Looking for a Komoot alternative? An honest answer from people who build one

Up front: we build VeloPlanner, a cycling route planner, so this is not a neutral review. We'll tell you plainly where we're the wrong choice. For some of you reading this, we are.

Since Bending Spoons acquired Komoot in March 2025, "Komoot alternative" has become one of the most-searched phrases in cycling. New ownership means new priorities, and many long-time users are unsure what it will mean for pricing, features, and the free tier. Maybe those worries turn out to be unfounded. But if you're looking around, the useful question isn't "what's the best Komoot alternative". It's: what do you actually use Komoot for? Different answers point in different directions, and no single app replaces everything.

First, what Komoot still does well

Komoot has one of the largest route communities in the world, years of navigation refinement, and Highlights coverage that no smaller app matches in density. It covers hiking, running, and mountain biking alongside cycling. If you're happy with Komoot today, you don't need to switch. This article is for people who aren't: because of pricing, because of the acquisition, or because it never quite fit how they plan.

What are you actually replacing?

"I plan cycling trips: multi-day tours, bikepacking, or day rides worth doing"

This is where we'd point you at VeloPlanner, because this is exactly what it's built for.

Planning a trip is different from generating a route. When you're preparing a week on EuroVelo, a weekend bikepacking loop, or a Saturday ride to somewhere actually interesting, you need to know things a routing algorithm doesn't tell you: what the surface really looks like, where you'll sleep, which castle or lake is worth a detour, where the train can take you home.

What that looks like in practice:

• Curated official routes with real guides. EuroVelo, GreenVelo, Alpe Adria and others, each with a practical guide written by our editorial team, plus reviews and photos from cyclists who've ridden them. Komoot's community routes are numerous; official signposted routes with actual editorial coverage are our thing.
• A planner built for trips, not just lines on a map. Split a route into daily stages. Merge several routes into one tour. Plan variants of the same stage and decide on the road.
• GPX import without map matching. Riding an ultra or a bikepacking race? The organiser's track is the track. Komoot re-snaps every imported route to its own map, which quietly moves your line. We import it exactly as-is, down to the odd field crossing the organiser put there on purpose.
• Accommodation and services as a planning layer, not an afterthought. Hotels via Booking.com integration, campsites, shelters, Bett+Bike partners in Germany, Accueil Vélo in France, Slowhop for character stays in Poland, and Zanocuj w Lesie zones (Poland's legal wild-camping forest program, open to bikepackers from anywhere). Plus train stations, restaurants, attractions, water points, and dozens more POI layers from OpenStreetMap. Users review them and add photos.
• Route images. Riders upload photos pinned to the route showing what the surface and trail quality actually look like, so "gravel" stops being a surprise genre.

And local rides, not just expeditions: the same POI layers turn "where should we ride on Sunday" into a route past a ruin, a viewpoint, and a decent lunch stop. Trip planning at any scale is the product.

"I mainly need turn-by-turn navigation on my phone"

This is where Komoot is ahead of us. We launched navigation in our mobile app this summer, in beta. It works, we ride with it daily, and it improves every release, but it doesn't yet have the years of polish Komoot's navigation has.

If reliable navigation is critical for you, though, it's worth saying that a dedicated GPS computer from Garmin, Wahoo or similar beats any phone app: days of battery instead of hours, better GPS accuracy, a screen readable in full sun, and no interrupted rides when a call comes in. And it pairs with any planner. Plan on VeloPlanner, export the GPX for free, load it on the device, ride. That's how most of our touring and bikepacking users work today.

"I don't want to pay for anything"

Fair position, and free tools do exist. Worth knowing what you're choosing, though: maps, servers, development and support all cost money, so every app funds itself somehow. Through subscriptions, through ads, or through selling attention. The honest differences between apps are what sits behind the paywall and how the free tier is treated.

Our answer: the planner, official route guides, community routes, collections, POI layers, and GPX import and export are free, on web and mobile. Premium covers the extras: offline routes, weather along your route with wind direction, satellite and terrain maps.

"I want ride tracking and performance stats"

Then you were never really looking for a Komoot alternative. That's a fitness platform, a different category with different leaders, and most cyclists we know pair one of those with a dedicated planner anyway.

Where VeloPlanner honestly beats Komoot

Beyond the trip-planning features above, three structural differences:

Price. Most of VeloPlanner is free, including full route planning and GPX downloads. Premium costs roughly half of Komoot Premium in every market we operate in, and there are no regional map packs to buy. On Komoot, even exporting your ride to a GPS device pushes you toward regional or world packs; with us, GPX export costs nothing.

Signal over noise. Komoot's Highlights are impressive in volume, but volume cuts both ways: a bench, a parking lot, and a genuinely great gravel sector all look the same on the map. We curate. Official routes get editorial guides, POIs come from structured sources, and community photos are pinned to routes with purpose.

Who's behind it. VeloPlanner is a small, bootstrapped team, and everyone on it rides. We plan our own trips in the same planner you use, hit the same rough edges, and fix them. Our CEO writes code and answers support emails, sometimes in the same hour. That doesn't automatically make us better; Komoot's resources buy things we can't match yet. But it does mean the roadmap is set by cyclists who use the product every week, and when you write to support, the reply may come from the person who built the feature.

Where Komoot still beats us

So you can trust the paragraphs above: Komoot has far more community-created routes and Highlights, more mature navigation, a bigger social layer, and multi-sport coverage across hiking, running and MTB. We're cycling-only, on purpose. If you want one app for every outdoor sport, we're not it and won't become it.

VeloPlanner vs Komoot at a glance

	VeloPlanner	Komoot
Trip planning: stages, variants, merging routes	✅ Free	Multi-day planner in Premium, more limited
Official routes with editorial guides	✅	❌
GPX import without re-snapping to their map	✅	❌
Free GPX export	✅	Regional or world map packs
Accommodation, campsite & train layers	✅ Extensive	Limited
Turn-by-turn navigation	Beta	✅ Mature
Community routes & Highlights volume	Growing	✅ Massive
Paid tier	~½ the price	Premium plus map packs
Behind the product	Small bootstrapped team of cyclists	Part of the Bending Spoons app portfolio

The short version

• If mature navigation is your main need: a dedicated GPS computer plus any planner is the strongest setup today, and our in-app navigation beta is improving fast.
• If you're leaving over the acquisition, the pricing, or because you plan real trips, from Sunday rides with something worth seeing, through weekend loops and bikepacking races, to a summer on EuroVelo: that's us.

Planning is free, on web and mobile, no map packs. Plan your next trip on VeloPlanner and tell us what you think. As a small team, we reads everything.

• VeloPlanner in Google Play
• VeloPlanner in App Store