Komoot

Komoot's interface is organized around planning a route before you ever move. You pick a sport (hiking, gravel, road cycling) and the map redraws to favor the surfaces and trails that sport prefers, then exposes elevation, way-type, and surface breakdowns as stacked profiles beneath the line. Dragging the route to reshape it recalculates these in place, which makes the trade-off between a paved detour and a steep shortcut tangible. Community-contributed Highlights surface scenic spots as discoverable pins you can fold into a plan. The turn-by-turn voice navigation stays genuinely usable off-road, a rare strength. Where it stumbles is the multi-day and offline workflow, which hides region downloads and collection management behind menus that newcomers tend to miss entirely.

Komoot's planner starts from two points on a map and a choice of activity, then shows the result as a summary before any detail: distance, duration, elevation gain and a difficulty grade with a note on the fitness it needs. Waypoints can be added by tapping the map or by searching, and the route reshapes around them. The summary makes it possible to judge a route in a glance before deciding to study its surfaces.

Discovery runs through the Discover tab and through collections, curated sets of tours made by Komoot and by other users, often for a region or a theme such as a long-distance trail. Each completed tour can be saved with photos, a description and a rating, which feeds back into the Highlights other planners see. The product turns individual outings into content that helps the next person plan theirs.

The business model shapes the interface. A free account gets one region, and wider map coverage comes through region bundles or the Premium subscription, which adds features such as multi-day planning, weather on the route and live tracking for friends. The prompts to buy appear at the moment a plan crosses an unpaid boundary, which is useful context for a newcomer but can also feel like a wall in the middle of planning a trip.