Gaia Pro or ON-X Offroad- Why? Why not?

I find myself using Gaia more. Much cleaner maps. OnX seems to be chasing some pretty cool advanced features, but for me I mostly just want a good map with details on each trail.

 

Select the track you want to edit --> click the edit button --> select crop track. You’re welcome.

 

Sorry, I should have specified that I was referring to doing that on my PC. For whatever reason, that function doesn't seem to be available on the website.

 

I’ll be honest I wasn’t expecting Gaia to look like a clear “winner”.

I too, like others don’t want to wind-up where everyone one else might. But! With a 3 and a 5 year old on board; I also don’t have the patience of “where the F are we” when someone in the back seat can’t stop saying “Daddy why can’t we stop here!” Etc. lol.

But a few solid nuggets in here. Partly for me I want to use Gaia in Europe for offline map capabilities so that is my other push to figure it out.

 

Yeah, OnX has much better marketing. Gaia has much better visuals. OnX looks like someone spilled neon spaghetti on a satellite photo. There is sooo much going on. Gaia is much less busy.

 

On an iMac, unsure how this translates to PC. Navigate to the piece of track you'd like to crop and click on it:


On the resulting page scroll down in the left column and look for crop track:


Crop track with slider. Bam! Done!

 

Yeah, I've found that OnX has trails that are not on Gaia, but I typically go to Gaia first anyways.

 

They must have added that recently. I'll have to check it when I get back home.

 

And it is in fact there. Awesome!

 

I have used Gaia pretty extensively and played around w/ On-X. Unless I was missing something, Gaia seemed to be much more feature rich, and I liked that. More map layer options w/ Gaia from what I remember as well.

 

Here's an example of the breadcrumbs Gaia lays down. This is a recent track driving up Baja -- zoom in to reveal some off road, eg to Mission San Borja.

 

Unless On-x pays me to be the influencer I'm staying with Gaia. I also use it for all my mapping for trips. There is a bug when modifying routes but there was a work around. I've been mapping all day and haven't had the bug yet so maybe they fixed it.
I agree with the spaghetti on a sat map is what On-x looks like. I will have to use On-x at KOH but it will be on my phone with my ipad running Gaia for nav next to it.

 

Found this thread looking for others opinions. I had nothing but bad luck with Gaia on a two week trip, which I chose after seeing all the glowing reviews. Steep learning curve wasn't ideal for something I would only use sporadically, but a lot of powerful software is like this. Unfortunately I wish my complaints were just that it is unintuitive and kinda hard to use (but it was those as well!).

- Dead in the water with low signal: I had to turn on airplane mode to get it to work when I had cell signal and maybe 1-2 bars of data. I could make calls and had enough signal to rage google trying to figure out what the hell the problem is just fine; didn't strike me that it wouldn't use the offline maps if bandwidth didn't support its needs. I guess this isn't a bug, so much as a glaring oversight.

- Direction? Ha. Took a couple wrong turns since the arrow had my trajectory off ~80 degrees. Finally got back to the highway and no matter how I oriented the phone, I was cruising down the road sideways. That would explain it!

- Speaking of offline maps, some would, some wouldn't, some would stall in the last 10mb of download and no amount of canceling and restarting would get it.

- Bad carplay UI. All sorts of shit on the map keeping me from seeing it. This was probably developed on a 13" ipad.

- Carplay would also almost never load any layer other than the default. It would randomly work but I would say that it was 20-30% of the time.

- Only a couple times would the map follow my movements. I would typically have to manually pan around to find myself if I covered enough ground to go off screen.

I contacted Gaia about the issues and they wanted me to spend a lot of time helping them document the problems but I just took my refund and called it a disappointment. Sorry Outside, $40 doesn't buy a lot of my time and I already wasted too much of it frustrated on a rare extended vacation..

Fast forward to today, and I'm going on a two day trip near Denver next week and decided to download Gaia again to see if anything has improved, since my old subscription still had a couple weeks left. More incomplete map downloads, and I deleted the app again. Going to demo OnX next week on a two day trip near Denver. So far it at least seems like the UI is easier, and my 22GB of offline maps downloaded without issue; with the caveat that, like Gaia, it won't download without having the app up and screen on (but I think this is an iOS thing and not the apps). Will try to remember to follow up with my experiences..

 

One question I’m concerned about with onX is if you already have an account using onX off-road and if you decide to get onX backcountry, do you have to pay for another subscription?

 

I'm giving Gaia a try.

Already using Trailforks for hiking and mountain biking so I'm giving it a go.

 

.

Please update on your experience. I really, really wanted it to work, but for me it frequently and literally didn't. I'm not totally dismissing a potential issue on my end..

 

Curious what iOS phone you're running, and what maps + overlays you tried to download for offline. 22GB seems like a lot of space compared to what my wife downloads for one of our trips (she runs Gaia on her iPhone SE 64GB). Seems to work great for her, and selfishly, it's nice to be able to compare what's on Gaia to what I have in BCN XE, but I totally get that the difference could be in the map choice.

 

I'm sporting the 13 mini, nothing terribly old by any means. I don't remember exactly what all the layers were but the "overland" layer was the main one I wanted to work since it had some degree of definition relative to road/trail use types. Having plenty of phone storage, I wasn't trying to be shy about downloading stuff. Maybe that was the problem, who knows.

I went out to CO last week with a OnX trial and...well...I don't know why I don't want to like it (might be all the social media hyping), but it just kinda worked without any drama, since I was alone and wasn't sure exactly where I'd wind up wandering I had the whole region downloaded, which gave me no trouble (I don't know how many giggleybits off hand, but probably quite a few). I was alone with no gear in a new/unfamiliar truck so I didn't go anywhere crazy, didn't do any route building or anything, I was just using it to make sure I was where I wanted to be and could get back on track if I took a little side quest. I spent less time prepping with it than I had last year with Gaia so I'm tempted to say I didn't really like it as much (ignoring the whole, Gaia not working when I needed to thing, NBD), but it's probably more just lack of familiarity and the aforementioned prejudice.

 

Gaia is for people comfortable with more free-form GIS mapping software. If that’s your jam, it’s no contest: Gaia all the way.

OnX is more “canned” meaning they have their trails and that’s what it does. You can’t plan a route that they don’t have in their system. But if it is in the system, the experience is usually pretty good.

OnX has some frustrating limitations that I suspect stem from trying to be three apps at once - I suspect Backcountry and Hunt prevent Offroad from really being great. I personally dislike the visually busy map with OnX, it’s not clean enough for me.

 

You sure about that? I'm certainly not very knowledgeable with OnX and have yet to try to plan a route but isn't that what the guy is doing in this YouTube video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NBOWVvqDAs