Komoot: Route Planning Built on Trails People Actually Walked

Komoot is what happens when a route planner is designed by people who care what the ground is made of. Ask it for a bike route and it does not just draw a line: it tells you how many kilometers are gravel, how many are singletrack, how much climbing is involved, and where the hard bits are. Then it hands you turn-by-turn voice navigation that keeps working when your phone loses signal halfway up a hill.

It is the rare outdoors tool that is genuinely useful before, during, and after the trip.

What is Komoot?

Komoot started in Germany in 2010 with a straightforward complaint: mapping apps were built for cars, and everyone who left the tarmac was being served an afterthought. Routing engines optimized for driving will happily send a cyclist down a dual carriageway or route a hiker along a shoulder.

Komoot rebuilt the routing from the trail up. Its engine works on OpenStreetMap data, but it weights paths by surface and way type, and it asks you what you are doing before it plans anything. Road cycling, gravel, mountain biking, hiking, running: each gets a different route across the same terrain, because those are genuinely different problems.

Layered on top of that is the part that makes it stick. Every route users record becomes a Tour, and users can mark specific spots as Highlights, a lookout, a swimming hole, a stretch of trail worth the climb, a bakery that opens early. Those Highlights accumulate. Over the years they have turned into a collectively maintained map of what is actually good, which is a different and much harder thing than a map of what exists.

The planner will then use those Highlights when routing. Ask for a loop from a given point and it will bias toward the paths people have flagged as worth riding, rather than the mathematically shortest line.

The community leans heavily European, so trail coverage is deepest in Germany, Austria, Italy and the Alps generally. But the base routing works worldwide, and coverage in North America, the UK and elsewhere has grown considerably.

What can you do with Komoot?

• Plan a route by sport and fitness level. Pick hiking, road cycling, gravel, mountain biking or running, set your fitness, and the route and time estimate adjust accordingly.
• See the surface breakdown before you go. Every planned route shows a bar chart of way types and surfaces, so you know in advance if you are about to ride 12 kilometers of loose gravel on 25mm tires.
• Read the elevation profile. The climb is plotted along the route, and you can hover any point to see exactly where the pain is.
• Drag the route to reshape it. Grab the line anywhere and pull it toward a road or trail you would rather use. The routing snaps and recalculates.
• Browse Highlights. Zoom around a region and see what other users have marked as worth stopping for, with their photos and comments.
• Follow other people’s Tours. Search a region for recorded routes, then copy one into your own planner and modify it.
• Navigate turn by turn with voice. The mobile app gives spoken directions, including offline, which is the whole point.
• Record and share your own rides. Track a Tour, add photos, and it becomes part of the map for whoever plans there next.
• Sync to a bike computer or watch. Routes push to Garmin, Wahoo and similar devices, or export as GPX for anything else.

Tips to get the most out of it

Set your fitness level honestly. It changes both the route and the time estimate. Overstating it produces plans that look fine on screen and feel awful at hour four.

Plan in the browser, navigate on the phone. The web planner has vastly more room for dragging waypoints and studying the elevation profile. Build there, and it appears in the app automatically.

Check the surface bar, not just the distance. A 40 kilometer route that is 60 percent unpaved is a completely different afternoon from a 40 kilometer road route, and the distance figure hides that entirely.

Search Highlights before you plan the route. Find the three or four things worth seeing in an area first, then build a route through them. This produces much better days out than planning A to B and hoping.

Buy the offline maps for where you actually go. Signal disappears in exactly the terrain you bought this for. Download the region before you leave the house, not at the trailhead on one bar.

Cross-check anything remote. Community trail data is excellent where the community is dense and thinner where it is not. For genuinely wild routing, verify against an official map before committing.

If you like Komoot, also try…

• Falling Fruit: a crowd-mapped guide to foraging spots, for the snack half of the trip.
• ShadeMap: see exactly where the sun and shadow will fall along your route at any time of day.
• Windy: the weather forecast worth checking before committing to a long ride.
• Dark Site Finder: for planning where to end up after dark, away from the light pollution.

More ways to get lost productively in Maps & Exploration.