If you're the kind of hiker who can spend hours just looking at maps, CalTopo will feel less like a tool and more like a playground. At its core, CalTopo lets you layer different map sources, tweak contour visibility, experiment with shading, and build a map that matches exactly how you see the terrain. The result isn't just functional - it's often beautiful, detailed, and deeply personal.
But CalTopo isn't only about aesthetics. Under the surface, it's a highly capable planning tool. Its route builder is precise and flexible, allowing you to sketch out anything from a quick local walk to a multi-day backcountry adventure with confidence. Whether you're analyzing elevation profiles or fine-tuning a route to avoid tricky terrain, it gives you a level of control that most hiking apps simply don't offer.
In practice, CalTopo shines across the full hiking workflow. Many users start on desktop, where the large screen makes it ideal for creating and customizing maps, layering data, and preparing routes. Those maps can then be printed for offline use or synced to your phone, where the mobile app becomes a reliable companion for navigation and track-following in the field.
This combination of flexibility and depth is exactly why CalTopo has earned a strong reputation beyond recreational hiking. It's widely used by professionals, including search and rescue (SAR) teams, who rely on its advanced mapping capabilities when precision and situational awareness really matter.
In short, CalTopo bridges the gap between map artistry and serious backcountry planning - and does both exceptionally well.
Wikiloc is one of the most popular community-driven hiking platforms and probably the most internationally diverse one, with trail contributions from hikers all over the world. It's particularly popular in Southern Europe and South America, and since most of my hikes take place in the Balkan peninsula, it's a natural choice for me - there's a healthy density of routes shared by local hikers. That community aspect really matters when you're looking for reliable trails in your region.
Like all the other community-driven hiking platforms, Wikiloc is built around outdoor routes and allows people to:
- record hikes, walks, and other outdoor activities
- upload those tracks to a shared platform
- gradually build a personal history of outdoor trips
- discover routes created by others
- follow existing trails in the field
Gaia GPS is a mapping and navigation app for Android, iPhone and the web. It is quite popular in the US and Canada due to a large number of specialized map layers for these countries, such as hunting, fishing, historic, public land and others, as well as some premium basic maps such as National Geographic Trails Illustrated. Hikers in the rest of the world can use the maps that are usually available with other navigation apps, which are based on OpenStreetMap.
The web app is a great choice for route planning, while the mobile app excels in navigation, track recording and aims to do so in following routes. Together, the web and mobile apps provide a nice platform for storing and organizing your recorded tracks, planned routes, waypoints and even photos.
The web and mobile apps are synced through the Gaia Cloud linked by your user account. This makes it a great platform for planning routes on your desktop and having them readily available in your app, without having to do any manual file transfers.
Gaia GPS was generally well regarded in the hiking community until it was purchased by Outdoor Magazine in 2021 and became part of the Outside+ suite of products. That's when the costs of using the app started to raise, together with privacy concerns among the community.
Gaia GPS is a complex app, which has both a mobile and a web version. In this article we will cover just a small but very useful functionality of it's web app - route planning.
