Don't waste your money – these £500 smart trainers are good enough for 99% of riders

Smart trainers are cheaper and more accessible than ever, but, here in late 2025, the sweet spot for price, features and performance sits around the £500 or $600 mark.

With that in mind, I’ve put three of the key models around this price through my rigorous test protocol, to find out which ones are worth your hard-earned cash.

All that said, let’s introduce our three contenders.

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Contenders for the middle-weight crown

First up, we’ve got the JetBlack Victory.

Priced at just £399 / $399 / €449.95, it absolutely smoked the competition when it launched in 2024, with the best price to performance ratio of any smart trainer I’d ever tested.

Perhaps in response to JetBlack, Wahoo finally launched the Kickr Core 2 in September – the long-awaited successor to its influential mid-range direct drive smart trainer.

Given it costs £499.99 / $549.99 / €549.99 – around 25 per cent more than the Victory – it faces a tough challenge to retake its crown as the go-to pick in this segment of the market.

Lastly, we’ve got the Elite Rivo.

An update to the highly-rated, but ageing Suito, the Rivo borrows design cues from Elite’s flagship Justo smart trainer, but keeps the price competitive at just under £500 or €520.

Read more

• Elite Rivo review
• JetBlack Victory review
• Wahoo Kickr Core 2 review

Specifications

All three trainers have roughly comparable specs on paper, with each one claiming to provide enough performance to satisfy 99 per cent of riders.

As you’d expect in this day and age, they all use direct-drive (rather than wheel-on) designs, which see you remove the rear wheel from your bike and mount it directly to the trainer at the dropouts.

Both the JetBlack Victory and Wahoo Kickr Core 2 have maximum power ceilings of 1,800 watts and can simulate gradients of up to 16 per cent.

The Elite Rivo offers a little more on both fronts, with a maximum power ceiling of 2,100 watts and can simulate gradients up to 18 per cent.

All three offer Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity, although the Rivo drops ANT+ connectivity.

Where we see bigger differences on paper are with flywheel weight, overall weight and how easy they are to stow away after use.

The Rivo is the lightest of the three at just 10kg, and perhaps unsurprisingly also has the lightest flywheel at just 3.5kg. It also fold ups to be the most compact of the three, making it by far the easiest to store between rides if you don’t have a dedicated space to leave your bike setup and ready to ride.

The JetBlack Victory sits in the middle, with a 12.9kg overall weight and a 4.7kg flywheel, while the Wahoo Kickr Core 2 is the heaviest on both fronts, with an 18kg overall weight and a 5.4kg flywheel.

The Kickr Core 2 allows its front leg to be tucked into the body of the trainer slightly, but doesn’t get as compact as the Rivo.

The JetBlack Victory doesn’t feature folding legs, but it’s also fair to say it’s still a fairly small trainer all things considered.

It’s also worth noting that while the Rivo and Victory both have handles, the Kickr Core 2 doesn’t – so it’s noticeably more awkward to move it around, as there’s not really an ‘ideal’ way to hold onto it.

With all of these specs, though, knowing which features do and don’t matter is crucial to distinguishing between the strengths and weaknesses of these trainers.

Setup

Before we get onto performance, let’s quickly touch on setup.

It’s fair to say all three trainers will be easy to set up for experienced riders, but for those that aren’t, the Kickr Core 2 stands out for its colour-coded legs and axle adaptors guide.

The Victory also includes colour-coded legs, but you’ll have to get by without a guide for axle adaptors, while the Rivo doesn’t include either.

Again, I’ll stress that none of the three are difficult to set up – especially if you get one with a Zwift Cog, as that means you don’t need to worry about bike compatibility, for the most part – but beginners will likely find the Kickr Core 2 the most approachable.

Performance

With all of that out of the way, let’s talk about how they compare in use.

Connectivity

We’ll start with the connectivity options as while there’s little difference on paper, there are a few quirks with one of the trainers that complicates things in real life.

As noted earlier, all three trainers offer WiFi connectivity, which means they can automatically keep their firmware up to date, and you get a potentially stronger and more stable connection to whatever indoor cycling app you’re using.

Unfortunately, the Elite Rivo can only use virtual shifting over Bluetooth, so if you get one with Zwift Cog and Click controllers then you won’t be able to use a WiFi connection for riding.

Annoyingly, this means missing out on the faster data transfer speeds – often referred to as ‘Race Mode’ – that you can get over WiFi with the Rivo.

In contrast, both the Victory and Kickr Core 2 support virtual shifting and Race Mode over both WiFi and Bluetooth.

Of course, if you’re using a standard bike cassette rather than the Zwift Cog then this won’t be an issue, but it’s worth noting if the Cog is a key feature for you.

Ride feel

In terms of ride feel, there’s a clear hierarchy for me, with the Kickr Core 2 being the winner.

It’s fair to say the Victory doesn’t lag far behind, and you might not even notice a difference if you were blindfolded, but there is a clear step down with the Elite Rivo.

While there’s more to a trainer’s ride feel than flywheel weight alone, it’s telling that the fluidity through the pedals does seem directly linked to it.

The Rivo, for example, with its lighter, 3.5kg flywheel, simply feels slightly choppier and less realistic through the pedals than the other two trainers.

Given it’s so light, it’s also more prone to moving about underneath you during sprints than the other two, while the Kickr Core 2’s greater heft means it tends to be the most planted.

It’s a similar story in terms of ERG mode performance, with the Kickr Core 2 and Victory being able to hold the most consistent power levels – in that order – and the Rivo a little further behind.

It’s worth pointing out that ERG mode performance is typically better on higher end smart trainers such as the Wahoo Kickr V6 or Tacx Neo 3M – so if you’re really into structured workouts, it might be worth saving up for one of those instead.

In any case, I think most riders would be happy with the ride feel on offer with all three trainers, although when push comes to shove, the Victory and Kickr Core 2 are a step above the Rivo.

Noise

Before we move on to data accuracy, let’s cover noise.

In the past, noise used to be an area where you’d see big differences between indoor trainers, but nowadays the differences tend to be so small as to basically not matter.

Recording the noise levels with a decibel meter app on my phone showed that all three produce similar noise levels of around 60 to 65 decibels during normal use, which isn’t particularly loud.

Much of that also comes from drivetrain noise, so it’s fair to say that once you’ve some headphones in and a big fan running to keep you cool you basically can’t hear them at all.

The Zwift Cog also helps in this respect as virtual gear changes are silent, whereas changing gears on a normal cassette can actually be quite noisy.

Data accuracy

Given most indoor cycling apps rely on power data to translate your efforts into actions on-screen, having a trainer that provides an accurate representation of your power output is absolutely crucial.

On paper, all three should be similar thanks to their +/- 2 or 2.5 per cent error bands, but we actually see some important differences between the three models here too.

For a start, both the Kickr Core 2 and JetBlack Victory feature automatic calibration functions that help keep the data in check as you ride.

In contrast, you’ll need to do manual spin-down calibrations with the Elite Rivo, and only after 10 minutes of riding to give all of its internal parts a chance to come up to the right operating temperature.

As with the ride feel, the Kickr Core 2 comes out on top here, producing impressively accurate power and cadence data throughout testing.

Notably, it even matched my on-bike power meters a little more closely than the outgoing Kickr Core – which tended to read just a few watts higher than my power meters. You’d normally expect the opposite, given it’s further downstream and subject to drivetrain losses.

Wahoo hasn’t said it’s made any specific changes to the Kickr Core 2’s hardware to achieve this improvement, but I noted that Shane Millar (also known as GP Lama on YouTube), said in his review that Wahoo is now factoring in drivetrain losses as part of its calibrations – so that likely explains it.

The JetBlack Victory was also solid overall, matching my power meters well. As noted in my in-depth review, I saw some instances where the Victory would track a bit low at the beginning of rides, but this always sorted itself out after about 10 minutes of riding.

Unfortunately, I found the Elite Rivo didn’t live up to my expectations in this area.

It generally tracked well with my power meters at lower efforts, but tended to noticeably under-report during sprints – often missing the peak snaps of power.

I also saw some drift that didn’t stabilise during the rides – starting low, for example, but then ending up a little too high towards the end of a ride.

As with the ride feel bit, the numbers weren’t a million miles off – and a few years ago this would have been close-enough for me to say “it’s fine for a smart trainer at this price”.

Nowadays, though, it’s just not quite good enough given the available competition.

If you’ve got a power meter on your bike, you can link that to the Rivo and have it transmit that data in place of its own, which can effectively be a workaround for these issues… But obviously not everyone will have a power meter – and, to be frank, that just feels like papering over cracks that shouldn’t exist on a smart trainer in late 2025.

Bottom line

If you’ve made it this far then thanks for reading, and let’s give you that all important answer as to what is the best smart trainer for under £500 or $600.

In terms of pure performance, the Wahoo Kickr Core 2 edges it.

It has the best ride feel, all the right features and produced the most accurate and consistent data of the three trainers during testing. The only thing it lacks is a handle.

So that’s the one to get, right? Possibly, but it’s also difficult to ignore how good the JetBlack Victory is for £100 / $150 / €100 less.

The performance is so close to the Kickr Core 2 in every area, that it’s hard to justify spending that extra money.

As was the case when I reviewed the Victory back in 2024, though, the major ‘problem’ is the fact that JetBlack lacks the same distribution network that Wahoo has, so it’s therefore slightly trickier to get hold of one.

As you’ve likely guessed, it’s tougher to recommend the Elite Rivo.

It’s not that it’s a bad smart trainer, it’s more that the competition has taken tangible steps forward while the Rivo has stood relatively still.

Even if you’ve got a great power meter to get around the accuracy issues, the relatively poor ride feel and fact you can only use virtual shifting over Bluetooth, and not WiFi, would be more than enough to sway me towards one of the other two trainers.

• I’ve tested 20 smart trainers and these are the three I’d buy for Zwift