Hydrow Wave vs Ergatta

These two sell to the same person — someone who wants a screen on their rower — from opposite ends of the connected-fitness idea. The Hydrow Wave is a studio in a machine: filmed on-water rows, live and on-demand classes, an instructor telling you what to do. The Ergatta is the opposite bet: no instructor at all, just games and races that turn a workout into something you compete at. They are both good; they are good at completely different things.

And before the philosophies, the same practical split that decides every comparison on this site: the Hydrow Wave is sold on Amazon with a live price that updates on this page, so you can buy it here. The Ergatta is sold direct from Ergatta only — no Amazon listing, no live price we can show you, and no buy button we can honestly place on it. So the actionable pick is the Hydrow Wave, and we will explain the Ergatta honestly around it.

Two philosophies of the same workout

The Hydrow Wave is built around instruction. Its 16-inch HD touchscreen streams studio-produced rows — the athletes film on real water — and the whole product assumes you want a coach’s voice pacing you through the session. If your last piece of home equipment became a clothes rail because nothing on it told you what to do, that guided structure is the entire pitch, and for a lot of people it is what turns a machine into a habit.

The Ergatta throws the instructor out and replaces it with a game. It is a WaterRower frame with a touchscreen and a games-and-racing layer bolted on, so instead of a class you get time trials, workouts that adapt to your pace, and races against other people and your own past efforts. For the specific person who cannot face another motivational class but will absolutely try to beat a leaderboard, that is genuinely effective — it is the reason Ergatta exists as its own thing rather than a WaterRower with a bigger screen.

Resistance: electromagnetic versus water

The mechanisms are as different as the philosophies. The Hydrow Wave uses electromagnetic resistance, which is computer-controlled and near-silent — there is no fan roar and no water to slosh, so it is one of the quietest ways to row and it lets the machine dial resistance to match a class. The Ergatta uses water, because underneath it is a WaterRower: you get the low-frequency whoosh of paddles moving through a tank and the self-scaling feel that water rowers are loved for. Neither is loud, but they are quiet in different ways — the Hydrow through engineering, the Ergatta through the soft acoustics of water.

The specifications, side by side

The blanks in the Ergatta column are deliberate: it is sold direct only, and we quote numbers we can cite rather than retype figures we cannot stand behind here. Two things in that table matter more than any dimension, though. The Hydrow Wave is 19 inches wide, which makes it the narrowest serious connected rower we cover — it fits rooms a wider machine does not. And the Ergatta rows without its membership, where the Hydrow does not, which is the hinge of the whole cost question below.

The subscription models

On the Hydrow, the membership isthe product. It is required, and Hydrow lists it at $50 a month — about $38 a month if you pay annually. Over five years that is roughly $3,000, which is more than most rowers on this site cost outright, and it is not optional: skip it and you are left with a heavy magnetic rower and a dark screen. You are not really buying a machine, you are subscribing to a studio that happens to ship a rower with it.

Ergatta’s membership is cheaper and, crucially, optional in a way Hydrow’s is not. Ergatta lists it at $39 a month, falling to about $27 a month if you commit five years up front — a discount that means paying $1,620 in one go. But the Ergatta still rows without the membership, because underneath it is a self-contained water rower. That changes the math entirely: with the Hydrow the subscription is the reason to own it, while with the Ergatta the subscription is the games layer you can walk away from and still have a working machine. We compare every rowing subscription here.

Footprint, storage and noise

The Hydrow Wave is the small-space specialist of the two: 19 inches wide and 80 long, it folds upright, and its electromagnetic drive is near-silent, which together make it the connected rower most likely to fit — and stay welcome — in a flat or a shared room. It weighs 102 lb and needs mains power, so it is not weightless and not cordless, but for a machine with a 16-inch screen it is unusually easy to live with. The Ergatta stands upright on its end when stored, the way any WaterRower does, and its water tank gives the soft whoosh rather than silence. Neither will disturb neighbors the way an air rower can.

Where you can buy each

This is the difference that decides how we can even cover these two. The Hydrow Wave is sold on Amazon with a live price that updates on this page, so you can put it in a cart in seconds. The Ergatta is direct-to-consumer only — there is no Amazon listing, no live price we can show you, and no buy button we can put on it.

We should be straight about what that means for us: the Ergatta earns us nothing. We cannot be paid on it, and we could quietly leave it off the site for exactly that reason. We cover it anyway, because a comparison of connected rowers that ignored the most interesting game-based one would not be worth reading. But there is a genuinely useful angle here for a buyer: because the Ergatta is built on a WaterRower frame, you can buy the WaterRower underneath it for considerably less, skip the screen and the membership entirely, and row the exact same stroke. If the games are not the specific draw, that is the smarter spend, and we lay it out in the WaterRower vs Ergatta comparison.

Cost over five years

Live pricing is more than 48 hours old, so this table is not rendering. We would rather show you nothing than show you last week’s arithmetic. Why prices expire here.

We can only show a five-year cost for the machine that has a live price, and that is the Hydrow Wave. Note what dominates it: on the Hydrow the membership is required, so the five-year figure is the hardware plus roughly $3,000 of subscription — the machine is the smaller half of what you pay. The Ergatta has no Amazon listing and therefore no live price for us to add here; you would price it, and buy it, on Ergatta’s own site, where its membership runs $39 a month or about $27 on the five-year prepay.

How to decide

Buy the Hydrow Waveif you want a coach’s voice and studio-grade classes to get you rowing, you value near-silent electromagnetic resistance, and you need the narrowest footprint a serious connected rower comes in. It is the actionable pick here — it is the one you can buy through this page — and it is the right machine for the person the membership is built for. Just go in knowing the $50 a month is the real cost, not the hardware.

Choose the Ergatta if games and racing are specifically what will get you onto the machine, and you are content to buy direct at full price with no live price or button from us. But run the WaterRower test first: if you do not actually want the games, buy the WaterRower the Ergatta is built on for less, skip the screen, and keep the difference. The stroke is identical; only the software is missing.