo plays a real traffic clip through the live detector, so you can see exactly how detection and alerts work before mounting your phone. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Everything runs on your device. No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no ads. Camera frames are analyzed in real time and never uploaded. Your location is used only to measure your speed during rides and never leaves your phone. Your ride videos belong to you. IN FOUR LANGUAGES English, Spanish, French, and Latvian. A NOTE ON SAFETY Bicycle Radar is an assistive tool. It does not replace mirrors, lights, a helmet, or your own attention to the road. Always ride according to local traffic laws.

About

CycleHUD

Features
Read full description

CycleHUD turns your rear radar into a clear, glanceable heads-up display — and now a quiet-roads navigator and a racing partner too. Always know what's coming up behind you, where you're going, and how you compare with your best, without taking your eyes off the road. EYES BEHIND YOU Vehicles approaching from behind appear on a clean perspective lane, nearest at the top, and the whole panel glows amber to red as a car closes in. A green "Clear" shows when the road behind is empty. Pair an Apple Watch and you'll feel it too: a tap for each new vehicle, faster as it nears, and a distinct buzz if the radar ever drops out. After the ride, every vehicle that passed you is pinned on your route map with its distance and speed. ROUTES ON QUIET ROADS Plan a ride by tapping a start and waypoints on a map — the path snaps to quiet roads and cycle paths, looping back to the start or finishing wherever you choose. While the road behind is clear, the radar panel becomes a live street map: your route ahead, live traffic and closures, the whole ride's elevation profile with the gradient coming up, and the next junction's real layout counting down — with the turn your route takes glowing green. Spoken turn alerts and wrist taps call each bend. Pick a route from across town and CycleHUD plots a lead-in to the start. The moment a vehicle appears behind you, the radar takes the screen back. Routes share as plain GPX and import from anywhere — Strava, Komoot, RideWithGPS, a friend's export. RACE YOUR GHOST Complete a route once and that run becomes its best. Every ride after is a race: a live ahead/behind readout and a ghost marker riding the map beside you. Beat it and the new run takes over. Ghosts travel inside shared GPX files, so you can race a friend's best — or import any recorded ride and chase it. BUILT FOR THE RIDE - Live metrics on customisable, swipeable tile pages: speed, cadence, heart rate, ascent, live gradient, wind (as headwind or tailwind), compass, rain nowcast and more - Every ride saved as an Apple Health workout, with a post-ride effort rating for Health's training load (iOS 18+) - Ride summaries with graphs you can scrub, laps, and your previous bests over the same stretches of road - Optional crash detection: a hard impact followed by a stop starts an SOS countdown on the phone AND your watch — dismiss it or call your emergency contact straight from the wrist - Heart-rate warning that flashes the display and buzzes your wrist - iCloud sync: rides, routes and ghosts back up to your own iCloud and follow you to a new phone - Light, dark and Cyberpunk themes, a digital-dash font, and a fixed-landscape layout for your handlebars WORKS WITH YOUR SENSORS Built around the Coospo TR70 rear radar, and also works with Garmin Varia-compatible radars, standard Bluetooth speed and cadence sensors and heart-rate straps. Speed falls back to GPS when no sensor is connected. PRIVATE BY DESIGN No accounts. No servers. No tracking, ads or analytics. Your data lives on your device, in Apple Health and in your own iCloud — all under your control. The optional routing and junction features fetch open road data (OpenStreetMap, BRouter) and say so plainly in Settings. CycleHUD is a focused, no-nonsense tool made by a rider who wanted exactly this, and nothing more.

Screenshots

Bicycle Radar4 screens
CycleHUD4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is update cadence: CycleHUD at every 10 days against Bicycle Radar's every 16 months. Bicycle Radar's advantage is iOS requirement (13.0 vs 17.0). On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Bicycle Radar ships an update every 16 months, CycleHUD every 10 days. The most recent releases landed on October 18, 2026 and September 29, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard2 real differences · 4 level
Bicycle Radar versus CycleHUD: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterBicycle RadarCycleHUD
PriceFreeFree
Update frequencyEvery 16 monthsEvery 10 days — better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
DevicesiPhone, iPad, iPod — betteriPhone, Apple Watch
Requires iOS13.0 — better17.0
Further details — not scored
Size76 MB7 MB
Age rating4+4+
Developercraig merryCarly Robinson

In-app purchases

None

Bicycle Radar

No in-app purchases

None

CycleHUD

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Bicycle Radar free?
Bicycle Radar is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is CycleHUD free?
CycleHUD is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Bicycle Radar or CycleHUD have ads?
Neither Bicycle Radar nor CycleHUD shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Bicycle Radar or CycleHUD?
Bicycle Radar ships an update every 16 months, and CycleHUD every 10 days. Most recently, Bicycle Radar was updated on October 18, 2026 and CycleHUD on September 29, 2026.

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