Polarsteps Alternative: For the Trip You Are Still Planning

If you are searching for a Polarsteps alternative, you probably do not hate Polarsteps. Almost nobody does. It rides along in your pocket, draws the route you actually took, files your photos along it, and at the end there is a map of your trip that looks the way the trip felt.

So, as usual, the honest version of this page starts with why you might not need an alternative at all.

Where Polarsteps is better than us

The record. Polarsteps tracks your route as you travel, offline included, without you doing anything. Dreamfare does not track your route. If what you want is the line on the map growing behind you, that is Polarsteps and it is superb at it.

The book. At the end of a trip Polarsteps will print the whole thing as a physical travel book, from about €36 to €150 at the time of writing depending on the size. Nobody else does this as well.

The diary. Steps, notes and photos pinned along the route as you go. A tracked Polarsteps trip is a richer record of the journey than any reconstruction after the fact, ours included.

Price. The core app is free. Plus was €8.99 a month or €29.99 a year at the time of writing, and you can track and relive trips without it.

If the record of the journey is the point for you, close this page. You are in the right app.

Why people go looking anyway

Polarsteps points backwards. It is built for the trip you are on and the trip you took. It has a planner now, but the plan it wants from you is a route with stops on it, typed in by you.

Your next trip does not currently exist as a route. It exists as forty saved videos, a Reddit thread, one strong opinion about a bakery, and a group that has not agreed on dates. Getting from that pile to a plan is most of the work of traveling, and it is the part that happens before there is anything to track.

The map you did not have to track

The feature that sends most people here is the world map of visited countries, so let us do that one properly.

Polarsteps colours its map from the trips it has tracked, and you can add the old trips by hand. Which is the catch: the map only knows what you tracked or typed. The decade of travel before you installed it is homework.

Dreamfare draws the map from your camera roll. Every photo you have taken knows where it was taken, so you open the Scratch map and the last ten years of trips colour themselves in. Nothing leaves your phone. Home is subtracted automatically, because the streets where you buy milk are not travel. It colours the regions you actually stood in, not just the country, so a week in Kyoto colours Kyoto rather than all of Japan. Two buttons fix what the photos got wrong: add the trip from before you had a phone, remove the layover you never left.

Then it goes one further. The photos cluster into trips, and each one can be saved as a real trip with your pictures filed under the days you took them, or played back as a story, day by day. It is the relive feature, for every trip you took before you had anything to relive it with.

The part before the plane

This is the half Dreamfare is actually built for.

Share your saved videos into it, from TikTok, Instagram, YouTube or Reddit, and the places come out with their real locations. The advice with no pin in it is kept as a tip for that city. Fold a trip and every stop is a real venue with its hours, a stop that lands when the place is shut gets moved or flagged, the gaps between stops are measured, and your flight times fence the first and last day.

Invite the crew and the trip gets a chat that lives inside it, votes on every stop, and packing and notes that can be shared or kept personal. When it is time to pay, the plan carries on into stays, flights, activities, rail and eSIM with your dates, your airport and your home currency already filled in.

Side by side

Who should switch

If the trip you care about is the one that has not happened yet. If your research lives in a saved folder and you want it to become a real plan without typing it in. If the visited map should include the decade before you installed anything. That is what Dreamfare is for.

If you are mid-trip and you want the line growing behind you, stay. Some people run both, Polarsteps for the diary and Dreamfare for the plan, and that is a perfectly sensible pocket.

Try it without migrating

Open the Scratch map once and watch ten years colour in. You do not have to plan anything. The map alone settles whether the camera-roll trick is real.

Keep a map of every country you have visited, see how the planners compare in the rest of the category, or look at real itineraries by destination.