Best App for a Multi-Day Hike: AllTrails vs Komoot vs Gaia vs FarOut

Most "best hiking app" comparisons are answering a different question than the one you've got. They're ranking apps on how well they help you find a two-hour loop near where you live. That's a real problem, and AllTrails solved it years ago.

A multi-day route is a different problem. The line on the map is usually the easy part, because long-distance trails are waymarked and the GPX track is already published. The hard part is everything around it: where does day three end, is there a bed there, how much climbing is in that stage, where you can resupply, and which of the route's variants you're actually walking.

This is a comparison of the usual options against that job, plus a note on what most of them leave to you.

The short answer

Prices checked October 2026. All of these change, and several changed significantly in the last two years.

One of those rows is mine. I built Traileasy, and this is still an honest breakdown: the prices and limits for each app are accurate, every one of them does something Traileasy doesn't, and when another app is the better choice for your trip, I say so.

Why a multi-day route breaks most hiking apps

Nearly every hiking app is built around a single assumption: a trail is something you drive to, walk, and come back from. The database is organised around trailheads, the reviews are about parking and mud, and the unit of planning is one outing.

Point that at a 170 km circuit and it falls apart. The whole route arrives as one enormous entry with a 10,000 metre elevation figure attached, which tells you nothing useful. There's no concept of a stage, so nothing in the app knows your day ends at a refuge that has to be booked in February. You end up doing the actual planning in a spreadsheet and using the app only as a map. That's not a flaw in these apps, it's just what happens when you use a tool outside the job it was built for.

The apps, one by one

AllTrails

The largest trail database anywhere, and by a distance the best crowd knowledge: recent conditions, photos from last week, whether the creek crossing is passable. For a day hike somewhere you don't know, it's the right first stop.

For a long route, two things get in the way. Offline maps need a paid plan, $35.99 a year for Plus or $79.99 for Peak, and offline isn't optional once you're three days from a phone mast. The second is that a trail is one entry and nothing more, so a 170 km route arrives with a single elevation total attached to it, and the app can't help you break it into days or tell you what's at the end of each one.

Komoot

The one with a proper routing engine behind it. Drop two points and Komoot puts a sensible line between them along paths that exist, with surface and difficulty information attached, and you can drag it around a col from there. Its European coverage is excellent. What you end up with is a line rather than a trip, though: no days, and no notion of huts as places that have to be booked.

The pricing changed a lot. Since 27 February 2025, new accounts need Premium, at €59.99 a year, to sync a route to a watch or GPS device, and Komoot was acquired by Bending Spoons the following month. A free account still gets offline maps for one region, the World Pack for every region is a one-off €29.99, and regions bought before the change stay yours. Premium is worth paying if route drawing is your main need.

Gaia GPS

The map nerd's choice, and deservedly so. The layer catalogue is enormous, and for anything off-trail or in serious terrain it's the one to have. Nothing draws the line for you the way Komoot does: Gaia gives you a superb canvas and expects you to bring the plan. The free tier lets you browse, record and drop waypoints, but offline downloads need Premium, at $59.90 a year.

FarOut

On a long American trail, nothing else comes close. Mile-by-mile guides for the PCT, AT and CDT, with water sources, campsites and comments from hikers who passed through this week. On those trails it's the obvious first choice.

Outside that world the coverage thins out fast. In Europe it's a short list: the UK through a partnership with the Trailblazer guidebooks, with trails like the West Highland Way, Hadrian's Wall Path and the Coast to Coast, then the Tour du Mont Blanc, the Camino de Santiago and the Camino del Norte, Iceland's Laugavegur, and a few newer long trails such as the Via Transilvanica. Guides are bought per trail: $59.99 for the Pacific Crest Trail and $74.99 for the full Appalachian Trail, with single sections of a trail from $9.99. A FarOut Unlimited subscription that covers every guide is $96 a year.

Outdooractive

The strongest official data in the Alps, drawn from tourist boards and Alpine clubs, which means hut information and waymarked route data you can actually trust. The free tier carries ads, and Pro is €29.99 a year with Pro+ at €59.99. It tries to cover everything for everyone, which makes it heavy going if all you want is one route walked properly.

Organic Maps and Mapy

Organic Maps is the genuinely free one: open source, no account, and as many offline regions as you want to download. Mapy renders marked European hiking trails about as clearly as anything out there, but its free tier holds one country's offline map at a time. You can swap which country whenever you're online, so it's fine for a trek inside a single border and awkward on a route that crosses one. The Tour du Mont Blanc touches France, Italy and Switzerland, and the Peaks of the Balkans crosses Albania, Montenegro and Kosovo. Downloading more than one country needs Mapy Premium, at €18.99 a year.

Neither will plan anything for you. What they will do is show you the map and where you are on it, on the day your main app decides it needs to sign in again. Carry one of them regardless of what else you use.

Traileasy

Built for the job this article is about: turning an established long-distance trail into a sequence of days, then walking it offline. You start from an example itinerary on one of 160+ routes rather than a blank map, split or merge stages, and see the places to sleep at the end of each day. On the Tour du Mont Blanc, the GR20 and Alta Via 1 it also shows which huts still have beds, night by night, and emails you when a bed comes free at a full one.

It's free on iOS, Android and the web, with every feature included. Planning starts from the trails in its catalogue, and you can request one that isn't there yet. For a day hike near home, a route drawn off-trail or last week's trail conditions, use one of the apps above. How it works is in the next section.

The part most of them leave to you

Load a GPX into most of the apps above and you've got a line on a map, not a plan. The plan is the sequence of days: where each one ends, whether that place has beds and whether they're already full, how far and how much climb each stage carries, and what it does to the rest of the week if you move one stage by five kilometres. It's also the things the line can't tell you: where the last resupply is before a stretch with nothing on it, and which variant you're taking, because most long trails offer several to choose between. On a hut-to-hut route you don't decide all of it either, because a day has to end where there's a bed. That's the actual work of organising a multi-day hike, and most apps in this comparison hand it back to you.

That gap is why Traileasy exists. You pick a trail from 160+ long-distance routes, open an example itinerary rather than starting from a blank map, and reshape it: split a stage, merge two, and watch the distance and climb update for every day. The places to sleep along the route are on the map with the route. When the plan is right, download it to the phone. There's no GPX step anywhere in that, because the route is already in the app, though you can still export one if you'd rather navigate with something else. There's also a gear list that weighs your pack and compares it with what's normal for that trail.

I have paid subscriptions to both AllTrails and Gaia, but honestly, I ended up using Traileasy for our entire hike because it was so intuitive, comprehensive, and easy to customize to our exact itinerary and schedule.

This is the 9-day Tour du Mont Blanc, the version most people walk, as it comes:

Trails that split into genuinely different routes get an example for each, so the variant decision happens before you start moving stages around. The Peaks of the Balkans comes as an 8-day variant and a 10-day complete circuit, and Alta Via 1 as an 8-day and a 9-day hut-to-hut version.

Once you're walking, the screen is about the day rather than the whole route. The part you've walked is drawn solid and the stretch ahead is dashed, so you can see where you are in the stage without reading anything. The panel at the bottom keeps a running count: distance walked out of the day's total, time on the move, and metres climbed and descended against the totals for the stage. Every marker still ahead of you carries the distance to reach it, so "how much further to the pass" has a number instead of a guess, and the same goes for the water stop, the junction and tonight's hut.

Underneath that sits the day's elevation profile with your position marked on it, the ground you've covered filled in and the rest drawn faint ahead of you. Distance on its own can look manageable and still hide 600 metres of climb in the last hour, so seeing the shape of what's left tells you more than the number does. All of it keeps working with no signal, because the map is already on the phone.

Battery is the part that separates a multi-day walk from a day hike, because there's no charger at the end of the afternoon. Navigation runs in one of three modes you cycle from a button on the map. Standard takes a fix every few metres for the most accurate recorded track. Battery saver lowers the precision and slows the update rate, in the foreground and in the background. Max battery saver stops background updates entirely and only refreshes while the app is open, which is the setting for the last day on a phone you can't charge. If the battery gets low while you're walking, it steps down a mode on its own and tells you it has done so.

It's free, all of it, on iOS and Android. It's also narrower than everything else here: there's no database of day hikes near you, it doesn't do off-piste route drawing, and it won't tell you about the mud on your local loop. For those, use the apps above.

What to actually carry

For most self-organised multi-day walks, two apps rather than one. Something that holds the plan and navigates it, and a free offline map as a backup that doesn't need an account, a subscription or a signal. Organic Maps is the one that fits that second slot without conditions attached.

If you're on a long US trail, that first app is FarOut. If you're putting together a route of your own along paths, it's Komoot. If it's off-trail, or you want the map layers to work it out from, it's Gaia. If you're walking an established long-distance trail and the hard part is turning it into a week of days with beds at the end of each, that's what Traileasy does.

Whichever app ends up holding the plan, do the downloading at home: the offline map for the whole route, and the GPX track onto the phone or watch if the app you picked expects you to bring one. What is a GPX file covers the format, and how to use a GPX file covers getting it into an app.