10 Best Hiking Apps of 2026

AllTrails is where most hikers start, and for good reason. AllTrails lists more than 500,000 trails worldwide that you can search by location, skill level and interest, with filters for dog-friendly, kid-friendly, stroller-friendly and wheelchair-friendly routes. Each trail page carries community reviews, photos and recent conditions, which help you judge a hike before you drive to it. The free tier covers search, recording and phone navigation. AllTrails Plus, $35.99 a year on the US App Store, adds downloadable maps for trails, parks and whole areas, wrong-turn alerts, live sharing with family, 3D topo maps and weather, air quality and UV forecasts along the route. The newer Peak tier, $79.99 a year, lets you draw custom routes or edit existing ones and shows heatmaps of recent activity. The gaps: route planning from scratch costs extra, and it lacks the slope, avalanche and land ownership layers that backcountry apps provide.

onX built Backcountry for people who leave the trailhead parking lot and keep going. The Premium membership, $29.99 a year on the US App Store, includes unlimited offline maps, immersive 3D views, custom route building, trail condition reports and local guidebook-quality Adventures for hiking, mountain biking, ski touring and climbing. Its terrain layers stand out: slope angle, slope aspect and active wildfires, plus avalanche forecasts, the Avalanche Terrain Exposure Scale and an avalanche simulator with potential release areas. Elite, $99.99 a year, adds private land boundaries and landowner names across the United States, dispersed camping maps, recent satellite imagery and partner gear discounts. The free version keeps satellite, topo and hybrid maps and trip tracking but limits you to one offline map and leaves out trail descriptions. onX SOS, sold separately at $49.99 a year, adds emergency response coordination. The coverage and land data are focused on the United States.

CalTopo is a planning tool more than a trail finder. It says mountain guides, avalanche educators and search and rescue teams use it, and its layer list shows why: MapBuilder Topo, Forest Service maps, scanned topos, global and weekly satellite imagery, slope angle shading, public lands, parcels, fire history, snow and water gauges, and wind, precipitation and temperature forecasts. You build a route on the web, and it syncs to the phone app, where you can download maps and layers for offline GPS tracking. Shared maps let a group plan together and follow each other with live tracking. Pricing is low: a free account, Mobile at $20 a year, Pro at $50 a year with prints up to 36 by 48 inches, and Desktop at $100 with the desktop application. The catch is the learning curve. There are no curated hikes or reviews, so CalTopo suits people who already know where they want to go.

Gaia GPS is a long-standing choice for backpackers who want to pick their own maps. The free app records, tracks and navigates. Premium, $59.90 a year on the US App Store after a 14-day trial, opens more than 300 layers, including Gaia's own Hike and Overland maps, cell coverage, private land, weather, slope and wildfire, and it lets you download any of them for offline use. You can create routes on satellite, private land, hike and overland maps, add waypoints with photos and follow your track with real-time stats, and routes show on Apple CarPlay for the drive to the trailhead. The Outside+ bundle adds Trailforks Pro, MapMyFitness MVP, Outside TV and Backpacker magazine. The tradeoffs are price, at roughly twice AllTrails Plus, the need for an Outside account, and a layer menu that rewards experience. Hikers who want a trail picked for them will find AllTrails easier.

komoot is the most automatic route planner on this list. Pick a start and finish, choose hiking, and the planner builds a route on trails it rates for your sport, showing surface, difficulty, distance and an elevation profile. Turn-by-turn voice navigation then talks you through junctions, even on small paths, and offline topo maps download with one tap. Community Highlights, shown as red dots, mark viewpoints, peaks and cafes worth a detour. Your first region is free forever, and a one-time World Pack, $29.99 on the US App Store, unlocks offline maps and navigation everywhere. Premium, $59.99 a year, adds a multi-day planner with places to stay, weather along the route, live tracking with battery level and ETA, sport-specific maps and 3D maps. Routes sync to Apple Watch, Garmin and Wahoo devices. US hikers will find fewer community tours than in Europe, and trail reviews are thinner than on AllTrails.

Footpath does one job very well: you trace a line on the map with your finger and it snaps to trails and roads, then shows distance and a color-coded elevation and slope profile. That makes it the quickest way to answer how far and how steep before a hike. The free Basic plan creates routes, syncs them across devices and saves up to five. Footpath Elite, $23.90 a year or $1.99 a month billed annually after a 7-day trial, adds unlimited saved routes, premium topo maps such as Footpath Topo, USGS, OS and IGN, 3D terrain, offline map downloads, cue sheets, offline turn-by-turn voice navigation, PDF map printing and export to Apple Watch, Garmin, Wahoo, Coros and Suunto. It also logs GPS activities. What it lacks is discovery: there is no trail catalog or community reviews, so you need to know the area or pair it with another app.

FarOut is built for long-distance trails, and it works differently from the rest of this list. Instead of a general map, you buy navigation guides, more than 200 of them covering over 50,000 miles of hiking, biking, rafting and paddling routes. Each guide uses official data from partner trail organizations, authors and publishers and runs fully offline, with waypoints for junctions, water sources, road crossings, trailheads and town services. A Check-in feature lets family see where you are. You can buy a single guide as a lifetime purchase or subscribe to FarOut Unlimited for every guide: $15 a month, $72 for a six-month Season Pass, or $96 a year, which includes 100 Points worth $100 toward lifetime guides. For a weekend hike near home, FarOut is the wrong tool, since coverage centers on named long-distance routes.

Outdooractive grew out of the European tourism world, and its strength is official content. The app collects officially approved routes from trail wardens, mountain guides and thousands of industry partners, covering hiking, trekking, trail running, ski touring and more. Its map catalog includes official topo maps in 25 countries, among them Ordnance Survey Landranger and Explorer in the UK, USGS in the United States, Swisstopo, IGN in France and New Zealand's land information maps, along with the Alpine Club maps for the Alps. You can plan routes with distance, elevation and terrain data, save routes or whole areas offline and share your live location with BuddyBeacon. Pro costs $29.99 a year on the US App Store and Pro+ $61.99 a year, both renewing annually. For US hikers the catalog and community are smaller than AllTrails, and the app has only 452 ratings on the US App Store, so it is best kept for trips abroad.

Strava is a training log first and a hiking app second, and it belongs here for hikers who also run or ride. It records hikes alongside more than 50 other sport types and syncs with Apple Watch, Fitbit, Garmin and thousands of other apps and devices. Its Routes tool uses de-identified Strava activity to recommend popular routes, including local hiking routes, scenic trails and long climbs, and you can draw your own. Saving routes for offline use and drawing custom routes are subscription features, along with segment leaderboards, advanced training analysis and Fitness Score. The subscription costs $11.99 a month or $79.99 a year on the US App Store after a 30-day trial. A real-time location sharing feature adds safety on solo outings. For hiking alone, Strava is thin: it has no topo layer choice, trail reviews or backcountry tools, and the yearly price is the highest here.

Avenza Maps solves a narrow problem well: putting a GPS dot on a real paper-style map. The free app opens a large Map Store with content from National Geographic, the National Park Service, the US Forest Service, USGS, NOAA and BLM, many of them free, and every map works offline once downloaded. It shows your real-time position and direction, records GPS tracks, measures distances and lets you drop placemarks with photos and notes, with KML, GPX and CSV support. You can also import your own geospatial PDF, GeoPDF and GeoTIFF maps, such as a park handout. Avenza Maps Plus, $34.99 a year on the US App Store, raises custom imports to 20 and adds geofences, and Pro at $169.99 a year targets professional field work and is required for commercial and government use. There is no trail search or route planner, so Avenza is a companion to a planning app rather than a replacement.