Best Hiking Apps for Outdoor Adventures

The Alltrails app is one of the most popular apps out there for hikers and for good reason. The database of trails built into this application is practically endless. To plan your next hike, you can search their trail database by length, difficulty, route type, elevation gain, and user rating. You can search for hikes by proximity, too. 

The basic, free version does not have an offline maps feature. If you get the “Pro” version of this hiking app, however, you can download lots of maps for offline viewing, among other extra features.

Gaia GPS is perhaps the best outdoor navigation app. You can find new trails, create your own routes, record your hikes, and more. 

With the paid version, you can download all your maps for offline viewing when you don’t have cell service or have your phone on airplane mode. The paid version is great for backpackers or advanced hikers hitting long-distance trails.

You can also download a variety of super useful map layers with the upgraded version. One of the coolest map layers we’ve found on Gaia GPS is a cell-phone coverage map. 

The Avenza Maps app is one of the best free navigational apps available. You can download tons of free maps from the Avenza store and use them to navigate without cell service. It has active GPS tracking, too. If you’ve ever wanted the benefits of knowing your precise GPS location while also using a paper map, this is the closest you’re going to get. 

You can search in the Avenza map store by location or keyword to find the maps you need. Some of the maps are free, though many aren’t. You can download maps made by the National Geographic Society and many other big names in the paper map world. 

We used Avenza to download Jonathan Ley’s Continental Divide Trail maps for our thru-hike. There are also maps available for other thru-hikers. Appalachian Trail, anyone?

The National Park Service app is essential for all national park-goers. Use this to explore the best hikes in all the parks, where you can stay, tours, amenities, and more. 

If you don’t know what park you want to visit, you can explore all of them and make a list of where to go next. You can access most of this app’s features offline, too. So when you are deep into the backcountry, you can still navigate.

The Hiking Project app is one of the best hiking apps for finding your next hike. If you’re going to a new location you can quickly download maps for that region and start exploring. This application is similar in functionality to Alltrails but has a couple of cool extra features.

We love the “explore” section of this app. If you’re tired of googling “find hiking trails near me,” open up HP and check out hikes near you. We especially like that HP marks the coolest spots with a gem icon! You can also search for hikes by region or points of interest and HP will suggest the top hikes. 

Komoot is one part social media for outdoor adventurers, and one part route planner and tracking app. It has a lot of features, and it’s free to get started. It will take you a bit of time to figure out how to use all the features, but once you’ve familiarized yourself with everything it’s easy to use.

This is one of the best outdoor apps available. It was originally created with cyclists in mind and is a great resource for planning bike tours. The voice navigation feature is especially nice for cyclists, but we like it for hiking, too. That voice navigation function means you won’t have to pull your phone out at every intersection! 

The Spyglass app uses your phone camera as a viewfinder to overlay a compass onto what you’re seeing in front of you. This highly accurate compass can also be used in conjunction with Spyglass’s pre-loaded maps. Move the phone parallel to the ground and the map and compass will appear. Move it so the camera is pointed ahead and it will shift back into augmented reality display mode. 

Along with the military-spec GPS, this has a speedometer, altimeter, and sextant with a rangefinder. Spyglass will give you the coordinates of your current location and any positions you’re targeting, as well as give you an approximate arrival time. 

Outdooractive is one of our favorite apps out there for exploring local trails. It allows you to get an overview of a trail that looks good and see some pictures of it before you head out. 

You can also use Outdoor Active to create new routes and track your hike while you’re out there. You can create routes on your desktop computer before you go and they’ll sync to your phone. However, you won’t be able to save the GPS map to view later for off-grid access unless you upgrade to the Pro plan. 

Cairn is the ultimate hiking safety app that you can use to have the best hiking experience possible. Use this hiking app to share your route and GPS information with friends and family, so they can follow along remotely as you go. As you’re trekking, this hiking app estimates the time it’ll take to complete your journey and shares that info in real-time. 

The FATMAP interface feels futuristic. You can see a 3D trail map of any area and the trails nearby. Create your own tracks, upload a GPX track, or plan an adventure on a hiking trail already built into a realistic 3D map. You can easily see elevation gain, zoom in and out, check out the backside of that mountain you’re planning to climb, and more. 

PeakVisor app identifies peaks you see while on a hike. While you’re looking out over mountain views, you can point your phone’s camera in the distance and quickly identify the surrounding peaks. 

This is the ideal hiking app for learning the names of those mountains you see on your route, which is, of course, important for navigation. It doesn’t work while you’re offline unless you have the paid version, but you can take pictures of a peak and check the name of it later when you’re reconnected.

The Skyview Lite hiking app lets you identify planets, stars, and constellations in the sky at night. Skyview uses your phone’s built-in GPS to let you know what it is you’re seeing while stargazing by overlaying graphics to highlight astronomical objects. We love this for nights out camping!

Also, check out our guide to navigating by the stars!

With Google Maps you probably already use, you can download offline maps for viewing when you lose coverage. This will probably help you mostly with getting to the trailhead, but Google does have some trails on their maps app as well.