Shifters & Derailleurs

Shifting

Always the right gear! Whether you want to buy new shifters and derailleurs as a performance upgrade, components for a custom bike or a replacement for a defective part - you'll find the right shifting components for your bike here.

Gear shifting for bicycles

The invention of gears made the bicycle much more efficient and comfortable in the last century. To this day, resourceful engineers are still working on improving shifting systems for mountain bikes, road bikes, e-bikes and everyday bikes. Modern bicycle gears are precise, quiet, light and cover pretty much every desired range of gears.

The right shifters and derailleurs for your bike

If you want to buy a complete gear shifting system for your bike, i.e. a "groupset", or individual shifting components, then you should pay particular attention to compatibility. The number of gears (gear steps) is one of the most important factors, but even if they match, you can't mix and match everything. Road bike gears, for example, often have different lever ratios than those on MTBs and parts from different manufacturers can only be combined to a limited extent. A Shimano drivetrain with parts from SRAM or Campagnolo? This only works in a few cases. Do some research in advance or choose your components "unmixed"!

If you are replacing the rear derailleur or shifters, new Bowden cables and cable housings are probably also a good idea. You can also find these and other small parts here, as well as rear derailleurs, front derailleurs, shift levers and shifters.
Chains, cassettes, chainrings and cranks are also part of the shifting system to a certain extent, but have their own category in our shop: drivetrain.
If you want to upgrade everything at once, take a look at the “groupsets” category!

To make sure you don't lose track of the many terms or even confuse parts, we recommend the shifting glossary in our blog:
"Glossary: A Brief Explanation of Shifting Technologies”.

Internally geared hubs or derailleur gears?

Derailleur gears are the most common on sporty bikes - i.e. mountain bikes, road bikes, gravel bikes, etc. They are available in all price ranges and designs for different requirements - for example with small gaps between the gears or with a particularly wide range between the lowest and highest gear. On the road, front derailleurs are still popular for shifting between two chainrings on the crank. On bikes for off-road use, only shifting gears at the cassette has become more common.

Internally geared hubs are particularly popular on everyday and touring bikes. The gearbox is protected from dirt and water in the rear wheel hub or bottom bracket shell, which significantly reduces the need for maintenance. In contrast to derailleur gears, you can also shift most internal gears when stationary.

Electronic gear shifting on bicycles

Unlike mechanical shifting systems, electronic systems do not have Bowden cables. They are controlled either by radio waves or by a wire and moved by small motors. This is ideal if you value a particularly fast and precise shifting response and/or particularly low operating forces. Do you want to find out more first? In the blog you will find an article that goes into detail: “Electronic Shifters & Derailleurs for Road and Mountain Bikes”.

The right shifters and derailleurs for every situation

The choice of the right gears depends heavily on the intended use and the type of bike on which you want to install them. Our application filter will help you with your shopping.
Why the distinction? On a road bike, the gears have to fulfil different criteria than on a mountain bike. On the road, having small gaps between the gears is important to most cyclists so they can always ride at the right cadence. MTB gears, on the other hand, usually offer a large range between the highest and lowest gear, and they are also more robust and dampen chain slap. Specialised gravel bike gears lie in between.
Here, too, we can recommend some blog posts that describe in more detail how and why the gears of different types of bikes differ:
• Shifters & Derailleurs for your Mountain Bike – An Overview
• Shimano, Campagnolo or SRAM? Shifters & Derailleurs for Road Bikes – An Overview
• Shifters & Derailleurs for Your Gravel Bike – An Overview