I’m reading glowing reviews about the performance of the Hylex RS brakes, noting the hood shape is good for comfort, excellent power/feel, and being compatible with Shimano pads.

Or, the other common setup is SRAM Rival 1 hydro brakes and built in shifter.

My current plan is the Hylex brakes with a Microshift 10 or 11spd bar end shifter which also gets good reviews, and I like the idea of slimmer hoods.

I’m pricing up a gravel bike build, would appreciate any comments as I’ve never built a drop bar bike and my current CX is a secondhand bike with canti’s!

My new bike has Rival. Never used drop bars, hooded levers or SRAM gears before.

The brakes feel a lot less powerful than I’m used to on mountain bikes, but they have plenty of modulation and work fine. I feel like I have to squeeze quite hard to brake hard which may be designed to be more familiar for roadies coming from mechanical brakes. Personally I’d rather have a shorter travel lever and more immediate brake response.

Design of the hoods works for me. They are big but feel secure off road. I like the shift lever, it’s easy to cover the brake with my index finger and shift with the middle. You can pull it close to the bar to use on the drops too.

I like the sram hoods I find them quite comfortable. There’s probably a reason no one use bar end shifters any more, maybe that there less easy to get to when things are slippy, you’re climbing or just want to keep your hands on the bars, there’s no way I’d choose them

I have Rival hydros, hood shape is fine but the braking is less than impressive and set up is finicky in usual SRAM style

That’s a good point about the bar end shifter, needing to grab a couple more gears on a technical climb would be a pain!

Personally I like the Sram hydro hoods, and the brakes are powerful enough.
I’ve recently changed from Shimano 105 levers and TRP disc brakes.
I find off-road the solid sram
Double-tap levers give me more confidence than the Shimano levers where the whole lever moves inwards to change up.
Brake wise I don’t think there’s much in it, there’s plenty enough power there for cx or gravel use at least (I’m using 160mm discs).

I’ve used bar-end shifters in the past, and I think they would be “ok” for 90% of the time if you really wanted to go that route, but there’s always the other 10% where it’s nicer/important to keep both hands on the bars.
Plus I occasionally used to **** my knees on the shifters, which could be painful…

Just realised the Sram groupset I’m looking at is cable discs…any ‘budget’ options for hydraulic brakes for 1*10 or 1
*11?

I’ve Hylex and bar ends on my gravel bike.
It suits me, the brakes are awesome stoppers and shifting works fine.
My set up is a triple with a huge range of gears and bar ends