Hydrow V Peloton
After dealing with Hydrow customer service I changed my review to one star from three. Reasons follow in the Customer service paragraphs. We purchased the Hydrow with only the Peloton row as competition. We like the online classes vs the gamified experience of others. There are a couple of areas where Hydrow shines over the Peloton (we have the Peloton bike and about 4 years of experience). First, there is a place where we live that will work on the rower if something happens. Our experiences with Peloton customer service is probably the worst of any company I have ever worked with. We were once unable to use our bike for about 4 months. They also refused to even sell us a rower. We live in an "unsupported" area even though they support the bike here. They did not even care if we arranged for shipping. We did find a way around it and almost bought anyway. Just a horrible company in our experience. Hydrow has a local retailer that has a good reputation. Hydrow also has a larger library of workouts. The Hydrow rower has a great reputation for sturdiness and longevity. Peloton now has a list of "acceptable" sounds the machine makes. Evidently it is very quite when new but many people report loud noises and the list on the Peloton site has some irritating "acceptable" sounds. The Hydrow is heavier and feels stout even to me as a strong 220lb rower. The Peloton online and app experience is far superior to Hydrow. I cannot even get on the Hydrow app. It keeps telling me I have the wrong password, I change it, and it repeats the message. I even changed it to a super simple old password I have used so I knew I did not put it in wrong. I finally did get the app to come up but it did not connect to my account. In my short experience it is terrible. It turns out it did connect to my account. It just made me try to reenter all my data again. Hydrow got back to me on my issues. They make customer reenter all their information to make it a better customer experience according to them. Huh? One has to reenter their date of birth. There is no option to simply type in that date. Instead, the arrow going back month to month has to be clicked in order to enter a birthdate. That's over 720 clicks for me. They also just sent me a reply that said I did not have to reenter my data to use the app. When I open the app I am given no options other than to enter my data. One button option one several screens (I did not go beyond the screen requiring me to click over 720 times). Im not sure customer service has ever used their own app. I guess I have the option of putting my birthdate as today. There is no online list of Hydrow classes. The app has to be used and evidently that is not something available to me. Peloton allows me to make a list of classes I want to take in a session online, or the app, then the list shows up on the machine. For us, on the Hydrow we have to get on the machine and do the search for what class we want. No ability to create a list that goes from desired class to desired class. I much prefer planning a workout ahead of time and then doing the workout (with warm ups, cool downs, and stretching included). The Peloton experience is far superior in this regard. Peloton classes allow me to skip the intros. Hydrow does not or at least we have not found out how to do it. I rarely find the intros necessary or helpful and would prefer not to sit and wait for a minute or more. A warning is in order. I have ben on Peloton for years and have become comfortable with the experience. That may too come to pass for Hydrow. For now I prefer Peloton in this regard. Overall we chose the Hydrow due to Peloton's nightmare customer service and seemingly better long term rower. The cost was another monthly fee. Seems worth it so far.