Guides · Product · 18 July 2026

Peak bagging apps and trackers compared (2026)

An honest comparison of the tools UK baggers actually use - Hill Lists, peakbagger.com, Walkhighlands, Strava, the spreadsheet, and Atlas.

We build one of these tools, so read this with that in mind. But the comparison below is honest, including the cases where something else is the better choice. UK peak bagging has been well served by volunteer-built tools for decades, and pretending otherwise would fool nobody who has spent five minutes on a hill forum.

The contenders

The spreadsheet. Still the reigning champion by user count. Free, infinitely flexible, works offline, outlives every company on this list. Weaknesses: it only knows what you type in, it can't read a GPX file, and sharing it means emailing a file called wainwrights_v3_FINAL(2).xlsx. If your data discipline is perfect, you genuinely don't need anything else.

Hill Lists (app). The long-standing baggers' app, built on the Database of British and Irish Hills. Enormous coverage of lists (Munros, Corbetts, Grahams, Marilyns, and far more obscure ones), manual tick-off, offline, respected. What it doesn't do is read your GPS history: you tell it what you climbed, not the other way round. As a reference and manual log it's excellent.

peakbagger.com. The global summit database, strong on prominence data and international peaks, with GPX upload on individual ascents. The interface is of its era, and UK-list coverage is less curated than the dedicated British tools, but for logging expedition-style ascents worldwide it remains the standard.

Walkhighlands. Not exactly an app: the definitive Scottish walking site, with route descriptions, forums and a solid Munro/Corbett tick list attached to your account. If your bagging is Scottish, its route content is unmatched, and the community is the real product. Ticking is manual.

Strava. Where most people's data already lives, and its segment/heatmap features are good fun. But Strava fundamentally doesn't think in summits; it thinks in activities. It can tell you that you ran up something on Tuesday, not that you've done 87 of 214 Wainwrights. Hiking generally gets treated as slow running.

Atlas (that's us). The premise: your GPS history already contains your bagging record, so no ticking should be required. Connect Strava or upload GPX, and it matches your tracks against summit locations for the big UK lists, plus trails, trig points and regions, with progress, achievements and a public profile on top. Weaknesses, honestly listed: UK-only, no route planning or navigation (deliberate, but if you want one app for everything this isn't it), Garmin needs a GPX export rather than direct sync for now, and full history import is a paid feature (free covers the last 12 months).

Which one, then

• You want route planning and navigation too: OS Maps or Outdooractive for the maps, plus any tracker here. None of the trackers navigate; don't let one try.
• Your record is entirely in your head and you enjoy the ritual of ticking: Hill Lists. It's the best manual logger there is.
• Your bagging is Scottish and social: Walkhighlands, no contest.
• You have years of Strava or GPX history and want the count done for you: that's the case Atlas was built for. The import-and-match moment, where eight years of walking turns into a filled-in map, is the whole point. It's free to find out your number.
• You distrust all software: the spreadsheet. Genuinely. Back it up.

The quiet truth

Every tool on this list is a different answer to the same problem: walkers are better at walking than at record-keeping. Pick whichever one you'll actually keep using, because a complete record in a mediocre tool beats a perfect tool you abandoned in March.

Related

• How to track your Wainwrights automatically
• How to export your entire Strava history
• Trig point bagging: what it is and how to start