Crank based power meter - basic question

Hi, basic question for crank based power meters, single sided.
Do you only get one crank arm for the power meter and you leave your existing crank arm on the other side (right side in believe, provided they are the same length)?
If this is the case i guess you don’t worry about any differences between the non matching cranky arms?

For Stages and 4iiii, you can almost always get the left-side crank arm.

There are some options for right-side arms too. A few people do this for bikes that don’t have enough clearance for the “simple & cheap” left-side (like many Trek bikes). In those case, they can still get “single-sided”, but end up with the right side as the power meter.

And the people that get the dual-sided are just the combo of both arms above.

Back to your question, if you stick to the same type of arm and interface (like road or mountain bike), you can generally mix and match between the left and right sides. So you might have a 105 power crank arm matched with an Ultegra crank arm. Just make sure to match crank arm length and you are set.

That’s the idea! But I would suggest buying the same brand and model as your existing crank arms.

Stages and 4iiii are generally the left crank. Just remove your existing one and replace with the PM crank. So long as your chainstay and crank have enough clearance for the pod you will be fine.

I’ve an Ultegra crankset but a 105 4iiii PM. Different colour but unless you actually look at both sides of the bike no-one will notice.

I see I think I get it now.
I have fsa cranks so I would need to buy a regular right side crank if I wanted the cranks to more closley match then.

You have to match brands at the very least. So, if you have FSA and don’t plan to swap the entire crank, you need an FSA crank arm option from an appropriate vendor. There are not a ton of them compared to the more common Shimano/SRAM ones, but there are some out there.

This might be obvious, but just to put it here - the crank interfaces need to match, you can’t just put two different ones together. The optics can be different though, as long as both parts match mechanically. For example, I have a sram rival crankset, which is aluminim, and put a stages gen 3 left crank on it, which is carbon. But I neded to make sure the stages was the correct interface, I couldn’t have just bought a shimano crank, for example.

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This is sort of my setup, silver Ultegra left side PM with a black 105 crank