Blog

Polarsteps alternatives in 2026, and what Plus actually costs

Polarsteps is still free for the thing most people use it for. Plan a trip, let the app draw your route, publish it, follow other travellers. None of that costs anything. What changed is that on 14 July 2026 Polarsteps launched Plus, a subscription at 8.99 euros a month or 29.99 a year, and the printed Travel Books are sold separately on top. The company's own wording in that announcement is that planning, tracking, sharing and following trips "remains free for everyone, and always will."

Plus adds 3D maps, Winter and Terrain map styles, step stats with elevation profiles, Play mode, transport totals, ten Travel Buddies instead of five, a badge, and 20 percent off Travel Books on the yearly plan (polarsteps.com/plus, checked 6 September 2026). The US App Store lists the same tiers at $9.99 monthly and $34.99 yearly, so your currency matters. Books are not included at either tier.

TripStone's alternatives post is dated 6 July 2026, eight days before Plus shipped. Staywise's is from 22 April. A Pilot Plans review last updated 20 January 2026 still describes the app as completely free. Page one has not caught up, so if you searched "is Polarsteps free" last week and got a straight yes, what you were reading was written before the paywall existed.

What Polarsteps is good at

Ten million-plus downloads on Android alone, and 4.7 stars from 192,000 reviews, on a Play listing that was last updated on 4 September 2026. Nearly all of that sits on one feature, the automatic route capture. You start a trip and stop thinking about it, and the map fills in behind you, offline included. Polarsteps puts the battery cost at typically under 4 percent a day. No ads. A trip is public or followers-only, and you can keep one to yourself.

Then the book. Polarsteps prints your trip as a photo book, a physical object your parents will open, unlike the shared album nobody clicks, and no free app I know of does that part better. I am not going to quote a price. The support pages that carry print pricing return 403 to everything I threw at them, and the third-party numbers do not agree with each other. Ask inside the app before you commit.

Polarsteps takes precise location, even when the app is closed

Two lines in the App Store privacy panel. Precise Location and Coarse Location, both listed as data linked to you, with Apple's warning printed underneath: "This app may use your location even when it isn't open, which can decrease device battery life."

You cannot draw the route someone walked across Hanoi without recording where they walked. That makes Polarsteps a location app in the sense people usually mean, and travellers already use it that way. In the Facebook group Horizons Unlimited Motorcycle Adventure Travellers, a thread asking how to share your real-time position with selected contacts got Polarsteps as the top answer.

The alternatives, priced

Prices below come from US App Store listings, with the euro tiers from polarsteps.com/plus, all opened on 6 September 2026. Where I could not verify a number the cell says so.

The ones that log the trip after it happened

FindPenguins is the closest swap. Free on iPhone, Android and the web, and its own site sells the tracker as battery-saving, offline-capable and able to detect flights, with a printed photo book waiting at the end. Version 11.2.1 shipped 26 August 2026. Still maintained. The US App Store listing shows no in-app purchases, so the book is the only part that costs money, and the same precise-location-when-closed collection sits in its privacy panel, which is unavoidable for anything that draws your route for you.

Journi and Travel Diaries are both photo-book businesses with an app in front. The Journi book is a one-click order, 4.8 from 5,100 ratings. Travel Diaries, from Journal Lab B.V., runs on written entries with print and online plans, and at 4.2 from 90 ratings it is the small player here. Neither will tell you a friend is in Porto next Thursday.

Google Timeline is free, and it is not a backup

If your only goal is a private record of the cities you passed through, Google already has it and does not charge. Google's support page states plainly that "Timeline is off by default for your Google Account and can only be turned on if you opt in", and that it is not available for Maps on a computer any more, so it lives in the phone app. Backups are optional. Switch the encrypted one on in the same sitting you enable Timeline.

Google moved Timeline data on-device from December 2024, and the notice gave people until 9 June to follow the new set-up process. People who missed it lost the history. In March 2025 dozens of users opened Timeline and got "No visits for this day" on every date going back, with nothing to restore from.

The ones that organise the booking

Plenty of people type "apps like Polarsteps" wanting the trip handled before it starts, and Wanderlog is the one that does it free: days, places, notes, collaborators, with a Pro tier at $5.99 a month or somewhere between $31.99 and $59.99 a year depending on the plan you land on. TripIt does one job. Forward the confirmation emails, get one itinerary back. Pro runs $48.99 a year, and its 4.8 from 309,000 ratings is the biggest App Store sample on this page, nearly nine times Wanderlog's 35,000. I put the two of them side by side in Wanderlog and TripIt alternatives for people who travel with friends.

What none of them do

A poster in r/digitalnomad wrote in December 2024: "Got many moments where I found out a friend was nearby but left already." Six and a half years earlier, in r/AppIdeas, someone had already specified the whole feature: "I want to schedule the trip and at a later date an alert pops up saying something like 'hey your friend bob will be in the same area as you during you're trip to Alaska!'" The same poster said how they usually found out instead: "Just random found out from an Instagram post but would have been cool to know ahead of time."

That request has been sitting there since 2018. Polarsteps, FindPenguins and Journi all start recording once you are on the plane, and not one of them knows that your friend booked the same week in the same city, because none of them asks. Small apps have gone at the earlier half of the problem. Several are shut down or bought now, and I went through the survivors one by one in apps that tell you when friends are in the same city.

Where Will U Be There fits, and where it does not

I built it for that gap and nothing else. A trip in it is a city and two dates, and the people you connect with enter theirs the same way. When two of those land within 100 km of each other on overlapping dates, both people get a push notification, and if you miss each other by up to about a week it flags the near miss so you can shift a day. The app also lists concerts, exhibitions and festivals within 15 km of where you are staying, inside your dates, drawn from more than 360 named sources across 57 countries. Over 200,000 events are in there right now. Coverage is uneven. Big European cities are dense, a mid-sized town may have nothing.

The app never receives your location. There is no GPS in it at all. You type a city and two dates, and that is the entirety of what the server knows, which is also why it cannot show a friend where you are standing. A matched friend sees the overlapping city and those dates. Nothing else from your trip list. If you want the longer version, I wrote it out at privacy first.

Your friends do not have to sign up one by one. Make a group for the ski week or the conference, share one link, up to 200 people, no friend requests inside it. And it does something for you from your first trip alone: the events for that city and those dates are there before anyone joins.

It is on iPhone and Android, both free, no in-app purchases, no ads. Seventeen languages. App Store, Google Play, and the site is willubethere.app.

It will not record your trip afterwards or draw the route you walked, and it will never print you a book. If those are the parts of Polarsteps you love, keep Polarsteps and pay the 29.99 if the 3D maps earn it. Nothing stops you running both. Mine only ever holds a city and two dates, so it has nothing to say about the route file Polarsteps is building while you walk. And if you want the meeting-up half, add a trip you have already booked, then send the group link to the four people most likely to be in that city anyway.