Trailmap now covers Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Estonia properly. The default map in each country is a hybrid of OpenStreetMap and the national mapping agency's topographic data, and the app and its guides are available in six languages. Maps and routing for the rest of Europe have been in place since spring 2026.

If you have not come across it before: Trailmap is a map and route planning app for people who spend their time off the tarmac – mountain and gravel biking, trail running, hiking. It started in Finland, and it is built on OpenStreetMap.

Finland: 31 000 km of trails mapped

Finland has over 31 000 km of classified singletrack in OSM, mapped by more than a thousand people over twelve years. In Europe only Italy is ahead in absolute terms, and per capita nobody is close. No company and no agency did this. Mappers did, one trail at a time. I wrote about it in detail in the OSM mapping 2025 post.

"Trail mapping" is too narrow a word for what came out of it. It started with mountain biking and singletrack, but the same work produced the data a gravel ride or a run is planned on: forest roads, recreational paths, surfaces, widths. In Finland mountain biking and gravel are more of a continuum than two separate sports, and many of the most active mappers ride both. So the goal is broader than trails – to make OSM a genuinely good map for moving through forest and open country, especially by bike.

Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Estonia have the same ingredients: the terrain, public access rights of one kind or another, and national open data every bit as good as Finland's. What is thinner is the OSM trail data. A lot of the mapping effort has gone into closed platforms instead, where it serves one app and cannot be reused.

What keeps mappers going

There is no single answer. People keep mapping when several things line up at once: they see their own edit on the map straight away, they see the router take it into account, they get something out of what they mapped themselves, they notice they are not alone – and they have an app that is genuinely better than the alternatives.

In Finland these fell into place gradually, starting in 2013 with one mapper in Tampere who set up a trail map style that rebuilt every night. Trailmap works on the same principle. OSM data is fetched every morning and the map and the routing are rebuilt from it. Tags are read precisely, including ones most apps ignore completely. The hybrid map combines OSM and the national topographic map, because neither is sufficient on its own. Routing profiles can be chosen and fine-tuned, and they use exactly the attributes a mapper adds.

That side of it is now in place in all four countries. A mapping community is not something software creates, though. I can share what worked in Finland and support the mapping, but each country needs local people willing to take a real role.

One piece is still missing on the software side as well. Tagging is harder than it needs to be, and tagging is the part that matters most. I am working on an open source project called BikeComplete to make it easier. It is unfinished, more on it later.

Four countries, four different starting points

The Finnish approach does not transfer as-is to any of them.

Sweden has the forest, the terrain and a large riding community across several disciplines. Gravel riders and people who move between sports are the closest fit for what Trailmap already does well. A lot of the MTB trail knowledge sits in closed platforms rather than in OSM, and that is the gap worth closing.

Norway is known abroad for its mountains, but a large share of the everyday riding happens in the forest and rolling terrain of the east and the south. That is where OSM mapping and Trailmap are strongest today, and the natural place to begin.

Denmark has a gravel scene of its own character: farmland, small roads and quiet lanes. What matters most in the map data there is surface and width on minor roads, and that is well within what OSM can carry.

Estonia has forest and quiet gravel within easy reach of where people live. In riding terms the starting point resembles Denmark's more than Norway's, and the same map and routing work applies.

What you get today

A map that reads OSM properly instead of drawing every path as the same line, combined with your own country's topographic data. Routing profiles for mountain biking, gravel, road and on foot that use surface, width and difficulty rather than guessing at them. Route analysis that flags what mappers have actually recorded. The app, the guides and the support material in your own language.

Trailmap is freemium, and I will be straight about where the line runs. The map itself is free – all of it, in every country. The premium features built on top of it are what pay for the development, and I have written separately about why it is set up that way. The other half matters more here: everything that gets mapped goes into OpenStreetMap, where it is free for anyone to use, including apps that compete with mine. That is the whole point of doing it this way.

What I am asking

You do not get into a new country through advertising. You get in through the first users.

• Try it where you ride, and tell me what is wrong or missing.
• If you map, tell me what gets in the way. That feedback shapes BikeComplete.
• If you know local riders, clubs, events or mappers who should hear about this, get in touch.

One sentence is enough: support@trailmap.fi.