Walking apps in Britain: maps, offline use and GPX compared

On paper the comparison is quick: OS Maps costs £35.99 a year [1], Footpath Elite £21.49 a year on its App Store listing [2] and Outdooractive Pro £26.99 on its own listing [3]. The trouble is that these prices do not buy the same thing. One is the national mapping agency’s own app, another lists Ordnance Survey among the maps of 25 countries, a third draws on three other map sources. So let us sort them on three questions, and only three: which map appears on screen, what can you download to set off without a signal, and what happens to a GPX track you import or export.

Three criteria, read from the publishers’ pages

A walking app shows a map, lets you draw or import a route, and puts a dot on it. What sets one apart comes down to three lines of small print: the base map (Ordnance Survey or something else), what downloads for offline use, and access to GPX, the exchange format for tracks [4]. Price comes last, because it only means something once those three lines are read. We stick to the publishers’ own pages, the App Store listings and the mountain rescue and weather authorities, read on 5 November 2026 (a few help pages on 28 October 2026). Offers change, so the date matters.

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OS Maps: the national map, with offline behind Premium

OS Maps is the app of Ordnance Survey, which describes it as Britain’s ‘gold-standard national map service’ [1]. The free tier gives OS Standard Mapping. Premium opens all 607 OS Leisure maps, adds topographic maps of the USA, New Zealand and Australia, and is where ‘Download offline routes and maps’ sits [1]. Every route created in the app has a downloadable GPX file for premium members [5]. Importing is possible too: the Ordnance Survey guide says GPX files can be imported directly, but does not say whether that needs Premium [5].

Premium is £35.99 for a year or £7.49 for a month, with a 14-day free trial for new customers; the App Store listing gives the same two prices [1, 6].

Paid monthly, a year of Premium comes to £89.88. The annual plan saves £53.89 on that, or about £3.00 a month. Someone who needs the offline maps for a single trip can pay for one month at £7.49 instead.

Mountain Rescue England and Wales announced in March 2023 that Ordnance Survey had made the OS Maps app available to all 47 of its local volunteer teams, and its article names OS Maps as the app it prefers for wild areas. The same article still recommends a paper map that needs no battery as a back-up [7].

Outdooractive and Footpath: other publishers, other maps

Outdooractive’s App Store listing advertises official topographic maps of 25 countries, Ordnance Survey among them, plus its own map for France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland [3]. Offline use is a Pro or Pro+ feature, and the publisher’s help page warns that downloading a map is not enough to navigate offline: the route has to be downloaded too [8]. On the publisher’s page the prices are in euros: Pro is €2.50 a month or €29.99 a year, Pro+ €5.00 a month or €59.99 a year, and the page calls the displayed prices indicative. The UK App Store listing shows Pro at £26.99 and Pro+ at £53.99 without a period [9, 3]. The plans page lists ‘Download GPX files’ without naming the plan, and says nothing of GPX import [9].

Anyone who used ViewRanger will recognise the family. Outdooractive announced its purchase on 19 May 2020 [10], and access to the ViewRanger app and website was switched off at the end of February 2022; ViewRanger’s site says data can be moved to an Outdooractive account [11].

Footpath lists three base maps: Footpath Outdoors, USGS Topo for the US and Canada, and OpenCycleMap. The Elite plan adds offline topographic maps and ‘GPX import and export’, along with TCX and FIT export for Garmin and Wahoo devices [2]. The App Store listing shows Elite at £3.49 a month or £21.49 a year, and a single-route pass at £1.99. The publisher’s pricing page shows no price in the version read, so the listing is the only source for these figures [2, 12].

Komoot and AllTrails: pay by region or by plan

The publisher’s page does not name komoot’s base map, and the App Store listing mentions topographic layers including Ordnance Survey, Swisstopo and USGS [13]. The Premium page promises offline maps that cover the entire globe [14], while the listing sells access by single region, region bundle or World Pack. It shows the World Pack at £29.99 and Premium lines at £4.99, £7.99 and £59.99, with no billing period, so the figure to trust is the one shown at checkout [13]. GPX export needs the start region to be unlocked [15]. Bending Spoons announced on 20 March 2025 that it had closed the acquisition of komoot [16], which can change offers: reread them before buying.

AllTrails reserves offline maps for its Plus and Peak plans [17]; the UK listing shows Plus at £35.99 and Peak at £79.99, without saying for how long [18]. Any member, even on the free plan, can import and download track files [19, 20]. The listing does not name the base map, only ‘topo maps and trail maps in 3D’ for Plus: check it in the app before paying.

GPX: the format that links the apps

GPX, short for GPS Exchange Format, is a light XML data format designed for exchanging GPS data between applications and web services [4]. It is what lets you prepare a track in one app and send it to another or to a hiking GPS. It carries no map: an imported track appears on the base map of the app that opens it. Our guide to planning the route, the map and the GPX track sets out what a file contains.

An app replaces neither the paper map nor your judgement

Mountain Rescue England and Wales says not to rely on your phone to get you out of trouble, because many areas of the mountains have no signal; it lists a map and compass, a head torch and a whistle among the essentials [21]. It adds that many accidents happen towards the end of the day, when both you and your phone are low on energy [22], and that GPS navigation can drain the battery quickly, especially where the signal is weak [23]. A Met Office page carries the view of the MREW chair, who writes that relying on a phone app for your map and route ‘can be disastrous’, and urges walkers to carry a conventional map and compass and know how to use them [24].

The rule to keep fits in one sentence: pay for the map you need without signal, download it at home, and keep the paper map in the rucksack.

Julien de Jurquet

Campervans, motorhomes, cycling and calculators

Julien de Jurquet writes for Outfarer about campervans, motorhomes, cycling and calculators. He reads instruction manuals to the very end and never lets a figure through without its unit, so that your choices rest on sums rather than promises.

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