Full disclosure: komoot provided financial support for my 2018 tour of Armenia, and I published this review as part of that agreement. In 2023 I updated the post to reflect the app’s evolution.
Lots of people have been asking about the route planning and navigation apps I’ve been using on my recent bike tours.
The app I’ve mostly been using since 2018 is komoot (with a lowercase ‘k’), the creation of a Berlin-based team of developers, which is finding increasing favour with recreational outdoor users – and it also happens to be an excellent route planning and navigation tool for cycle tourists and bikepackers.
First things first, though: why use any route planning and navigation app, rather than a simple map, on a cycle tour or bikepacking trip?
Finding your way on a bike trip has long been done by some process of looking at maps, comparing them to what you see around you, and piecing together a cycling-friendly route from there. But apps like komoot are now clever enough to calculate – in many cases – consistently better routes than those you might pick yourself.
By “better”, I don’t mean shorter or more direct, like Google Maps or your friendly roadside truck driver might suggest. I mean quieter, prettier, with gentler gradients and road surfaces appropriate to the bike you’re riding, and passing by more points of interest along the way – in short, routes that are better for cyclists.
This kind of functionality used to be hard to achieve. Simply put, the underlying data wasn’t good enough – which was why I never bothered with previous generations of these apps and websites. It was also because I generally like to go low-tech and keep things simple.
But times have changed. The coverage and accuracy of open-source global mapping data continues to skyrocket, and the body of community-created routes is growing in parallel.
On my cycle tour of Armenia in 2018, I had a list of specific places I wanted to visit. So I decided to give komoot a try to see if it would make reaching them more enjoyable.
The komoot app itself (Android/iOS) is free, as is the first of the regions you download. From then on, additional regions are chargeable at EUR3.99 each, but ultra long-haul riders might prefer to buy the world pack (EUR29.99) which covers the globe for a one-off lifetime purchase.
After using komoot daily for that month-long ride the length of Armenia, my overall impressions were very positive. Those impressions form the basis of the rest of this review.
There were a couple of issues which I’ll mention in detail below, but none were deal-breakers. Indeed, komoot has since become my go-to app for route planning and navigation on most of my cycle tours and bikepacking trips, as you’ll see from the hundreds of tours on my profile I’ve recorded and shared since.
So what exactly are komoot’s strengths?
To my mind, it isn’t a single feature but rather the package as a whole. Rather than trying to do everything for everyone and cram in every possible piece of functionality, the developers’ goal seems to be simplicity of use combined with powerful core features.
To that end, the app’s functionality is broadly split into three parts: route planning, navigation, and community. Let’s go through each in turn.
Planning mode uses routing algorithms to generate optimal routes between any number of points of your choice, which can be searched for, selected on the map, chosen from categorised listings of nearby places, or chosen from community recommendations. The routing happens server-side; you’ll need an active internet connection to carry out this step, but saved routes can then be followed offline.
The resulting routes are generally excellent – I particularly like that you can switch between cycle touring, road biking, gravel biking and mountain biking, which produce different routes based on different criteria – and the database of points of interest is extremely comprehensive.
Of particular use to cycle tourists and bikepackers is that generated routes are displayed not just with elevation and gradient profiles but also track type breakdowns, so you can see in advance what proportions of a route are on dirt or asphalt, highway or provincial road, etc, and adjust as necessary depending your preferences. Also generated are statistics concerning distance, estimated ride duration based on your fitness, total ascent/descent, average grade, highest/lowest elevations, and the like (though in uber-mountainous Armenia these numbers usually give me a sinking feeling!).
It’s worth mentioning that komoot has a web interface for planning routes with a bit more screen real-estate. Routes planned here are then saved to your profile and synced to the app.
In navigation mode, the app is unobtrusive and as accurate as the mapping allows (see below); I prefer to use the audio prompts (turn-by-turn navigation) with the screen switched off, which saves a lot of battery power. The fact that this works offline for pre-planned routes is a big plus. Your actual route is automagically logged, regardless of whether it matches the route you planned, and can later be exported as a GPX file.
Although every platform now has some implementation of the idea, perhaps the most innovative feature when komoot was first launched was the community aspect of the platform.
Once you’ve logged your day’s activities, you are encouraged to highlight your favourite spots and sections on the route, and then to share any resulting recommendations with the app’s other users, who can then upvote them. Popular highlights then begin to show up when other users plan routes in the same area, thus enabling them to benefit from good recommendations. Public trips also become searchable and show up on your profile.
You can also embed them in your blog:
The result is a crowdsourced database of routes and curated highlights which might not appear on a regular basemap. (On a gamification tip, you also get badges and whatnot for being an active contributor.)
It’s a nice, simple system that seems to have the spirit of exploration at its core, rather than that of competition or showmanship as with some other cycling apps. Does it work? Well, the app has 5 million users at the time of writing, so komoot must be doing something right!
I mentioned earlier that there are caveats. komoot asked for an honest report, so here they are in detail.
The most visible issue stems from the app’s reliance on the OpenStreetMap database and open-source elevation data to provide the underlying data. All of the route planning features depend on it. This means that the functionality will only ever be as good as the data. And while the open-source data is extraordinarily good in some places (including the app’s native Germany, the UK, and most other European countries that dominate its user base), in Armenia it is far from perfect.
To be sure, it’s a lot better than it was – my team added or updated more than 5,000km of track data in 2016 alone as part of the Transcaucasian Expedition – but there are still quirks, mostly relating to road names (which affect the audio prompts), the misclassification of dirt roads as paved (which affects routing for road biking), and the low-resolution elevation model (which creates discrepancies in elevation and gradient profiles).
Of course, komoot is by no means alone in suffering from incomplete or inaccurate mapping data. In fact, the same issues affect all apps using OpenStreetMap (which is most of them). But coverage and accuracy continues to improve worldwide, and a bit of common sense is enough to overcome most routing issues – and it’s practically a non-issue in much of Europe nowadays. That’s why it isn’t a deal-breaker. The fact that it even has such sophisticated routing features is already a game changer – find me an app five years ago that could do that!
And if the map really is blank at any point, you can draw a straight line between A and B, or switch the basemap to aerial imagery and trace the routes you see. This much-requested new feature is called ‘off-grid routing’ and surfaced in an update midway through the ride on which this report is based. It gave komoot a big leg-up in the planning of intrepid, off-trail routes.
On the topic of routing, komoot does have a particular type of user in mind with these features. While the algorithm is extremely powerful if given good data, users who like to do their own fine-grained route planning will find the algorithm too dominant. Adding additional points to ‘force’ the app to take the route you want is clunky and cumbersome.
But this would be missing the point: komoot’s focus is clearly on making the routing feature as strong as it can possibly be and appealing to people who will utilise it, rather than override it.
(Case in point: I’ve found plenty of new routes in Armenia that I wouldn’t have known about had I not followed the app’s suggestions.)
There are a few minor issues that could be improved (or at least there were when this report was originally published):
- It is hard to add new points to a route mid ride. I’d prefer to see pre-selected categories of points on the map at all times, and then simply tap to add them.
- I’d like to be able to join a pre-planned route midway while offline, rather than replanning it with a new starting point, which needs an internet connection.
- If I make an intentional detour, I’d like the app to recognise this rather than instructing me to make a U‑turn for the next several minutes.
- If I’m going (downhill?) too fast to be able to hear the audio prompts, it would be cool if the app would detect this and show a visual prompt as well.
- And if my phone’s screen is locked, I would prefer to be able to unlock it without pausing my tour to do so.
The specific phone I used during testing – a cheap Huawei Y6 – also has a habit of terminating the app at unpredictable intervals when the screen is off. Having looked into the issue I believe it is an issue with Huawei’s proprietary version of Android, rather than a fault with the app itself. It doesn’t happen with my Google Nexus 6P, which runs the regular flavour of Android, nor my later Pixel 4 XL.
Finally, I don’t believe I’ve got the best out of the social features, purely because of where in the world I’m located. I became a komoot Pioneer in Armenia by default because nobody else was using it.
The verdict?
komoot is certainly the most powerful route planning app for cycle touring and bikepacking I’ve come across to date, as long as you let it do its thing and don’t try too hard to override it. And if you’re cycle touring in new places and you don’t know the area, who wouldn’t want optimally calculated routes together with curated community highlights?
Throw in offline voice-assisted navigation and you’ve got one of the most powerful apps a cycle tourist could wish for. Just check OpenStreetMap coverage of the region before you commit.
If you’re keen to see how it actually works, check out my public komoot profile, which includes all my tracked rides (and a few hikes) in Armenia so far.
Something to add?