This article reviews the 12 Best Motorcycle Apps for Planning, Navigation and Tracking, available for iPhone in 2017. It focusses primarily on Motorcycle Apps providing features around Ride Planning, Navigating and Tracking, so no loosely related apps like speedometer, google maps, weather apps, motominder, speedtrap or motorcycle games for example. If you think an app is missing add a comment below, but only if it fits the category. This is a new edition of my similar review article of 2 years back,

I do not claim to be totally objective as MotoMappers’ own app Scenic is in the list, but I’m trying to be. I want you, motorcycle rider with an iPhone, to get an overview of all the best motorcycle apps for navigation and tracking out there, so you can make an informed decision on what’s the best app for you. Feel free to comment if you have a different opinion on something I’m saying.

Best Motorcycle Apps for Ride Planning, GPS Navigation and Tracking on iPhone

The Apps Reviewed (in alphabeticle order)

• Best Biking Roads (BBR)
• Diablo Super Biker
• EatSleepRIDE (ESR)
• GreatestRoad
• InRoute (Not in old article)
• MotoEye
• REALRIDER
• Rever
• Round (Not in old article)
• Scenic (Not in old article)
• TourStart
• WeRide

You’ll find a detailed written review on all these apps below. If you don’t feel like reading, here’s a comparison table against the main criteria important for motorcycle navigation:

	App Store Rating	Creating Routes	Importing Routes	Navigation
Best Biking Roads				N.A.
Diablo Super Biker		N.A.	N.A.	N.A.
Eat Sleep Ride		N.A.	N.A.	N.A.
Greatest Road			N.A.
InRoute
MotoEye	N.A.	N.A.	N.A.
RealRider		N.A.	N.A.	N.A.
Rever
Round		N.A.	N.A.
Scenic
TourStart	N.A.		N.A.
WeRide			N.A.

 

	Finding Routes	Ride Tracking	Offline Maps
Best Biking Roads		N.A.	N.A.
Diablo Super Biker	N.A.		N.A.
Eat Sleep Ride			N.A.
Greatest Road		N.A.	N.A.
InRoute	N.A.	N.A.	N.A.
MotoEye	N.A.
RealRider	N.A.		N.A.
Rever
Round			N.A.
Scenic
TourStart
WeRide			N.A.

Again. These are my personal ratings based on personal preference and what I find important for an app on the Best Motorcycle Apps list. You might rate things differently. Therefore I encourage you to read the full review below and download some of these apps and give them a try. Most of them are free to download.

 

Best Biking Roads (BBR)

Since the old article BBR added 2 new significant features: If you find a nice route you’d like to ride, you can download/export the gpx file of that route directly from the app. They also added a feature that lets you find motorcycle rental points and biker friendly accommodations. For the rest it looks and feels pretty much the same.

BBR was probably one of the first Motorcycle Centered websites focussing on Routes specifically for Motorcycle Riding. They started with their website and later added the App. They currently have about 32k users (from 30k 2 years back), 13k routes (from 8k) and 13k route reviews (from 12k). Routes have a detailed description, some of them with pictures. They can be created on the website or can be uploaded to the website through GPX upload. The website route creator is pretty basic and wasn’t changed in the last 2 years. It lets you drop pins and that’s about it. You can’t undo or add intermediate points so if you make a mistake you’ll have to start over.  The upload works well, although I did get an error message after uploading, but when I went back the route was uploaded successfully.

The App lets you search routes in their database by location, rating, country and some more options. At first you’ll get a list of the routes you searched for including rating, length and distance from current location. You also have the option to show them on a map.

As mentioned above the app now also let’s you export the route. Navigation is not a feature. The app also has a Route Creation feature which is better than the one on the website as if offers an undo feature.

The main plus point for Best Biking Roads is the active community which ensures a large number of high quality routes and route reviews. I have no doubt that you’ll always be able to find a route to your liking with BBR. Although it doesn’t navigate It’s earned its place in this list of Best Motorcycle Apps!

Price: $3.99
Advertising: No
In App Purchases: No
App Store Rating:

 

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Diablo Super Biker

Diablo Super Biker was updated a couple of times, but these were mostly bugfixes and feature enhancements. No significant new features were added. Diablo Super Biker is an App specialized in measuring your performance during riding. It not only can measure your performance on the road, but also has a special track option that measures your lap performance when riding on a race track. It’s a pure Tracking App. It doesn’t offer routes or navigation.

What’s very nice about the app it that it records your lean angle during the ride and shows this in a nice graph over the duration of your ride. And, of course it’s very nice that it’s remains free. It’s not available in all countries though.

Because it offers nice tracking features it’s in this list of Best Motorcycle Apps.

Price: Free
Advertising: No
In App Purchases: No
App Store Rating: 

EatSleepRIDE (ESR)

ESR is updated on a regular basis. So, since the old article they added quite some new little features and changed the look and feel a bit. They also added an Apple Watch App for ride recording. Most importantly they added a function on their website (not their app) to export GPX files of your rides. For the rest it’s pretty much the same as described in the old article.

ESR is a good looking app and packs a lot of features. It’s been out there for a while and shows up in most ‘Best Motorcycle Apps’ lists. Because it’s so packed with features it takes a while to get used to the user interface and realize just how much it can do. The focus of ESR is more towards the social aspect of riding. It has kinda like a small Facebook for Motorcyclists integrated if you will. You can post stories, places, pictures, reviews, routes, events etc. to the ESR news stream and those posts can also be shared  to the main social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and even WhatsApp.

It can also track your rides and help you organize group rides with fellow ESR users. The tracker not only tracks your location, distance, speed and duration, but also elevation and, similar to Diablo Super Biker, lean angle. And of course you can share those rides in the same way as mentioned above.

Next to that ESR offers CRASHLIGHT (in app purchase), which is a security feature that sends your info and location to  three of your closest contacts if your phone detects that you crashed. (You have the option to cancel this within three minutes in case you didn’t crash but just dropped your phone or something.) Since the old article they upgraded to CRASHLIGHT 2.0.

Needless to say that ESR is one of the most feature packed apps in this list. Only thing that would make it even more complete  is the ability to create or import and navigate routes.

Price: Free (was $0.99)
Advertising: No
In App Purchases: CRASHLIGHT $14.99/year (was $9.99/year)
App Store Rating: 

Greatest Road

Greatest Road was not updated since july 1st, 2015, so it’s 100% the same as described in my old article. Here’s what I wrote back then:

Greatest Road is probably the most well known Motorcycle App out there, perhaps together with Best Biking Roads. It nearly always shows up in the “Best Motorcycle Apps” lists that are already out there. The basics are actually quite similar to BBR, however it has more features and in my opinion it’s more advanced. It doesn’t have a website like BBR does though.

The route finding feature is very similar to Scenic’s. It lets you search for routes by selecting a map area and then it will load all the tracks for that area and show them on the map. By tapping on a route it will show you more details about it and you can open a new screen showing you even more details, including a description and ratings.

Greatest Road doesn’t do ride tracking and can’t navigate you along routes, but it does offer a very interesting feature. It will let you open the selected route in a third party navigation app. For example, I know that it supports opening a route in Navigon (for details on how Navigon than deals with this look at my other blog post here). I don’t know of any other apps it supports as it only shows the Navigon option if you have Navigon installed, so if you know of another supported app please leave a comment below. Alternatively, if you don’t have Navigon installed, it can open Google Maps for you and Google Maps will guide you to the route start point. Unfortunately Google Maps doesn’t support multi point routes at the moment so once you arrive at the route start point you’re on your own. If that still doesn’t work for you the app can also send out an email with a link to the GPX file of the route.

About a year back Greatest Road also integrated Yelp into the App, which lets you find restaurants, hotels and other amenities along the route or in a certain area. A nice feature if you’re looking for a place to stay or a restaurant for a lunch break during your rides.

With Greatest Road you can create routes quite nicely. It shows a crosshair center screen and you then postion the map so that the location you want to add is in the crosshair. You then tap “start”, “waypoint” or “end” and it will drop a corresponding pin there. If you made a mistake you can just tap on a pin and you’ll be able to delete it from the route

Price: Free
Advertising: Shows one fullscreen Ad at each startup
In App Purchases: No
App Store Rating: 

InRoute

InRoute does not advertise as an app specifically for motorcycle riders, however it’s fairly well known in the community because of the features it offers. In short, it offers route planning and navigation. The UI takes a little getting used to, but once you are used to it you’ll soon find that InRoute is very feature rich. It has a relatively simple looking (but again, feature rich) built in turn by turn navigation and, like Greates Roads, also offers the opportunity to navigate routes with 3rd party apps, like Navigon.

Like mentioned, the built in navigation looks simple, but it’s really not. It includes traffic information, offers the ability to skip waypoints and can show a graph with elevation, curviness or weather information along your ride. Very nice. For motorcycle riding I would argue that the font sizes used are too small (except for the next instruction text) to let you quickly glance and have a good idea on where/when to turn. There are no ‘arrows’ showing the next turn, but in stead it shows a small section of the map.

The route planner is also very feature rich. You can tap and hold on the map to add your start, waypoints and destination. You can also rearrange those points in a list view. Furthermore it offers a lot of routing options, amongst others “Most Curvy  and “Least Curvy”. I have not tested this in real life, so I don’t know how good this “Curvy” routing is for motorcycle riding. Please leave a comment if you have experience with it. Last but not least it also has POI support along your route, so you can plan a gasoline stop or hotel-stay along your route.

InRoute also offers Route Import (GPX, KML and XLSX) and route export to GPX. The GPX Import is a bit strange though. I tried to import a GPX that contained a route with 183 points and 2 tracks with more points. I got the message that it could not import the route as it had over 100 route points, so it only imported the 3 waypoints, ignoring the tracks all together. Then I tried to import a GPX with only 1 track (with thousands of points), no routes and no waypoints. This actually worked. It ‘filtered’ the trackpoints down to 99 and then calculated a route between the filtered points. This is also how Scenic works, although Scenic can go up to 200 points. It’s a bit strange that InRoute doesn’t show you the GPX elements and doesn’t let you pick which ones you’d like to import. It makes this choice for you it seems.

All in all InRoute is a very nice and complete app. It’s not advertised as being specific for motorcycle riding, and, my honest opinion is, that this is with reason. It doesn’t track your rides, but most importantly the built in navigation is not suited for quickly glancing to your phone on the handlebars to find your way. The route planner however is probably the most complete of all apps in this list. The whole package makes it a worthy app in the Best Motorcycle Apps list.

Price: Free
Advertising: No
In App Purchases: $4.49/month or $33.99/year
App Store Rating: 

MotoEye

Since my review 2 years ago MotoEye had one update that didn’t include any significant new features. It’s basically the same as it was when I wrote the old article. It’s mainly a Ride Tracker but has some nice additional features. Similar to Scenic you can take pictures during your ride and they will be added to your ride in the activities log. Unlike Scenic though, you can also record videos and add them to your ride. Looking at the app’s background story this is one of the reasons that MotoEye came to be. To make video recordings while riding and record your route at the same time.

Another nice feature is that it has a weather report included. It shows the current weather, the weather in 2 hours and tomorrow. Nice if you’re not sure to bring your rain overall. Further you can add the bikes you have (no pictures) to your “garage” and, very nice, it has Offline Maps, for free!! How’s that for Best Motorcycle Apps list.

It also offers turn by turn and voice navigation, but only to a specific destination, not for routes. You enter a destination and it will guide you there while tracking your ride. In their update notes they mention ‘External navigation always use Apple Maps’. I was not able to discover what they mean by this. I couldn’t find a feature/button or something like that in the app.

Price: Free
Adversiting: No
In App Purchases: No
App Store Rating: N.A. Insufficient ratings to determine

 

REALRIDER

REALRIDER is an App mainly intended for users in the UK as it is integrated with the NHS Control Room Network. It has a similar function as ESR’s CRASHLIGHT called REALSafe, but it doesn’t contact 3 of your closest contacts, it directly contacts the Ambulance Service (also here you have a small amount of time to cancel this if you didn’t crash). It’s updated on a regular bases. A significant feature update since the previous article is the Nearby feature, which lets you explore routes and places around you. Next to REALSafe and Nearby it also is a Ride Tracker.

Does this app belong in the Best Motorcycle Apps list? For the REALSafe feature I would say definitely so. But, if you feel differently, leave a comment.

Price: Free
Advertising: No
In App Purchases: No, but you do need a  £3.99 /month (was £25 / year) subscription for REALSafe (only available in UK)
App Store Rating: 

Rever

The most stand-out feature for Rever is that they’ve integrated Butler Motorcycle Maps into the app (in app purchase). For those unfamiliar with Butler: their Motorcycle Routes are of high quality and are scouted by a team of “scouts” riding around. They have routes for a lot of US States, unfortunately not outside of the US, yet? 

Since the previous article Rever was updated regularly. You’ll also find it in most Best Motorcycle Apps list out there. The most standout added features are satellite and terrain views and ride sharing. Next to that they changed the UI somewhat. As before you can create your own routes on their website, after which they will show up in the app under the “Rides” tab. In the app, you then just select a route to follow it. The route following is ‘follow the line’, so no turn by turn and voice guidance. They draw the route on the map and you just “Follow the line” while your ride is being tracked.

A bit strange is the difference between Butler routes and the routes made by you or other riders. The butler routes show up as marked roads on the map (with 4 separate colors indicating “coolness” of the road). This is pretty handy when you’re riding around. See a yellow marked road, TAKE IT. I haven’t found a way in the app to get more info on those roads like a description or pictures though. Perhaps I missed something. Please let me know if I did.

The routes you created or others created don’t show up on the map, so you can’t find them by viewing a map area. You’ll have to select them from the list of rides and select them specifically before starting your ride. After selecting a specific route that route will show on the map and you can start following it.

You can also become friends with other Rever users and friends can share routes amongst each other. Another nice feature is that you can “Ride with Friends”. It’s a bit similar to Apple’s Find my Friends, but specifically tuned to Other Rever users. You’ll see their position along the route on the map. If you don’t want that you can turn that feature off.

With Rever you don’t need an internet connection when you’re going out for a ride. Just select a ride from the rides tab and tap “Offline”. Rever will download the map data for that route and you’re good to go. Again, this only goes for your own routes or public/friend’s routes. Not the butler roads. My guess is that the idea behind this is that you can plan a route yourself (on the rever website) which can include a butler road, because the map planner also can show the butler roads, similar to the app.

Price: Free
Advertising: No
In App Purchases: Premium membership ($5.99/month or 59.99/year)
App Store Rating: 

Round

Round is not advertised as an app specific for motorcycle riding, however it does show up in the ‘Users Also Bought’ section of the app store if you search for a motorcycle app. Round is a beautifully designed app. Really, it’s beautiful. Functionality wise it’s currently a bit limited from a motorcycle app perspective. In short, it offers navigation and basic tracking, but no route creation nor import or export.

Ride tracking is very similar to Scenic ride tracking, although more basic. You can track your rides by simply tapping a button. Once you’re done with your ride it will ask you to enter a name and description for the route and you’ll get the option to make this route public. If you do, other users can find this route and navigate it too. Different than Scenic, you can only track your ride if you are NOT navigating a route. So you can’t track all your riding adventures. Seems the purpose of tracking is for route generation only. The tracked information is also very basic. Only your coordinates are tracked. No speed profile, nor ability to add pictures. Navigation itself is again, beautiful and simple and includes voice guidance.

I’d love to see this beautiful app add more features to it to make it more complete for Motorcycle riding. Does it belong in the Best Motorcycle Apps list? Maybe not now, but I hope the developers will consider expanding it more.

Price: Free
Advertising: No
In App Purchases: No
App Store Rating: 

Scenic

Scenic is my own app, so I’ll try and be as objective as possible. Together with InRoute, Scenic is the only app that can import Routes and make them navigable. Scenic currently only offers GPX import (unlike InRoute which also offers KML and XLSX). However Scenic also offers other handy ways to get routes in the app. There is a web app that lets you paste an URL from a route you created with Google Maps and Scenic integrates with several online route planners (currently Furkot and RouteYou).

The route creation in Scenic is very similar to the Greatest Road route planner. Intuitive and easy to use. You can add, move and delete via points. There’s an ‘undo’ button and a
‘reverse route’ button. Once you create a route or import one you’ll be asked if you want to make it public. If you do other users will be able to navigate it, review it and add pictures to it. Until now this has resulted in a database of 3k Scenic routes.

The navigation looks very much like the standard navigation apps (e.g. Google Maps or Apple Maps), with the main difference that Scenic can navigate you along routes of up to 200 via points. Next to this it offers advanced features for when you take a detour (deliberately or not). By default it will guide you to the first via point you missed, but you can also choose to skip that via point and connect with the route on one of the via points further down the road. Navigation can be online, or you can download offline maps so you won’t use any data from your plan.
While you are navigating (or just riding free without navigation), Scenic tracks your ride. It tracks your location, your speed and you can add pictures along the way. After you’ve finished your ride, similar to Round, you’ll be asked to enter a name and description to the trip. Afterwards you can go back to your trip list and remember your riding adventures. You can also create a route from previous trips so you can ride them again and/or share them with others.

Of course you can question my objectivity for this app, but the user ratings don’t lie. Give it a try yourself and you’ll see why Scenic definitely earns a place in the Best Motorcycle Apps list.

Price: Free
Advertisig: No
In App Purchases: Premium ($10.99/year or $49.99 once) Offline Maps (around $25 for a continent, downloadable by country or state)
App Store Rating: 

TourStart

TourStart is a Route Creator, Route finder and Route Navigator first and foremost. It won’t track your rides as such, but it saves your rides as tours so you can ride the same route again. Specific info like avg speed or max speed of a ride is not stored.

Like ESR the user interface is not standard iOS, it takes some getting used to. The start screen is quite nice and gives an overview of what the app can do.  You can Plan a Route, Find tours uploaded by others, Plan or find an event and put it’s location on the map and navigate routes.

The route planner is more or less similar to the route planner of Greatest Roads and Scenic, so good and easy to use. Finding routes is also done by a map view, like Scenic and Greatest Road. On higher zoom levels it shows one marker with a number in it, indicating the number of routes and/or POIs in that area. When you zoom in further the one marker becomes more markers, indicating a route start point or a POI. If you tap the lowest level marker a callout appears and you can tap the callout to see more details.  That will bring up either the POI description with an optional picture or, if it was a route, the route map, a list of waypoints and optionally a description and pictures for the route.  

As for the turn by turn and voice instructions, I’ve not had a chance to test it out extensively, but from my first tests on short routes I would say it is good. If you have experiences with TourStart’s Navigation feature I would love to hear about it. Please leave a comment below. All and all, TourStart is a very complete and well thought through app once you get used to the UI.

I’m not sure why TourStart is not mentioned a lot in the existing “Best Motorcycle Apps” lists. Please share your experiences with this app in the comments and help me understand!

Price: Free
Advertising: No
In App Purchase: Navigation ($14.99 / year)
App Store Rating: N.A. Insufficient ratings to determine

WeRide

WeRide, not to be confused with the skating app WeRide, is a nice Motorcycle App that’s been out there a couple of years now. It’s used a lot in the Spanish speaking countries which I guess is logical because it’s developed in Spain. It’s also available in English and a couple of other languages though.

WeRide’s user interface is basic/simple, but in a good way. Due to it’s simplicity it’s fairly intuitive to use. That’s not to say that the app is simple, it’s actually extensive and hides a lot of good and well thought through features. Since the previous article they added a route export feature which lets you export your routes to GPX, KML or directly open it in Apple Maps.

WeRide’s main focus is social. The app is also listed in the Social Networking category. You can become friends with other users, but that’s not all. You can create or join groups  and post things to the “wall” of the group or socialize on the group forum. Besides that WeRide also has a chat function to chat directly with your WeRide friends. There are quite a lot of groups. You can find them on the map (they have a location) but also by searching by country/city and/or riding type (Road/Trail/Offroad).

Similar to BBR you can find routes nearby or by country and filter by riding type and distance. Unfortunately it’s not possible to find routes on the map, so you’ll have to go into the details of a route to see the map.

The Route Creation in WeRide is pretty similar to the one in Greatest Road, Tourstart and Scenic, so again, good and easy to use. Once you’ve choses or created a route you can also navigate it. The navigation is “Follow the Line” like Rever’s and while you navigate your ride is being tracked too. Similar to TourStart your ride is not being saved as a ride as such, it’s saved as another Route and like Rever, the information saved with it is pretty basic: distance, time, description, type and a picture. No information that’s specific to you for that ride, like avg speed, max speed, pictures along the way.

They also have a WeRide shop where you can purchase motorcycle gear, however when I tried this I got an “unexpected error”. Maybe that’s due to my location (Mexico)? I don’t know.

Price: Free
Advertising: No
In App Purchases: No
App Store Rating: 

Conclusion

Well. This was a long read, and if you’ve come all the way to the bottom of this I appreciate your time and reading through all of it. By now you probably know there can not really be a number one in the Best Motorcycle Apps list. Some apps are better in one thing, while others are better at another thing. Some apps are missing this feature, while others lack another feature. In the end it depends what you want from an app. I designed Scenic to be an app alternative for the expensive motorcycle GPS units out there. Although not perfect yet, I think it’s pretty close, and I’ll keep at it, adding new features and improvements.

Feel free to leave comments below!