The Best Free FATMAP Alternatives in 2026 — An Honest, Head-to-Head Comparison

01Why FATMAP Shut Down (and What Happened to Your Tours)

If you opened FATMAP one morning in late 2024 and found it gone, you weren't imagining it. Strava acquired FATMAP, and the standalone FATMAP app was shut down on 1 October 2024. Anything you hadn't exported before that date — saved lines, custom tours, planning notes — was permanently deleted. There was no grace period afterwards, no archive to dig through later. For a lot of ski tourers, years of route-building simply vanished.

The features themselves didn't die; they were absorbed into Strava, behind a paid subscription. Through 2025 Strava rebuilt the parts people missed most: 3D terrain and gradient/aspect (slope-angle) layers returned. But two things matter for anyone planning avalanche terrain. First, they sit behind Strava's subscription — roughly €60/yr for the maps tier (always check Strava for current pricing). Second, and this is the one that stings: Strava carries no avalanche bulletins. You get the pretty slope shading, but not the daily danger rating that tells you whether that 38° face is loaded today. You end up planning in one app and checking the bulletin somewhere else.

That's a genuinely worse workflow than FATMAP gave you, and it's fair to be annoyed about it. If you're rebuilding your planning setup from scratch, it's worth knowing exactly what you lost and what each replacement actually does — we lay that out in the free FATMAP alternative comparison, pricing and honest gaps included.

If your terrain map doesn't show today's avalanche danger next to the slope angle, it's a drawing tool, not a planning tool — you're still one tab away from the decision that matters.

A few practical notes before you migrate. Strava auto-migrated most FATMAP adventures, so if your history was there, connecting your Strava account will pull it back. GPX files you exported before the shutdown can still be brought in manually. And whatever you land on, rebuild the layer that FATMAP-plus-Strava now leaves out: live avalanche danger. If you're new to reading one, how to read an avalanche bulletin and avalanche slope angle explained are the two habits worth carrying into whatever tool comes next.

02The Paid FATMAP Replacements, Honestly Assessed

If you want a like-for-like FATMAP replacement and you're willing to pay, four apps deserve a fair hearing. None of them is Snow Trace, and two of them beat us outright at things we don't even attempt.

Whympr (€24.99/yr) is the closest in spirit to old FATMAP: community route topos, GPS navigation, and offline maps aimed at mountaineers and ski tourers. If you miss the FATMAP guidebook feel, start here.

PeakVisor (~$29.99/yr) is not really a planner — it's a peak-identification and 3D-terrain tool, and it's genuinely excellent at both. Point your phone at a ridgeline and it names every summit; its photoreal 3D globe covers the whole planet. Snow Trace does neither. If you want cinematic 3D or worldwide terrain, PeakVisor (and RealityMaps) serve you better, full stop.

ReliefMaps (freemium, paid tiers) renders beautiful LiDAR-derived hillshade relief. It's a gorgeous base layer, not a full touring stack — no avalanche bulletins, no snow data.

Strava (~€60/yr for the maps subscription) is where FATMAP actually went. Strava restored 3D terrain plus gradient and aspect layers in 2025, and it auto-migrated most FATMAP adventures — so connecting Strava is how you get your old history back. But those maps sit behind the subscription, and Strava carries no avalanche bulletins at all.

Pay for cinematic 3D or worldwide coverage; don't pay expecting avalanche safety layers — only Snow Trace bundles live avalanche bulletins and slope-angle shading for free.

That's the honest split. Snow Trace won't out-render PeakVisor and doesn't pretend to cover the planet — see the full free FATMAP alternative comparison for where the free layers land and where they don't.

03What Nobody Tells You: Every Serious Replacement Costs Money

Here is the thing nobody in the FATMAP-refugee conversation says out loud: every serious replacement is a paid subscription. When Strava retired the standalone FATMAP app on 1 October 2024, the mapping features didn't disappear — they moved inside Strava behind its subscription (around €60/yr for maps). Strava even restored 3D terrain and gradient/aspect layers in 2025, but they sit behind that paywall, and Strava carries no avalanche bulletins at all. So the tool millions used to plan a day for free became a recurring bill that still won't tell you the danger rating.

Look at the rest of the orphan market and the pattern holds (check each provider for current pricing — these were researched July 2026):

None of that is outrageous for a keen alpinist. But it stings for the casual or weekend tourer who just wants to check a slope angle and an avalanche bulletin before Sunday — that person now needs a card on file to do what FATMAP once did for nothing.

Snow Trace is the deliberate exception. The whole planning stack is free: IGN maps and orthophotos over France, a 25°→50°+ slope-angle shading ramp, live EAWS avalanche bulletins across the Alps, 18,707 route topos, 2,297 refuges, downloadable offline map regions, and Strava activity sync. The only paid extras are optional: a human-written Conditions Brief and booking a certified guide.

The honest caveat, though: free does not mean best-at-everything. Snow Trace has no photoreal 3D flythrough — its terrain is functional MapLibre hillshade, not cinematic — and it is optimised for the French Alps and the wider Alpine arc, not worldwide. If you need cinematic 3D or global coverage, PeakVisor or RealityMaps will genuinely serve you better, and you should pay them.

If your goal is planning a safe day in the Alps rather than a photoreal world tour, the free tool wins — that is the narrow, honest claim behind the whole free FATMAP alternative comparison.

04The Free Planning Layer: IGN, Slope Angles, Avalanche Bulletins, 18,707 Topos

Here is what you get the moment you open Snow Trace, with no account, no card, and no trial clock ticking: the French IGN Plan v2 basemap and IGN orthophotos, streamed straight from the free Géoplateforme (no API key, no per-tile fee). Over that, a slope-angle shading ramp that lights terrain from 25° up through 50°+ — the band where dry-slab avalanches release. If you only ever turn on one layer, make it this one; read avalanche slope angle explained for why 30–45° is the number that matters.

The safety stack goes further than any FATMAP feature ever did. Snow Trace pulls live EAWS avalanche bulletins across the Alps — France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Bavaria, Slovenia and Slovakia — so the danger rating and the aspect/elevation rose sit on the same screen as your line. Learn to decode them with how to read an avalanche bulletin. On top of that: satellite snow cover, depth and meltout, so you can see whether the couloir is actually filled in before you drive four hours. Downloadable offline PMTiles regions mean the whole massif works with no signal — set it up via download offline maps.

And the database: 18,707 route topos (ski-touring routes aggregated from Camptocamp and Skitour), 2,297 mountain huts and refuges, plus Strava OAuth sync to pull your own history in. All of it, free.

The only two things Snow Trace ever charges for are optional extras — a human-written Conditions Brief and booking a certified mountain guide. Every map, layer, bulletin and topo above costs nothing.

Where the free tools land against the paid competition:

(Always check each provider for current pricing.) Be clear-eyed about the trade: Snow Trace has no cinematic photoreal 3D and its coverage is tuned for the Alpine arc, not the whole planet. If you need either, PeakVisor or RealityMaps serve you better — and that is the point of the wider free FATMAP alternative comparison.

05What Snow Trace Does NOT Replace (The Honest Limits)

Here is the promise we will not break: Snow Trace is a free, avalanche-first planning tool for the Alps — not a like-for-like FATMAP clone. Anyone selling you a "full FATMAP replacement" is overselling, and here is exactly where we fall short.

No photoreal 3D flythrough. FATMAP's cinematic, textured 3D was its signature, and Strava restored a version of it in 2025 — behind its ~€60/yr map subscription. Snow Trace's 3D is functional MapLibre terrain with hillshade: enough to read a couloir's shape and a slope's aspect, but it will never look like a helicopter shot. If you plan by eye from photoreal renders, you'll miss that here.

Coverage is Alpine, not worldwide. Our free IGN Plan v2 and orthophotos stop at the French border; our 18,707 route topos and 2,297 refuges are dense across the French Alps and the wider Alpine arc, and thin-to-absent elsewhere. We carry live EAWS avalanche bulletins for France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Bavaria, Slovenia and Slovakia — a serious offering, but a European one. Planning a line in the Rockies, the Andes or the Caucasus? We are not your tool yet.

Young product, no curated iOS guidebooks. FATMAP shipped hand-written, editor-curated adventure guides. We don't. What we offer instead is data — slope-angle shading, bulletins, snow-cover satellite layers and downloadable offline regions — and you bring the route-finding.

Where competitors genuinely beat us:

Always check the provider for current pricing.

If your reason for using FATMAP was the beautiful 3D or a mountain range outside the Alps, Snow Trace is honestly not your best replacement — PeakVisor or RealityMaps will serve you better.

But if what you actually relied on was terrain you could plan avalanche-aware descents on — slope angle, aspect, live bulletins, offline maps — that's the part we rebuilt to be free forever. See the full free FATMAP alternative comparison, or start with the backcountry skiing & ski touring guide.

06Migrate Your FATMAP and Strava Tracks in Three Steps

Moving off FATMAP is less painful than it looks, because most of the work has already happened without you. When Strava acquired FATMAP, it auto-migrated most FATMAP adventures into Strava accounts. Snow Trace reads that same history through Strava OAuth, so the fastest route to your old lines is simply to connect.

1. Connect Strava. In Snow Trace, authorise Strava. Because Strava already absorbed most FATMAP adventures, this pulls that migrated history back onto the map without you touching a file. Your recorded tours reappear as tracks you can re-plan against.
2. Upload the GPX exports you saved. Anything you exported before FATMAP's 1 October 2024 shutdown — routes that never made it into Strava — you upload by hand. Open the account menu and choose Import a GPX track. (Files you neither exported before that date nor had auto-migrated into Strava were permanently deleted by FATMAP; no tool can recover them, so import whatever you kept.)
3. Rebuild your planning layer. A track is a line; safe planning is a line plus context. Turn on the slope-angle shading (25°→50°+), switch on the live EAWS avalanche danger, add the IGN Plan v2 / orthophoto base for France, then download your home massif as an offline PMTiles region so it works with no signal at the trailhead.

Steps 1 and 2 are free and take minutes. Step 3 is where Snow Trace earns its place — and unlike the FATMAP features now behind Strava's ~€60/yr map subscription, every layer here is free. Read avalanche slope angle explained and how to read an avalanche bulletin to actually use that layer rather than just admire it, and download offline maps before you lose reception.

If you only do one thing, connect Strava first — it restores most of your FATMAP history automatically before you upload a single file.

Two honest caveats. Snow Trace has no photoreal 3D flythrough and its coverage is built for the French Alps and the wider Alpine arc, not worldwide — if that is your terrain, keep the free FATMAP alternative comparison open, it names who serves those needs better. For everything else, the backcountry skiing & ski touring guide picks up where your migration leaves off.

07Which FATMAP Alternative Should You Choose?

There is no single winner — there is a winner for what you actually do on the mountain. FATMAP tried to be one app for everyone; its features now sit inside Strava behind a subscription. The honest answer is to match the tool to your primary use case.

Read those trade-offs plainly. If you want a cinematic 3D flythrough or coverage outside the Alpine arc, Snow Trace is not your tool — its 3D is functional MapLibre terrain and hillshade, not photoreal, and it is optimised for the French Alps and the wider Alps, not the whole planet. PeakVisor or RealityMaps genuinely serve those needs better, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Where Snow Trace does win is the planning-and-safety core that FATMAP refugees miss most, and it charges nothing for it: IGN Plan v2 and orthophotos, avalanche slope angle shading, live bulletins you can actually read, downloadable offline map regions, 18,707 route topos and 2,297 refuges. The only paid extras are optional: a human Conditions Brief and guide booking.

Choose by your primary job: avalanche-aware Alps planning for free → Snow Trace; photoreal 3D or worldwide → PeakVisor/RealityMaps; already committed to Strava → Strava.

Most touring skiers want to plan a safe line in the Alps without a subscription — that is squarely Snow Trace, and it pairs naturally with our backcountry skiing guide. If you are still weighing options, the full free FATMAP alternative comparison lays every tool side by side.

08Sources & Further Reading

Sources & further reading. This comparison draws on primary announcements and each provider's own pages. FATMAP shut down on 1 October 2024; competitor pricing and features were researched in July 2026 — always check each provider for current details.

• TechCrunch — Strava to shut down FATMAP (June 2024)
• Strava — new proprietary map rendering engine (2025)
• PeakVisor — FATMAP replacement overview

Snow Trace surfaces official EAWS avalanche bulletins issued by regional avalanche services — it does not forecast them.