The best free motorcycle GPS apps in 2026

“Free” does a lot of heavy lifting in app store listings. Nearly every motorcycle navigation app is free to download, free to plan a route in, and then asks for money at exactly the moment you want to ride it.

This is a straight guide to which ones are actually free at the point you need them, what each is genuinely good at, and how to choose. No affiliate links, no scores out of ten.

First, work out what you actually need

Riders lump four different jobs under “a nav app”, and no app is best at all four:

1. Planning — building a route worth riding, in advance, at a laptop or on the couch.
2. Navigating — being told where to turn while wearing a helmet at 80 km/h.
3. Recording — keeping a trace of where you went, for the log, the map, or the story.
4. Riding together — not losing the group, and knowing when someone has stopped.

Decide which two matter most to you. That does most of the choosing.

Where the paywall usually sits

Before the list, the pattern to look for. Free tiers across this category are broadly generous with planning and stingy with these four things:

• Turn-by-turn voice guidance. The single most common paid feature. You can build the route, but you cannot be told to take the next left.
• Offline maps. Storage and bandwidth cost real money, so this is the most defensible paywall in the category — though downloading just the route you are riding, as we do, keeps it cheap enough to give away.
• GPX import and export. Locking the door on your own routes, and the reason a route library can become a hostage.
• Round trips. “Give me a two-hour loop from here and back” is often premium, despite being the thing a rider wants most on a Sunday morning.

Check those four against the free tier before you invest a weekend building routes.

The apps worth your time

Motoridez — free curvy routing, and a map that remembers

Ours, so read this with an appropriately raised eyebrow, but the specifics are checkable. Curvy route planning, turn-by-turn voice navigation, round trips, ride recording, GPX export, group rides and rider-reported hazards are all free with no premium tier holding them back.

The distinctive part is what happens after the ride: every recorded ride is map-matched to the actual roads you rode, so your map fills in with the roads you have GPS-confirmed. You can then ask for a route that avoids roads you have already done, which turns a familiar hometown into somewhere with roads left in it.

Offline is covered by downloading the map for a route you have planned, free. The gap against the paid apps is whole-region downloads, so improvising a brand-new route from a no-signal valley is not something it does today.

Best if: you ride day rides and weekends in coverage, you want curvy routing and voice guidance without paying, and you are bored of your usual loop.

Kurviger — the planner’s planner

Kurviger’s web planner is superb, and the free tier is more usable than most. It gives you fine control over curviness and road preference, and riders who enjoy the planning as much as the riding tend to end up here. The mobile app’s free tier is limited, and the good stuff sits behind a subscription, but the free browser planner alone earns its place on this list.

Best if: you plan tours meticulously at a desk and are happy to export a GPX to something else for navigating.

OsmAnd — offline, free, and not remotely friendly

OsmAnd is the outlier: a map-first navigator with genuinely free offline regions (a generous download allowance before it asks for anything) and deep configurability. It is not a motorcycle app, its interface is a menu tree written by engineers for engineers, and setting it up is a project. But it will navigate you through a national park with the phone in flight mode, for nothing.

Best if: you ride outside coverage and you are the sort of person who enjoys a settings screen.

Google Maps — fine at the wrong job

Free, reliable, everyone has it, and it is optimised for arriving quickly. It will put you on the motorway. It has no concept of a road being enjoyable, no curvy routing, no round trips worth the name, and it will happily route a motorcycle onto a gravel goat track without telling you the surface changed. Perfectly good for finding the pub afterwards. We have written more on where Google Maps falls down for riders.

Best if: you need to get somewhere, not enjoy getting there.

Rever, Scenic, EatSleepRIDE and the rest

Each has a real following and a real free tier, and each puts a different thing behind the paywall — Rever leans social and route discovery, Scenic is iOS-centric and beautifully made, EatSleepRIDE built its name on crash detection. All three are worth a look if their particular emphasis is what you care about; all three will ask you for money for the full experience.

A comparison you can act on

If your priority is…	Start with	Because
Free curvy routes, voice guidance and offline	Motoridez	All free, no trial clock
Never riding the same road twice	Motoridez	GPS-confirmed ridden-roads map and avoid-visited routing
Meticulous tour planning at a desk	Kurviger	The best free planning controls in the category
Riding a planned route with no signal	Motoridez	Free offline download for the route, POIs included
Holding whole regions offline	OsmAnd	Region downloads, genuinely free
Riding in a group	Motoridez	Free group rides, live position, hazard reports
Just getting there	Google Maps	Already on your phone

Three things riders wish they had checked first

Does it record while the screen is off? Phone operating systems aggressively suspend background apps. An app that stops logging when your screen sleeps will show you a ride full of holes. Test it on a short ride before you trust it with a big one.

Does it export GPX? If the answer is no, your route library is not yours. This is the single best insurance policy against an app changing its pricing on you.

What does it do with your location data? You are handing an app a continuous record of where you go, at what speed, and when your house is empty. Read the privacy policy. We wrote up what a ride-tracking app should and should not do with your data, and you can hold every app on this list — including us — to it.

How to try one properly

Do not judge an app on a lap of the block. Plan one real route you already know well and ride it. You will learn more in ninety minutes than in a week of reading comparisons, this one included:

• Does the route it picked match what you would have chosen?
• Do voice prompts arrive early enough to act on in a helmet at speed?
• What does the battery read when you get home?
• Did the recorded trace survive a stop for coffee?

Whichever app answers those four best is your app. Everything else is marketing.