2025 route creation/finding apps?

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It’s been a few years since the last relevant discussion I could find about route creation apps - and in that time a lot has changed.

I’m interested in the trade-offs and benefits for:

  1. Finding existing gravel routes
  2. Creating gravel routes (I’m lazy and would prefer auto generated ones, but only if I can actually ride them on drop bars; see below).

The 3 main apps I’m considering are:

  1. Strava premium. I currently have this. Benefits for me: it’s nice for auto-generating a route, and it’s easy for me to copy a route I find from an event. But I’m not sure if the route search function actually searches user generated routes, or if it uses the auto-generated ones. I’ve also noticed that it classifies all dirt as off road, so some of my gravel routes include trails that I’d only ride my enduro bike on.
  2. RWGPS: seems like it has a decent mapping interface with a few useful extra tools (reverse a route, clip into two routes). And there are a lot of groups on there with routes. The search seems decent, might be better than Strava. But I don’t think it supports auto generation. And since I’m only sharing my rides on Strava, I’d still need to manually manage routes or use Strava or Garmin Connect to store them.
  3. Komoot: it seems like it has more curation than the other platforms? I haven’t spent much time with it so I’m not really informed about how it works or what it offers.
  4. Garmin Connect: haven’t tried it much, but it seems like it may not have a lot of support for updated surface information, auto routing, or suitability for drop bars. I haven’t really used it much, so would welcome anyone who has.

Cost really isn’t a factor for me. Each of the first three cost somewhere around $60 - $100 per year, which is less than the cost of maintaining any of my bikes, by a significant margin.

Welcome any thoughts here - and any corrections on what I’ve gotten wrong or missed in my observations.

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My experience is that the surface layer is not great for any of them. They depend on the community updating open street maps, which certainly doesnt happen everywhere. Rwgps is a superior mapping platform and works great for finding routes. With premium you can click on a road and it will find user routes that pass through that point. So not auto route generation, but maybe something better since it may have local knowledge? I dont think the strava route generation is great, but it is something. Yeah,im not a lot of help, but it think a combo of strava heat map and rwgps routes and tools is the best option.

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This is great - I didn’t know this was available!
Thanks!

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I’ve found RWGPS much better than Strava, although I cancelled and deleted my Strava account a while ago now as I wasn’t interested in the increasing social media aspect of it. I find RWGPS pretty good for organising your routes, you can put them in ‘Collections’ for example of a certain area or length/elevation or road/gravel. I’ve tried Komoot, it’s okay for finding points of interest such as cafes and the likes, they get submitted by users, but like Strava’s segments it’s now overdone and cumbersome to wade through it all to find anything of real use.

The free version of RWGPS is still an excellent tool, and I can’t see any reason why you wouldn’t use that alongside something else that gives you other features.

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