Review: AllTrails Hiking App

Very few things let you anticipate adventure like poring over paper maps scattered across the kitchen table. This seldom happens anymore. These days, most of us plan what we're going to do and how we're going to get there using online tools, like AllTrails. There's something to be said for having room to eat breakfast while you plan next summer's adventures, but I do miss those old USGS topo quadrants.

There are at least a dozen mapping apps to help plan your routes through the wilderness, whether you're hiking, backpacking, mountain biking, overlanding, off-roading, or hunting. AllTrails is one of the biggest and most widely used hiking apps available.

AllTrails doesn't just help you find and plan routes. It also tracks your progress as you hike, and it has a strong community of users rating trails and uploading photos. You can follow other hikers. If you go for the paid versions, you can download offline maps, get alerts when you're off route, and yes, even print maps to cover the kitchen table.

What Is AllTrails?

Courtesy of AllTrails

The AllTrails app is a way to plan, navigate, and record your hikes, offering tools to search for popular trails as well as trails generated by the AllTrails community. You can read reviews, ratings, and (with the paid versions) preview trails in 3D.

Part of AllTrails' success lies in its ease of use, which makes it approachable for beginning hikers. Maps are clear, and trails are easy to see and visually follow, even if you're not familiar with topographical maps. AllTrails does a good job of helping you find hiking trails near you, get to them, and navigate your way down the trail and back again.

More advanced hikers will likely use AllTrails more for planning and recording trips rather on-trail navigation, and it's good at both of those things, though most of the power-user tools require a subscription. Considering how much I used to spend on topo quadrants every year, I've always considered online maps quite the bargain.

Using AllTrails

Courtesy of AllTrails

Before I get into using AllTrails, remember that GPS signals can be lost, phone batteries run out, and a dropped phone is a useless brick. For these reasons and more, WIRED does not recommend relying solely on a smartphone app for wilderness navigation. Always carry a paper map and a compass, and know how to use them. That said, apps are great for planning and can be helpful on the trail, provided you have a backup as well. (You can even still get 7.5-minute topographical maps from USGS).

AllTrails has a website you can use to plan, but I prefer the apps. For planning I like the iPad app, while on trail I use the Android version on my phone. So far as I've been able to tell in testing, there's no difference between the various ways you can access AllTrails. Almost all the features are available, no matter which interface you use.

Once you open it, you'll be greeted by a basic search interface you can use to find trails. This really is the heart of what makes AllTrails useful—the search and filtering tools. By default, the apps will use your location to pull up nearby trails. Then you can filter trails based on difficulty, distance, elevation gain, type (loop, out-and-back, point-to-point), season, whether a trail is kid-friendly or dog-friendly or is stroller or wheelchair accessible. There are even a dozen or so filtering options for what you want to see on the trail, whether it's waterfalls, wildflowers, caves, beaches, or even pub walks.

I primarily tested it as a hiking app, but you can also search for mountain biking trails, running routes, scenic drives, paddling routes, birding, and many more activities. I use the birding option a fair bit. AllTrails is probably using eBird hot spot data in conjunction with its trail info, as most of its good birding trail suggestions match local eBird hot spots.

Courtesy of AllTrails

I've tested about 10 trail apps now and have consistently found that each of them has different suggestions for my area. There is always an overlap—what I think of as the big five trails that every app lists—and then each app typically has at least one trail the others miss. AllTrails is no different, covering all the popular local spots but also suggesting a trail I have not seen in any other app. The moral of the story here is that if you really want to find all your local trails, you're going to need more than one app. Or you could join a local hiking club, which in many cases may include trails that locals like to keep to themselves (at least that's the case where I live).

Thanks to some ongoing private-vs.-public-property disputes in my area, finding trails here is more challenging than other places I've lived. I was happy to see that AllTrails did not suggest the “trail” that's currently in dispute, as sending more people down it isn't going to help make it public right now (it's technically closed). That's a win for AllTrails.

Once you've found a hike, you can use AllTrails to navigate and record your hike using GPS. The app gives you a live position on the trail map (provided you have signal), and you can see how much elevation you've gained, the distance you've hiked, and an estimate of how long you have remaining. I find the latter particularly helpful, especially when combined with a photo-planning app like Photo Pills, which tells me what time golden hour will start—so I know what time I need to get where I'm going, and AllTrails can estimate how long it will take to get there.

After the hike, AllTrails can give you info about your pace and average speed, which is invaluable info for planning future trips. I don't use a smartwatch anymore, but AllTrails can integrate with Apple Watch, Garmin, and, for the stat-obsessed, Strava.

AllTrails Plus and Peak

AllTrails offers two paid subscription levels, Plus which is $36 per year, and Peak, which is $80 per year. I've tested both and can say without reservation that Plus is well worth the money. The free version of AllTrails does not include offline maps, an absolute necessity in my opinion. For that reason alone I suggest anyone interested in AllTrails who is even vaguely serious about hiking should get at least Plus. Here's a quick breakdown of the key features in each subscription level.

Of the features available in Peak, the two that sell it for me are the route-planning tools (I would lump creating your own routes and customizing existing ones as the same feature)—which are excellent, intuitive, and easy to use—and the community heat maps. The latter I was not expecting to use, but then I realized that the heat map data is great way to find some solitude. It's no guarantee, of course, but skipping the dark-purple trails (the highest-traffic trails on the heat map) is a good way to avoid the crowds.

It’s also possible to cobble together different free online tools to do much of what AllTrails Plus and Peak offer. For example, Google offers free downloads of offline maps. But I find the effort required to do so is not worth the saved money. Plus is, after all, less than a cup of coffee per month. AllTrails even offers some discounts. For example, you can pick up a National Parks pass ($80) with a Plus subscription for just $99, making the cost of Plus just $20 for your first a year. That said, I prefer the route-planning tools available with a Peak subscription and recommend it over Plus to more serious hikers and backpackers.