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The fragmented landscape

Why the Commons exists: today a cyclist's knowledge is scattered across dozens of separate, mostly closed apps — "a different app for everything." This page lists the real providers in each area, as a reference behind that claim. It is a snapshot (June 2026); names and figures shift.

Legend: open = open data / open source · closed = proprietary silo · mixed = open base, closed layer.

Climbs & cols

Finding, rating and racing climbs, cols, gradients, segment times and KOMs.

  • Strava (Segments / Local Legends) — closed, freemium. The de-facto global KOM standard everyone benchmarks against; leaderboards increasingly paywalled.
  • VeloViewer — closed, paid. Deep segment/climb analytics on the Strava API (VAM, category, 3D profiles).
  • climbfinder — closed, freemium. The broadest, best-UX European climb-profile database.
  • CyclingCols — closed (community), free. A broad community catalogue of cols across many countries — for riders ticking off climbs one by one.
  • myCols — closed, free. Worldwide climbs with history/storytelling per ascent.
  • PJAMM Cycling — closed, freemium. Global steepest/hardest climbs + a proprietary difficulty index (PDI) and Street View.
  • salite.ch — closed (volunteer), free. Veteran European archive, deep on Italy/Switzerland.
  • cols-cyclisme.com — closed, free. The French-speaking community's col reference.
  • quaeldich.de — closed (community), free. Rich German-language climb detail (surface, traffic, photos).
  • climbbybike.com — closed, free. One of the earliest large pan-European climb indexes.
  • 100 Greatest Cycling Climbs (Simon Warren) — closed, paid. The canonical UK climb bucket-list (book + app).
  • CyclingUp / Climb Index Europe / cycloclimbing — closed, free. Smaller volunteer European catalogues.

Fragmentation: heavily closed; there is no shared open climb dataset. Strava's leaderboards are the only near-universal layer (proprietary, paywalled), while a dozen national databases re-catalogue the same cols behind walled gardens.

Quality rides & ratings

Route planning, navigation, ride sharing, and cyclist-experience ratings (quietness, scenery, surface).

  • Komoot — closed, freemium. Surface/bike-type routing + a vast community Highlights layer & Trail View.
  • RideWithGPS — closed, freemium. Precise planning, cue sheets, club/event tooling.
  • Strava Routes / Heatmap — closed, freemium. Routes from aggregated activity; "where cyclists actually ride."
  • cycle.travel — mixed (OSM base), free. Genuinely quietness-optimised routing from real traffic data.
  • Bikemap — closed, freemium. Millions of user routes with surface filters.
  • CycleStreets — open (non-profit, OSM), free. Explicit fastest/balanced/quietest modes (UK).
  • Garmin Connect / Wahoo / Hammerhead — closed (with hardware). Popularity routing + Climb previews on devices.
  • Outdooractive — mixed, freemium. Large multi-sport route portal, strong in DACH.
  • BRouter — open-source, free. The configurable routing engine behind many other tools.
  • CyclOSM / OpenCycleMap — open (OSM), free. The open cycling map styles others embed.
  • kurviger / Relive / Cyql — closed, freemium. Scenic-road planning / ride videos / club ride org.

Fragmentation: a thin open spine exists (OSM, BRouter, CyclOSM, cycle.travel), but the mass-market layer is proprietary and cyclist-experience ratings are siloed per-app (private Highlights, heatmaps, surface tags) — no portable quality standard.

Scenic, views & heritage

Viewpoints, panoramas, photo spots, landmarks, cultural/heritage sites worth riding past.

  • Komoot Highlights — closed, freemium. The de-facto discovery layer for European cycle touring.
  • Strava — closed, freemium. POIs + popularity heat (not curated heritage).
  • Outdooractive — mixed, freemium. Tourism-board POIs and editorial tours (DACH/Alps).
  • AllTrails — closed, freemium. Popular viewpoints/photo spots, hiking-leaning.
  • Wikiloc — closed, freemium. Tens of millions of trails with geotagged waypoints (viewpoints, fountains, ruins).
  • Atlas Obscura — closed, free to browse. Offbeat cultural/heritage sites.
  • izi.TRAVEL — mixed, free. Location-triggered audio guides at heritage sites.
  • Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons — open (CC), free. The canonical open heritage knowledge base + millions of geotagged photos — but not packaged for cyclists.
  • OpenStreetMap (tourism=viewpoint, historic=*) — open (ODbL), free. The upstream POI source most apps render.
  • Google Maps / Places — closed. Unmatched coverage + Street View, but ToS forbids bulk reuse.
  • Mapillary — mixed (Meta). Crowd street-level imagery; photos are CC BY-SA (open, and usable to trace into OSM), but the platform, derived data, and API are Meta-owned and under Meta's terms.
  • Polarsteps / Spotted by Locals — closed. Personal trip diaries / locals' city guides.
  • FATMAP — defunct — a 3D scenic-discovery map shut down by its owner Strava: a concrete example of a knowledge silo simply vanishing and taking its curated data with it.

Fragmentation: the open facts live in OSM and Wikipedia/Commons, but the layers cyclists actually use wall their curation into non-interoperable silos — and FATMAP's shutdown shows how fragile any single silo is.

Bike-friendly stays

Cyclist-friendly accommodation and hospitality networks.

  • Warmshowers — non-profit, web free / app paid. The original large-scale bike-touring hospitality network.
  • Booking.com / Airbnb / HostelWorld — closed. Scale, but cyclist-friendliness is an unverified amenity flag.
  • Bett+Bike (ADFC, Germany) — closed scheme, free to search. Thousands of certified properties; the model others copied.
  • Accueil Vélo (France) — closed scheme, free. Tightly integrated with France's cycle-route network.
  • Albergabici (Italy) / Fietsers Welkom! (Netherlands) / Cyclists Welcome (Cycling UK) — closed national schemes.
  • EuroVelo national labels — numerous closed national silos (thousands of certified businesses across incompatible systems).
  • iOverlander / Park4Night — mixed, freemium. Crowd-sourced wild-camp / overnight spots for self-supported tourers.
  • Couchsurfing — closed, paid. Broad reach, declining trust after monetisation.
  • Trustroots & Couchers.org — open-source, free. Community-run alternatives with cyclist circles.
  • biroto / cyclefriendlyhotels / beds4cyclists — closed aggregators competing with the national labels.

Fragmentation: extreme. Cyclist-welcome quality is splintered across many incompatible national labels plus private aggregators, mainstream OTAs reduce it to a checkbox, and the community-owned options are small and don't interoperate.

Road surface & conditions

Surface type & quality, gravel/pavé, hazards, closures, traffic/safety, live conditions.

  • OpenStreetMap (surface= / smoothness= / tracktype=) — open (ODbL), free. The base layer nearly every tool reads — but coverage is patchy.
  • CyclOSM — open-source, free. The most complete free cycling map style (surfaces, cobbles, infra).
  • cycle.travel — mixed, free. Surface scoring + a "Cycling Quietness" traffic model.
  • BRouter — open-source, free. Gravel-favouring profiles weighting OSM surface tags.
  • Gravelmap — crowdsourced (non-profit), free. The largest dedicated unpaved-surface database — but its own silo.
  • Trailforks — closed (Outside/Pinkbike), freemium. The strongest real-time MTB trail-condition reporting.
  • Strava Heatmap / Metro — closed, freemium. Popularity signal — but no surface-quality info.
  • Bikemap / RideWithGPS / Komoot — closed, freemium. Surface display + comfort/popularity routing.
  • Waze / Google Maps — closed, free. Real-time closures/hazards — but car-centric, thin on bike detail.
  • BikeMaps.org — open/non-profit, free. Crowd cyclist collisions/near-misses/hazards (academic, sparse).
  • OsmAnd — open-source core, freemium. Offline surface inspection in the field.
  • One.Network / roadworks.org — closed over public data, free. The official UK closure feed — but motor-framed.

Fragmentation: one shared open base (OSM tags) plus a constellation of incompatible proprietary silos — Strava's heat, Gravelmap's gravel DB, Trailforks' reports, Waze's closures — none interchanging data, the richest live signals closed and car-centric.

Water · food · services

Drinking water/refill, resupply (shops/bakeries), cyclist cafés, bike shops & repair stations, e-bike charging.

  • OpenStreetMap (amenity=drinking_water / bicycle_repair_station / shop=bicycle) — open (ODbL), free. The only cross-app shared source — but thinly mapped.
  • Refill — closed (UK charity), free. A large network of free tap-water refill points.
  • TrailTap / WeTap — crowdsourced, free. Cyclist/walker fountain & refill maps (UK / global, patchy coverage).
  • Komoot — closed, freemium. In-ride resupply/POI alerts along a route.
  • Google Maps — closed, free. The default resupply tool — but nothing cyclist-specific or refill-aware.
  • Bike Citizens — mixed, freemium. Urban cyclist navigation + bike-shop POIs.
  • OsmAnd / Organic Maps — open-source, free/freemium. Offline water/café/shop search where Google fails.
  • Bosch eBike Flow / BikeEnergy — closed (hardware), free at point of use. The leading e-bike charging maps — locked to brand/region.
  • Warmshowers — non-profit. Touring hosts (lodging, meals, water).
  • Café Network / CoffeeStop / CakeRider — closed, free. Small regional cyclist-café lists (mostly UK).
  • City open-data fountain datasets (NYC, Vienna, Vancouver…) — open, free. Authoritative within a city, each its own schema/portal.

Fragmentation: even more siloed than surface — refill points split across Refill/TrailTap/WeTap and dozens of incompatible city portals; e-bike charging fractured by hardware brand; cafés/repair/hosts each in their own list. No single source unifies water, food, repair and charging.

What the Commons does differently

One open dataset (ODbL) for the non-personal facts above, given back to OpenStreetMap, with a free query API and bulk exports — so the layers join up instead of fragmenting further, and where good open data already exists (OSM, Wikimedia, open hospitality networks) we partner and link rather than wall off a copy.