^ I was going to post a link to Josh’s piece… Well worth reading before investing any time or effort in Komoot IMHO.
Just so OP is clear, people who bought the “World Pack” before the takeover get a lot of features included for life(?) with that one off purchase. Many of those features are now behind the Premium paywall for newcomers.
So whilst I’m quite happy with Komoot, that is at least in part because I paid £20 several years ago, and haven’t paid another penny since. That makes it seem like particularly good value.
If you’re joining today, as far as I can tell, you would really need to pay for premium for Komoot to be remotely functional. That is definitely less appealing. Under the current model, the free version seems completely non-viable.
Is it worth it? I still use it, so it’s clearly not completely terrible. But I’m not convinced I’d feel like I was getting good value if I had to pay for premium. Mostly I use it for importing existing gpx files, or plotting routes where I already have the exact route in mind. Neither use case really justifies the cost over free/no additional cost alternatives (e.g. Strava if you already subscribe). I’m also slightly adverse to paying for something where most of the value is provided altruistically (Komoot relies on OSM base mapping and “Community Contributions”).
What I might pay for is if I regularly plotted brand new routes, relied on the built-in routing algorithms, and was consistently happy with the results. I’m definitely not convinced Komoot really ticks that box - it seems prone to detours onto what I presume are deemed to be more “suitable” routes, when I would prefer a more direct route. And there is no way to modify that behaviour for a given activity type (although “road bike”/“bike”/“bike touring” etc are all separate and the algorithm does appear to have different weightings). I know some apps let you choose if you want faster versus quieter routes or similar.
I would like a ‘prefer hilly’ or ‘prefer flat’ option. I’d also like a road ride to prefer roads, not canal paths or very short jaunts off a road only to join again.
My use case is kind of split, in Finland I know the roads better than Komoot and there aren’t that many good options around especiallly if you prefer asphalt (and if I need help, I use government-provided open data on the road network), whereas around Berlin (near Komoot central, as it happens) there are so many nice roads to choose from (as long as you don’t need hills) that in areas where I don’t ride that often, the highlights are really useful for reminding me which road this was again, plus I have my own downvotes for the few roads I wouldn’t want to ride again (really wish these were easier to see in the UI).
I guess I’ll keep using Komoot as long as it doesn’t frustrate me too much (the Bikepacking piece’s critique really applies to tech+capitalism in general so I don’t see why Komoot should be singled out, of course the odds are in favour of enshittification but I haven’t seen that happen yet from the user perspective). Wanderer sounds interesting, but if using it means transferring routes/activities back and forth manually, I’m too lazy for that. If there is a highlight-type function there though, I would certainly be happy to consider exporting my Komoot contributions there as well.
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I’m currently paying for Premium, but will probably not renew next cycle round. I unfortunately don’t have experience with the Strava side of things but as we are currently on a bikepacking/-touring trip round europe mostly planning our routes with Komoot I have some opinions.
Our experience is pretty mixed:
The routing is sometimes nice but you always have to check afterwards what route the algorithm created. I guess this applies to other route creation sites as well, but some of the decisions it makes in routing are pretty ass backwards.
How I like to use it: Create a route for cycling by selecting start/end/middlepoint(s), then switch between cycling, road cycling and gravel (we’re on some decently beefy rubber for gravel) and compare the results to check for a good middle ground.
You have to be really careful though, as with the gravel-setting you often get sent onto single-track and sometimes some pretty serious hike-a-bike-sections.
So if you want to use it for road route planning use the Roadbike-setting. Otherwise gravel will be on the menu. Also as others mentioned here be dragons, if the OSM-data in your area is lacking (unknown surface is asphalt/road to Komoot). This also depends heavily on the country you’re in as we’ve learnt (particularly on the balkans…). We are up for adventure and some sections might take an hour or two for 5km if you’re using the gravel-setting in a country with not a lot of data. If you want to play it save-ish stay with the normal cycling setting.
As for the Premium-Features:
We’re using them to create a rough long route for a region and then splitting them up into smaller daytrips. That’s quite nice because by now I know how to translate the estimates from Komoot to our very touristy pace.
The height-data is as some have already mentioned a bit crap as well. Also quite region-dependent. For Montenegro for example we had a route with lots of tunnels and there it overestimated the height to travel by a lot, as it seemed to ignore the tunnels and just go with the orthographic data underlying the track. This is different by country but so far I only found that the climbs I get shown in the routes when loaded to my Wahoo are ballpark at best, showing when climbs start/end with sufficient accuracy but the inclination, forgettaboutit.
My opinion on the social-crap is that sometimes It is quite nice to have the highlights in a region you don’t know. They also allow you to gauge the surface-conditions and width of a path. Otherwise I rather use the OSM-maps directly via Organic Maps to find the next spring/water source (works quite well in europe), as I find the Komoot Maps are weird when it comes to searching for points of interest. Why don’t they show all water sources at all zoom levels? No one knows.
As I started my post, I’m not very likely to pay for premium next cycle even with the very extensive use I’m currently putting into it. There are just too many niggles - slow UI, sometimes incomprehensible route-planning, defaults that are kinda stupid (why do new routes have my current position as point A by default but when selecting a goal it asks me to set a starting point every single flipping time - for me to pay for another year and hope it get’s better.
Hope this helps.
tl;dr:
I guess it’s fine but maybe not quite worth the money for premium unless you feel you need one of the features.
I’ve found Komoot invaluable for long-distance route planning. We are 4 months into a 5-month cycle tour in Europe and the ability to quickly see all of the EV and National routes marked on the map is great when planning. I’ve also found the points of interest and the photos of the road surface to be really helpful.
Will I continue to pay for premium after this trip? Probably not as I won’t need the multi-day functionality again for a while.
I think the community contributions are really important when planning a long-distance ride. If this disappears with the new owners, the product will be much poorer for it.
I’m a long time Komoot premium user (for 3-4 years) now. I mainly went premium to be able to create collections and multiday trips. It’s super handy for finding certain POI’s (drinking fountains, stores etc). It is also super handy for checking the route via user created pictures (what’s the surface?). For segments I find it becoming less and less useful. Some segments or highlights are being mentioned for 3-6 times. That is bonkers, they should moderate that.
Komoot / Karoo integration is very good for the OP use care of on the fly routing. I do this myself, especially for day-long tours, first buying a regional map on Komoot then paying for premium to support an amazing community figures app (pre takeover).
Komoot gets time estimates right, integrating climbs and descents. I open the route in the app (not navigation, just browse the route) to see where I am, how long I have left, it’s the best to get an ETA. Invaluable for 6+ hour trips.
Friction is a bit on the Karoo side. To “send” the route to the phone you need to save the route in Komoot, sync in the Hammerhead dashboard via phone browser, then hotspot so the device can sync over wifi. k3 maybe fixed this, dunno. But anyway takes only a minute or so.
There’s now an option in the route menu on the Karoo to force the sync, so you don’t need to open the dashboard anymore, only the hotspot unless you have a SIM in the K2.
(Personally I have a cron job running on my home server refreshing the routes once every couple of hours so I really only have to do this if I plan the route on the Komoot app, which I almost never do.)