Chatbooks vs Skoma

Chatbooks does automatic photo books for everyday life. It turns your camera roll into small books on a subscription. For a rolling record of family life, it works well.

Skoma automates something different, and just once. It builds a single volume of a whole training block and race from your Strava data: the arc, the numbers, the maps and your photos. You get a hardcover you own outright, with no subscription.

How they compare

Two kinds of automatic

Chatbooks automates the habit. Photos from your phone flow into a book every month, and the subscription can be paused or cancelled. It also sells one-off books if you don’t want the series.

Skoma automates one project. You choose a training period, say the 16 weeks before a marathon, and the race at the end. Skoma reads those activities from Strava and builds the draft around them. When you have ordered it, that’s it. Nothing renews.

Example: a year with a marathon in it

In a Chatbooks series, marathon season is spread over four or five monthly books. Race day sits between birthday photos and the school run. That is a fair picture of your life, and that is the point of it.

A Skoma book pulls those months out into one volume. Each month gets a calendar of runs and its weekly average distance, so the build shows. Race day gets the course map, splits and finish time next to the photos.

Plenty of people would want both, and they don’t compete for the same shelf.

What Chatbooks is better at

Volume and routine. If you take hundreds of photos a month and never get round to printing them, a subscription that does it for you is the right tool. Skoma can’t help with that.

Price per book is also lower for small everyday books. A Skoma hardcover is a single, larger purchase.

Limits on the Skoma side

Skoma needs training data to be useful: Strava, GPX or FIT files, or activities you add by hand. It prints hardcovers only, from $49.99 for 50 pages. It is not built for non-sport photo books.

Paying once versus paying monthly

A subscription spreads the cost. Each monthly book is small, and the total over a year depends on how many you keep.

A Skoma book is one payment. In the US a 50-page book is $49.99, and a 60-page book is $59.89. Shipping is included worldwide. Designing it costs nothing, so you can build the whole book and decide at the end.

From order to doorstep

Skoma books arrive in about 7–14 business days after you order. Before that, you can send a private, read-only link to anyone you like. They can flip through it without signing in, but they can’t edit or order it.

Choose when to order with that in mind. If the book is a gift for a training partner, start it the week after the race, not the week before their birthday.

Photos versus numbers

A Chatbooks page is a photo, and sometimes a caption. That is the whole idea, and it keeps the books quick to make and easy to flip through.

A Skoma page can be a photo too, but many pages are built from numbers: distance, pace, elevation, the months on a calendar. For a runner those numbers carry the memory. The 32 km long run in the rain is a line on a calendar and a route on a map, even if no one took a picture.

If the people reading the book don’t run, a photo book may tell them more. If you are the reader, the data usually wins.

Running both side by side

Some runners keep a Chatbooks series for family life and make one Skoma book per big race. The two don’t overlap much. Race-morning photos can go in both: the monthly book shows the day in your life, the Skoma book shows it as the end of a training block.

Which should you choose?

Details reflect each provider’s publicly available information and may change; brand names are trademarks of their respective owners.