Given the recent Strava price increase announcement, and the fact most people kept the premium for routes only, creating this as place for Strava routes alternatives for search purposes.
If others have alternatives, pay or free please list below and we will update this post.
If you want to create a route online, upload to Garmin/Wahoo, and then let it handle the turn by turn directions - which of the RWGPS packages would be required?
Recently posted this on another thread, with some minor edits:
I paid for RWGPS in 2016 when I started cycling, to dual record the DeathRide. The offline maps are a premium feature, and a great feature. Back then another feature for Garmin 520 users was downloading a route with the RWGPS turn-by-turn data. But my 530 doesn’t need it. The largest clubs I’m with has a premium account, and I still use RWGPS to modify a route and then export it. The free RWGPS account works well enough.
Nowadays I prefer Strava maps and routing.
One example - I did a gravel event on the CA Central Coast and the Strava route correctly displayed the 2 gravel sections, while the RWGPS route only displayed 1 gravel section (6 miles) and it missed the other 8 mile section of gravel road. They both claim to use OSM but Strava must be supplementing the data.
The Strava route has the lunch stop and is .6 miles longer. Sadly the Eroica team published two routes and I loaded the wrong one and missed the lunch stop on the ride
Note that Gaia is part of Outside now, so I question committing to that platform.
I do use Gaia heavily for hiking/climbing type activities where it really excels. I have a few years left on that sub and will see if outside has ruined by the time I need to renew.
I can do that with the free version with some limitations, namely it won’t let you edit the cue that get imbedded in the .fit file for the route. It genreates those automatically. It also won’t let you edit the expected pace and sticks in something like 5mph.
I’ve had many instances in the other direction where RWGPS says a section is gravel and I know it’s not. When making new routes, I always cross reference gravelmap.com. Too many experiences ending up on gravel while riding 23s.
Maybe they are pulling the data at different times of the year and someone updated the surface between data grabs? Weird
Before rwgps came out with surface types, i actually suggested to them incorporate gravel map into their data…they were all “ we already got surface type covered, coming soon”. Too bad As osm is not anywhere near as good as gm.
I have a premium subscription in Komoot and I just love it. Planning a multi-day trip is easy as Komoot adjusts the daily routes according to accommodation etc. I can see all the national bicycle routes on the map. And they just introduced Google Street View which helps to check the surfaces on your planned routes. You can also upload a gps file and start planning from that.
[edit: I use Garmin Edge as my main navigation tool while riding and Komoot uploads all the planned routes automatically to my Garmin Connect account.]
bikerouter.de looks interesting. Haven’t used it much though. It creates different routes from A to B based on the chosen profile (an endless list of road, gravel, mtb etc profiles).
Until Garmin starts leveraging the data it has about routing for heat maps, any competitor to Strava is going to be worse and provide worse rides, on average.
That said, I used a gift card back in 2020 and for some reason I have free Strava for life now.
You can see a Heat map in Garmin Connect while creating a route. But it’s still based just on Garmin data. Strava has data from Garmin, Suunto, Polar etc. On the other hand in Garmin you can see ride specific heat maps (road, gravel, mtb) which should help you with creating a better ride for yourself.
This occurred to me while reading the Strava pricing thread, but I didn’t want to go OT.
While I quite like the social aspect of Strava, and I do use certain segments as fitness tests, what I mainly use it for is route mapping.
I’ve tried Komoot and found it quite unwieldy, though it seems quite a powerful tool, potentially at least. Does anybody have a) any other good route planning apps, and/or b) tips for getting the best out of Komoot?