Every hike or ride we do starts in Komoot. You drop a start and an end, it routes you along paths that actually exist, and it tells you the climbing before you commit to it — which is the number that decides whether a day out is a pleasure or a slog.
What makes it stick
The surface and elevation breakdown is the part we use most. A 40 km ride is a completely different day depending on whether it is 300 m or 1,200 m of ascent, and Komoot shows you both before you leave the house. Same with surface: it will tell you that a “shortcut” is 3 km of loose gravel.
Offline maps are the other reason. Download the region before you go and the whole thing works with the phone in aeroplane mode, which matters more in the Picos than it does in the Peak District, but it matters everywhere eventually.
The community routes are hit and miss. They are a good way to find out that a valley is walkable at all, and a bad way to pick an exact line — plenty of them are somebody’s GPS trace of a wrong turn. Treat them as inspiration, then draw your own.
What it does not do well
Live navigation is fine on a bike and mediocre on foot: the turn-by-turn prompts assume you are moving faster than walking pace, and it will happily tell you to turn thirty seconds after you passed the junction. We use the map, not the voice.
What it costs
The first region is free. After that it is a one-off payment per region, or a one-off for the world bundle, which is what we ended up buying and have never regretted. There is a subscription tier too; we have never needed it.