Ride With GPS and Komoot are two mapping tools used to discover, plan, organize, and share bike adventures. In this story we compare them head to head and share our thoughts on which one may be a better option for each type of riding and planning.
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1. Overview
2. Pricing
OVERVIEW: Ride With GPS vs Komoot
White both tools target the same overall goal of planning adventures using a map, the focus of Ride With GPS and Komoot are pretty distinct. Let's break down the focus and audience of each platform which will translate into the unique features they offer.
Ride With GPS
Ride With GPS is for map creators who want more advanced tools to create and organize highly detailed rides and routes. It's an incredibly powerful too for those who spend hours drawing lines, cataloging POIs, analyzing rides, and take pride in architecting detailed routes using many different routing tools at the same time. You simply won't find this level of detailed organization and customization in Komoot.
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Komoot
Komoot is focused on crowd-sourced adventuring, deep social sharing, and photo-centric story telling around the globe. For those looking to follow the stories and adventure highlights of explorers all over the world and then plan the adventure yourself using the community's favorite highlights as your guide, Komoot is your best friend. NOTE: Many of the strengths of Komoot are heavily dependent on user volume. Komoot currently has a massive presence in Europe but has a significantly smaller base in the USA which makes the benefit of user generated content less significant in many places.
Pricing
Ride With GPS has 3 monthly tiers: Free, Basic, & Premium. The Basic plan is $7.99/mo and gives you advanced route planning on the mobile app. The Premium plan is $9.99/mo and gives you the full suite of web-based tools. The Free version allows for basic route planning and ride recording.
Komoot has two pricing models: Komoot Maps and Komoot Premium. Maps are all one-time payments and give you permanent access to voice navigation and offline maps for the geographies that you pay for ($3.99 for one region, $8.99 for a region bundle, or $29.99 to permanently unlock the entire world). Komoot Premium is $5.99/month and includes World Map access, personal collections, live-tracking, multi-day planner, on-tour weather, safety contacts, and more.
Holiday 2024 Promotion: Get 15 Months of Ride With GPS for the Price of 12.
Route Editing
We'll get deeper into this section with each platform's "Unique Features" but for now I'll just say that this is an area where Ride With GPS dominates. Both the desktop and mobile route planner are extremely easy to use and are packed with high powered advanced tools unmatched by Komoot.
Komoot's route editor is much more tedious and and has a significantly simpler toolbox to use when trying to meticulously plan perfect routes. It's a slower process with fewer options to customize.
Points of Interest (POIs) & Route Highlights
Ride With GPS's Points of Interest (POIs) are created for each individual Ride With GPS account. You can add POIs to any of your maps for any reason to mark anything you want. They are uniquely built into the maps that you choose (or dynamically available in a POI library if you use a Club account) and they won't show up in the map building tool for the general public unless they're viewing your unique route.
Komoot calls these "Highlights" and they're 100% crowd sourced and built on community generated content for everyone to use. The downside is that you can't add private POIs such as "Camping in my uncle's backyard" or temporary POIs like "Race day headquarters" but the upside is that the entire globe is covered in the adventuring community's best route highlights, photos, and tips for anyone to go exploring. Every Highlight and photo is rated by the community which makes planning incredible adventures significantly easier.
Social Sharing & Adventure Discovery
Komoot owns this category. The entire platform is built around photo-first adventure discovery, community generated map highlights, and ready-to-ride collections of the world's best places to explore.
The social feed is deeply inspirational and the biggest names in gravel biking and bikepacking are constantly sharing their ride galleries, map libraries, and tips to take their adventures and do them yourself.
While Ride With GPS is a really powerful planing tool, its strength is less in discovering new adventures through community sourced mapping highlights. Ride With GPS's tools like "Inspect" and "Heatmaps" are really great for finding new places to ride, but they end at drawing great lines on a map. Trail level photo content is sparse and community sourced tips are non existent outside of individually created maps.
Similarities
We don't dig into every feature in this article. Several features exist in both platforms and are at least comparable. "Surface Types" is a feature of both platforms and I haven't found it to have any accuracy in the region that I live in either platform. Both platforms have Safety Tracking and Privacy Zones which are an important part of staying staying safe on and off the bike. There are many other features they both share.
Now let's break down their unique features they each have.
Ride With GPS Unique Features
Ride With GPS has an extensive toolset for advanced route editing, adventure planning, and deep organization. Let's break down the main features are exclusive to Ride With GPS.
Global & Personal Heatmaps
Heatmaps are indispensable for finding out where everyone else rides (Global Heatmap) and seeing a live log of where you've ridden (Personal Heatmap). If you're exploring a new area, there's no better way to find some of the most popular routes than seeing where the community is doing the most riding via Heatmaps.
Inspect Tool
Touch a point on a map and see the most popular routes going through that spot. Without the context of community generated photos and tips, I don't find it very useful as it only shows personally created routes that get a lot of engagement but this doesn't actually aggregate any crowd sourced information about that route.
Ride Metrics
If you like analyzing post-ride data, you're going to love Ride With GPS's deep stack of metrics. There are over 26 metrics that are fully customizable during your ride and their post-ride metrics are going to give you a lot of data to pour over when you're done.
Bike Maintenance Log
A fun way to keep track of maintenance, repairs, and upgrades for each of your bikes.
Custom Cues
Create cues that say whatever you want them to. These are supported in TCX files for Garmin devices, Wahoo devices, and the mobile app will read them aloud just like a normally generated turn left turn right cue.
Clubs & Organizations
If you're an organization or club, this is the clear winner for organizing, customizing, and embedding various route libraries and POIs that can dynamically be pulled into maps of your choosing. Colors, layers, images, categories, routes, links, and POIs can all be fully customized to your needs and the ability to give free navigation and offline use for your members/customers.
Plus a Lot More
Both the deskop and mobile applications have a lot more tools and custom configurations at every point of your process from planning, to riding, to organizing and they're regularly adding more. I don't expect them to slow down adding new tools and features in the future as they're hyper focused on helping map lovers and organizers plan using as much data and efficiency as possible.
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Komoot Unique Features
Komoot's strength is less in mapping tools, metrics, and organization and more in social and community tools. Tools that inspire users to explore the world and have the most fun getting from point A to point B.
Trail View
This is the "Google Streetview" of off-grid trails. If you've ever studied satellite images trying to guess what the surface is like and if the trail is actually passable, Trail View is going to be a life saver. Komoot uses artificial intelligence to pull all public photos of trails and pin them to where they were taken on the map for everyone to use. The result is trail-level photos of any place any Komoot user has taken a public photo of a trail on a route. No more guessing whether that obscure line on a map is a hidden gem or a total bust.
Pioneer & Expert Gamification
Base on community cues and up-votes on Highlights, photos, and tips, Komoot gives points for all the activities and regions that you've recorded activity. This is a fun way to build your expertise and social influence within the app as well as finding the best adventurers to follow
Sport-Based Route & Highlight Searching
Use the Discovery tool to select routes and highlights based on the sport you're interested in such as road cycling, gravel riding, and bikepacking
On Tour Weather
Plan daylong or multi-day adventures and see temperature, precipitation, wind direction, and sunshine for any point in time on the map.
Crowd-Sourced Highlights
This is mentioned earlier in the article but i's worth repeating here because Komoot Highlights isn't just a similarity to Ride With GPS's Points of Interest, it's a it's really a unique feature that makes Komoot stand alone. Highlights is a rich user generated global library of the best places to ride, stop, and explore. They're all filterable by sport type, voted on by the community at large, and logged with rider tips so that you have the easiest time having the best experience from point A to point B.
Personal Collections
This is another feature that does exist in Ride With GPS but I think Komoot does it much better. Personal collections are a way to show off your rides, routes, highlights, story, and photos all in one beautiful place for the world to see in their Komoot social feed (or embed on your website). For other users, these are an incredible way to discover new places to explore and be inspired by brilliant photography and gorgeous bikescapes.
So Which is Better, Komoot or Ride Withg GPS?
Cut to the chase...you want to know which is better right? Well of course it depends. Their features and tools are built for similar but different audiences and the best platform is going to be the one that meets your planning and riding goals.
Ride With GPS Wins If...
You want to build a library of personal (or organizational) mapping assets that you can customize and organize however you want
You care about advanced planning and analyzing using the most data available
You prefer customization, tweaking, and analyzing over social sharing
You are a club or organization who needs advanced organizational and embedding tools for your members.
Komoot Wins If...
You want to use the community's favorite crowd-sourced highlights, tips, and photos to plan your routes.
You're looking for ready-to-ride collections of routes, highlights, and photos from other users' libraries
Sharing the best parts of your ride and discovering the best parts of others' rides is more important than personal customization tools and metrics
You only need offline maps and voice navigation and don't want to be locked into a paid subscription
