In an earlier post I mulled over what a good gravel map looks like, and compared how usable the maps of the popular apps (Komoot, Strava, RideWithGPS, Trailmap) are for gravel riding. Now it is the turn of the route planning features. As I promised last time, there are surprises in store…

The central feature of route planning is automatic routing, i.e. when you click waypoints along the route in addition to the start point, the app automatically builds you a route that sensibly follows roads and perhaps partly trails. In a good app you can tell it what kind of routing you want: mountain biking, trail running, gravel, road cycling and so on. Of the apps tested, all support several different routing profiles except RWGPS, which only supports the "cycling" profile — in practice road-cycling-weighted, but not entirely, which makes its routing rather unpredictable.

Once the routing profile is chosen, the job of the routing is to find the shortest route between the waypoints such that it suits the chosen routing profile. This sounds easy, but it is not, because the app has to make compromises (shortest vs. best fit for the criteria) to find the route. Here the apps differ significantly, as you can see from the screenshots.

Once the route line exists, the user should be able to assess the route: what kind of roads or trails does the route follow, is some part of it something the user wants to change. And what if some stretch is too hard to ride on a gravel bike, is there a good alternative? A good app lets the user peek underneath the route line to see what ways the route follows, and the app can also give the user notes and warnings about the route so that the user can quickly assess some part of it (a stretch of trail, say, or a forest road whose condition is unknown). The differences between apps are significant in this area too: some tell you next to nothing about the route, others describe in great detail which ways were picked for it.

Then, the verdicts on the apps:

• RideWithGPS: Weak showing. The routes are often fairly safe, e.g. asphalt instead of gravel, but when it does cut across trails the user is not told: the user cannot peek under the route line, and RWGPS only tells you whether the surface is asphalt or "something else", i.e. everything from a gravel road to a hike-a-bike singletrack goes in the same category. Its track handling is versatile, which probably explains why some people have taken to the app nonetheless.

RideWithGPS route

• Strava: Very close to RWGPS, with the difference that the "gravel" profile routes very aggressively onto trails too. And Strava, of course, does not trouble the user with this — it just states, the same way RWGPS does, that part of the route is "dirt" surface (i.e. anything but asphalt). In the screenshot example Strava routed almost half of the test route along demanding trails; several kilometres of pushing would have been in store… Strava's strength is heatmaps and segments, and a heatmap alone does not tell you much about gravel — although improvements are apparently in the works at Strava.

Strava route

• Komoot and Trailmap are very close to each other on most of my test routes. The biggest difference is in the notes & warnings given to the user about the route: Komoot's notes, such as "restricted access" for a ski trail bed, are hard to interpret (what Komoot is trying to say is that you must not ride there during the winter ski season...), as they have not been adapted for Finland specifically. Trailmap describes the challenging parts of a route very precisely, with the risk of course that some users worry too much. The other bigger difference comes from the maps, where MML's NLS topographic map used by Trailmap brings precision to the map, e.g. showing more reliably when a route runs through the yard of a house.

Komoot route

Trailmap route