Coopah vs Runna vs Zonna: an honest comparison
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If you're choosing between Coopah and Runna, the short answer is Coopah for a London Marathon Events race specifically, Runna for almost everyone else who wants a well-funded, polished coaching app on either iOS or Android. I built Zonna, and it's the right answer for a narrower group: iPhone-only runners who don't want streaks, badges or a feed attached to their training. This page covers all three honestly, including where mine comes last.
The comparison
| Coopah | Runna | Zonna | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | £14.99/month or £119.99/year | £15.99/month or £99.99/year | £7.99/month or £59.99/year |
| Platforms | iOS, Android | iOS, Android | iOS only |
| Plan adapts to your training | Yes | Yes | Yes (free tier rule-based, paid tier AI-enriched) |
| Watch sync | Apple Watch, Garmin, Coros, Polar | Apple Watch, Garmin, Fitbit, Coros | None. No Garmin workout export |
| Streaks, badges, social feed | None advertised | None in the app itself, but bundled into Strava's kudos and segments if you link the two | None. No feed at all |
| Who builds it | VC-backed team, roughly £1.5m raised | Strava's engineering team, since the 2025 acquisition | One person |
| Free tier | One week trial, no ongoing free plan | Seven day trial, no ongoing free plan | Genuine free tier: a full plan, not a demo |
Coopah
Coopah is the official training app of London Marathon Events, which covers the TCS London Marathon, the Brighton Marathon, the Big Half and the Vitality London 10,000. If you're running one of those, that partnership is worth something real: taper timing built around the actual event, event-specific messaging, and a discount code through the race itself.
Outside of an LME event, the case for Coopah is the coaching, not the badge on the app. It leans on 24/7 coach access, AI-generated answers plus real human coaches, and a weekly report that breaks down what you actually did against what was planned. That's a genuinely different product shape to Runna or Zonna, closer to a human coach with software wrapped around it than an adaptive plan generator on its own.
It costs £14.99 a month, or £119.99 a year if you pay upfront. It runs on iOS and Android, and syncs with Apple Watch, Garmin, Coros and Polar. The free trial is a week. I haven't trained on it myself, so I won't invent an opinion on how the coaching logic behaves week to week. What I can tell you is the size of the operation behind it: roughly £1.5m in seed funding, a real team, and an official race partnership that neither Runna nor Zonna has.
Runna
Runna is the biggest app in this category and it earned that position. The plans are well regarded, it runs on iOS and Android, it syncs with Apple Watch, Garmin, Fitbit and Coros, and the plan genuinely adapts as you log runs rather than staying fixed from day one.
Strava announced its acquisition of Runna in 2025 and the deal has closed. Runna says it's staying a standalone app "for the foreseeable future," and you can still buy a Runna subscription on its own without touching Strava at all. But the two are now one company, and if you link them, Runna's training sits next to Strava's kudos, segments, leaderboards and Local Legend badges. If you'd rather keep your coach and your social feed in separate apps, that's worth knowing before you commit.
It costs £15.99 a month, or £99.99 a year paid upfront, making it the most expensive per month of the three. For most people choosing a first coaching app, on either platform, with the most development resource behind it, Runna is still the safe recommendation. I said the same thing on the alternatives page I wrote before this one, and nothing here changes that.
Zonna
Mine. £7.99 a month, or £59.99 a year, and the free tier is a genuine free tier: a full plan, not a seven-day trial that expires into a paywall. No streaks, no badges, no leaderboards, no feed of any kind. The whole app is built around telling you when to hold back, because I ran a 100km race in July, went out too hard on the descents because nothing was telling me to stop, and walked the last 40km of it.
It's iOS only, iPhone and Apple Silicon Mac, nothing on Android, so if you're comparing three apps because you're on Android, Zonna was never in this race. There's no Garmin workout export either. If you live on a Garmin watch and want sessions pushed to it automatically, that's a real gap, not a small one, and both Coopah and Runna do this natively. And it's built by one person working around a full-time contracting job, so feature development moves slower than either of the other two, both of which have funded teams behind them.
Which one
Training for the TCS London Marathon, Brighton Marathon, the Big Half or the Vitality London 10,000: Coopah, for the event partnership alone. Want the most established app, the widest platform support and don't mind Strava owning the company behind it: Runna, still the default answer for most runners in this category.
Zonna is the narrow case. iPhone only, no interest in a training app that also wants to be a social feed, and you've already worked out, or you're about to, that the thing that ends most people's races isn't a lack of fitness. It's not knowing when to hold back. If that's you, my free plans are there to try before you pay anyone anything, mine included.
Written by Russ Shear, who built Zonna after running 100km in July 2026 and walking the last 40 of it.