Free navigation software

There is quite a lot of free navigation software based on OpenStreetMap, but it’s somewhat difficult to find something that actually works for the given purpose. I feel like I need to document for myself what to use. And why not share the documentation? Hence this blog post.

It’s easy on Android – there’s OsmAnd there. OsmAnd is somewhat difficult to use but otherwise it’s nice, working well and providing a lot of useful features.

It’s less easy on desktop. After some searching I got amazed by BRouter, which is a navigation backend capable of offline OpenStreetMap based navigation. That’s a killer feature itself, but BRouter also provides another outstanding feature. You can create complex BRouter profiles describing your navigational preferences, which is especially useful for bike navigation. BRouter can’t be used without reading its documentation first and it takes some effort to make it running. But it’s not too difficult and once BRouter is up, it’s amazing.

BRouter can be used on both desktop and Android, but it’s just a backend server. You need some frontend to actually use it. You can use OsmAnd on Android. There is a very plain BRouter application to set up the server and then BRouter can be chosen as the navigation backend in OsmAnd preferences. As for desktop, you can use Web client for BRouter. It can be used locally or as an online Web application, with your selected set of profiles. There is also an online demo for testing BRouter with its included profiles (there are more profiles available from third parties, see documentation).

For simpler planning, especially for making simple sequences of track points used e.g. by some Garmin devices, FoxtrotGPS is well usable. Unfortunately FoxtrotGPS seems incapable of displaying complex GPX tracks. But then there is GPX Viewer, which is nice for viewing GPX tracks.