Guides · Product · 19 July 2026
AllTrails vs Atlas: which one do you actually need?
They sound like competitors. Mostly they aren't. What each app actually does, where they overlap, and why plenty of people run both.
Short answer: they do different jobs, and the honest comparison is closer to "map versus logbook" than to a head-to-head. We build Atlas, so discount our bias accordingly, but the distinction below is real and it will save you buying the wrong thing.
What AllTrails is
AllTrails is a route library. Its job happens before and during the walk: 450,000+ trails worldwide with reviews, photos, conditions, difficulty ratings, and turn-by-turn navigation while you're out. It answers "where should I walk on Saturday, and how do I not get lost doing it?"
It's genuinely good at that job. The review density in popular UK areas is unmatched, the free tier is usable, and the paid tier (about £3 a month) adds offline maps and wrong-turn alerts. Criticisms worth knowing: coverage skews to honeypot routes, the crowd-sourced difficulty ratings are calibrated to the crowd (a "hard" flag on a Lakeland fell means something different from a "hard" flag on a city park loop), and in Britain its map data plays second fiddle to OS mapping for serious hill days.
What Atlas is
Atlas is a completion record. Its job happens after the walk: connect Strava, Komoot or Apple Health, or upload GPX, and it matches everything you've ever recorded against the UK's peaks, trails, trig points and regions. It answers "what have I actually done, and what's left?" - your Wainwrights count, your Munro round, the sections of the Pennine Way you've walked, the corner of the Lake District you've somehow never set foot in.
Atlas deliberately does not plan routes, navigate, or record activities. There is no map to follow while walking and there never will be; your recording app already does that. If you turn up at a trailhead with only Atlas installed, you have brought a trophy cabinet to a navigation exercise.
The overlap
Both apps know what a trail is, and both will show you a map with your activity on it. That's roughly where the overlap ends. AllTrails' completion features (marking a route "completed") are manual ticks on its own route library; Atlas' completion is computed from your GPS tracks against surveyed summits and trail geometry, including everything you did before you'd heard of either app.
So which one?
- You want to find and follow routes: AllTrails (or OS Maps, which UK hillwalkers often prefer for the mapping itself).
- You want your walking history turned into collections, counts and coverage: Atlas. That's the entire product.
- You're a bagger who plans in one app and records in another: run both, they don't fight. A common stack we see: OS Maps or AllTrails for planning, Strava or a watch for recording, Atlas reading the Strava history to keep the lifetime score.
One more difference worth naming: AllTrails is a big company with a global product; Atlas is UK-only and small enough that feedback lands with the person who builds it. Depending on your temperament that's either a feature or a warning, and we're comfortable with both readings.
Related
Atlas matches your Strava or GPX archive against every UK peak, trail and trig point. Find out free.