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.
