I have been debating this for like 6 months...thank you for the video

OnX must've watched this video and listen to this guy. All cons that he has expressed for OnX are now changed, fantastic app. You made a B- App and made it in to a A. Thanks! FYI still very simple to use still.

Thanks for the rundown and feedback! I go back and forth between the two for my needs and what OS to use.

Gaia is like Android. You can do all kinds of customization you just have to take the time to learn. While Onyx is like Apple, simple with a couple things to shine.

Excellent comparison. I am a Gaia user primarily for the map choices and your video answered all my questions about On X Off-road. Thank you.

Thanks! I was considering Onx Offroad. Very helpful comparison. I agree that the Gaia user interface can be intimidating, but your previous Gaia tutorials were very helpful; I highly recommend those to your viewers.

Really great comparison, thanks. I have found at times it’s easy to get bogged down in the complexity of Gaia, but it’s a really powerful planning tool. I’ve been using Gaia for maybe 5-10 years.

Great review and comparison. I love Gaia and you've convinced me that its working just fine. I love the huge array of layers for different needs. I use it for hiking, mountain biking, and dual sport / atv riding and find myself using different maps depending on the activity. Not sure if OnX is as widely used internationally or is just USA centric, but I know Gaia has many different map layers available for the Globe. The Backroad Mapbooks layer for Canada is amazing and offline is a must since cell service is limited away from major highways so download of maps is a major priority.

Thanks for doing this comparison, I never looked at OnX (did hear about it) but after watching this I now know I don't need to bother. I will stick with Gaia.

We're in Texas and i just got Gaia and this is all new to us, so this was super helpful! we spend a lot of time in the Ozarks, i think i've seen your Jeep!

An area might be useful for organizating from a visual perspective. You draw an area and call it "Weekend fun" and all the lines within are what you have planned for the weekend. Just a thought.

Nice job! The area draw is mainly used to draw out the boundary for and area and it will measure said area. Kinda like measuring square miles if you will.

I use mainly On X Hunt vs the Off Road because it shows land area ownership. note; once you save an off line map in On X, You can zoom in on the area within that map and get the fine detail of the area same as it would be online. I have and pay for both services Gaia and On X, as sometimes I like the simple interface of On X when out in the field, it is also a lot easier to follow for a new navigator. sometimes less is more. Thanks for the comparison.

Thank you for this comparison video

This helped me make my mind up! Thanks for the great video buddy

Appreciate the review. Well done! If you do enter new route information, please include a comment re: if it's appropriate for a full size truck vs. Jeep (e.g. width/wheelbase concerns). All high clearance vehicles not created equal. Had some issues with this finding routes in Moab area and needed to rely on locals (good thing anyway).

Great video! Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

Points are all great. I am a ONx user because they actually have updated STATE forest roads listed in Michigan. Gaia has struggled with this. National is listed fine, but Michigan has a ton of state land too. But the ONx frustrations you mentioned I have too. I feel like those are all items that will improve with time as they continue to grow.

Got the Onx hunt for Arizona and Love it, No Hassle and My time is Free. Time to Move on to The Outdoors, Plug and Play Vs a Life time of Desk work. $50 brand new on Ebay Later Dude.

Great summary. I have been out of the Onx loop for awhile so I was curious. To me Gaia has tons they can improve on in an incredibly powerful tool and Onx has almost nothing except simplicity. For serious open ended exploring of large areas off grid it's not even close. Gaia is clearly better. I also fail to understand the people that complain about subscription fees and then spend 10-16 years worth of sub fees on a device like a Garmin Overlander running hardware that is low spec and obsolete from the moment you buy it.

Thank you. I am all about simple and easy to use. OnX it is. Thanks!

thank you for doing this, my son and I are planning our first overland trip from OK to NM first of May and intend to be on off road trails in southern NM. We will be using the Gaia GPS. We faithfully watch your videos and really enjoy all the trails you explore. I am excited to make the trip, I am using a walker so my son drives, I get to run the photography side. I had the same idea of using a topo skin on my gecko JKU, where did you get yours? I have a zillion questions but will close. Enjoy your day, its a gift.

Great overview. We use Gaia with Apple Car play in our Jeep so we do have to have any dash mounts.

I just did part of the WBDR with ONX. Even though it technically worked, I can’t say I like it. It felt rough and under developed with clunky features. I think it has potential but needs some polishing and some extra features like an easier to use offline map download function. If you want a high definition map section it forces you to use a very small viewing window which makes downloading multiple parts of a large map section difficult and frustrating.

Gaia has public tracks in app. Click layers then map overlay and toggle public tracks. Also at the bottom of the app there is a discover icon which list a more curated list of tracks, hikes etc.

I need to watch more of your videos on gaia, as I can't seem to fully figure it out, at least from my phone, not sure if a tablet or actual computer would make it easier, as it seems there are more options than what I can find on my phone, and I do have the paid subscription.

Thanks for the great comparison! Have you used or have any thoughts/opinons on All Trails or Trails Offroad?

Good vid Matt. Thanks

The area shapes function is especially useful, as Eddy Gray points out, for creating boundaries. This is useful for marking, as Eddie points out, restricted areas, but also for marking out an area you have specific permission to be located in. For example: If I where wheeling (or more likely hiking or hunting) on a portion of private land with permission, I could mark the boundary area and easily at a glance know where I was in relation to those borders, such as if a land owner said "Yeah. You can hunt east of (fictional) Buzzards Creek" I would go in and set a boundary along his property line and following the creek, then I would know the difference between buzzards creek and beaver creek instantly while following a trail. It could also be used to mark areas that have known dangers. This year I hunted in a WMA that the local warden warned me of mountain lion sightings in one area of the WMA, which since I was ground hunting with a blind was good to know, but the best we could do was draw the area out on my paper map of the area. Likewise it can be used say for example if you where going to be wheeling in an area that someone you knew was familiar with, they could sent you a map marked with areas where you could get some great drone footage by marking an area you would want to fly your drone so you did not miss the incredible view/footage that could not be seen from the trail. Or if I where to go canoeing in the Adirondacks this summer as I hope to, someone could point me to good clusters of lakes easily allowing me to focus my search and planning. In theory one could even use a function like the area shapes to mark "the map is wrong in this area, the area is not meadows, it is muskegs".

Thanks for the review of both. I have been using Gaia. What I would like one of these companies to do would be to give us the ability to magnify the view so as to enlarge the trail lines and names instead of having them shrink back down to their default size as you zoom in. Riding off road and bouncing around I am unable to get a good view of the information. All that I can see is if I am still on track. I am 65 and wear glasses for distance and that doesn’t help seeing the map. I would buy a iPad instead of using my iPhone 14 MAX if I thought it would help but it’s still the same size when it comes to the trails and names.

Another big advantage to Gaia is CarPlay, which I use all the time.

Just attempted to transition from combining Gaia & Trails Offroad for planning, hoping to just have one subscription with OnX having trail info like Trails Offroad (so everything I need in one app, instead of bouncing between two). I do like the simplicity of OnX, but the deal breaker for me is routing. I love how Gaia snaps a route instantly between two waypoints, where I have to manually draw a line to make an entire route in OnX. That’s a major pain, and time consuming, for longer trips. If OnX eventually integrates better routing features like that, and refined its trail filtering/organization as you mentioned it would be a contender. For now, Gaia is for me.

Also on the OnX if you go to “rides” and uncheck the ATV/UTV it should filter those trails off the map. I agree it’s nice to just see them in GaiaGPS, but this will help remove those.

Nice presentation

Area shapes may help you stay out of restricted zones or state line boundaries where your cargo could be illegal

do either of them have the ability to adjust "on the fly" for road closures? Especially when you're somewhere with no signal and need to adjust the route?

Question, OnXoffroad came as part of my purchase w/ my Sahara. It does a few of the things you said it didn't do (like landowners info). Have you done any recent comparisons? BTW, so appreciate all the different videos and viewpoints you and Cara produce! :)

You published one or two videos from one of your Colorado trips that included 3D animations. The animations (maybe 20 seconds each) showed the route from start to finish for that day. Did you use Gaia for this purpose or another application? (I may be mistaken, but I seem to recall that your Taylor and or Pearl Pass routes were illustrated in this fashion.) Thank you for your great content!

Question: @29:18 you were saying Gaia GPS only had (Public Tracks) in the web browser but not the app version. Could one export a public track from web browser to the app, in advance of their trip for offline viewing?

Area shapes would ve great for highlighting an area boundary for hunt units for new hunters to an area or to even let others in your hunting party the area you will shoot anything that moves. Lol

Thanks for such a great review. I started with Gaia, and I am just planning my first "easy~moderate" trip and found it to be very powerful except that it did not tell me about trail complexity. A fellow in a community recommended onX and I subscribed only to find this very difficult user interface with all those thick lines, and I have to zoom in very close to click on the right track to get information about it. I found onX to be very much featureless compared with Gaia except for the trail complexity information. Can you please point me to a reliable source for that one? Thanks a lot.

Excellent overview of both apps, thank you for sharing. I do have a question, I’ve been using Gaia for many years, I am finding the app to be somewhat unstable, crashes , and extremely slow, even locking up often, when downloading offline maps. I basically download 5 map layers (Gaia topo, MVUM, Private and Public Lands, and USFS Roads and Trails). My devices are the iPhone 13 Pro and iPad mini gen 5. Because of this issue, I have been dabbling with OnX but, like you pointed out, it is very simple and very limited. I have reached out to Gaia a few times but have not really received any help. Do you have any wisdom regarding my Gaia issues? I do plan the rewatch your Gaia tutorials again to see if I missed something. Thanks much!

for a newbie, what is a "public track"? Are all the other routes/tracks/dirt roads "private tracks" on private property?

Question…..Just found your channel btw. Great Content. I just checked my Gaia MVUM map on my iOS App and it shows the public FS roads. Did Gaia do an update? So my MVUM works on the app and on a desktop!

They both have pros and cons..I had to go with oNx bc of the user friendly .

I believe OnX has a different tier paid version that will show the private land owner info. Think it was 99. Bucks you get all features plus the private land and something else. Looking at this and Gaia at the moment

Question: Gaia seems to allow seeing public tracks on the tablet (not just web browser). Can you or anyone confirm? Thank you.

I'm not very tech savvy but I will give Gaia a best effort and watch your previous tutorials. You mention you teach Gaia? Online classes?

Public Tracks are on the web and mobile versions of Gaia

Oklahoma wildlife management is offering 20% off on x

How do I get that sweatshirt?

Are any of these apps really effective and detailed for canada?

Area tool... This is useful setting up zones to stay out of. For those that play in the sand down in the Glamis Dunes, there are areas that are nature preserves that carry big fines for violating. You can set up exclusion zones on your maps to avoid these areas.

Are both of these systems as good in Canada?

Gaia also supports Apple CarPlay so I can run it directly on my Tacoma's infotainment screen. Wish they could support Android Auto but I guess Google won't open the map feature to 3rd party apps.

Thoughts? I just got a Jeep and moved to Denver, so I don't really know what's available/where to go offroading. So far i have been using the Funtreks books and TrailDamage website. My Jeep has AppleCar play so Gaia has been great to display a track on the Jeep screen. But with Gaia as you pointed out its not great at discovering/looking for new tracks.... What about doing an OnX subscription to "discover trails", then exporting to Gaia to display via CarPlay when actually out on the trails? I did note that Onx does not let you export from the iOS app, so it would have to be all done at home. (this past weekend the trail we planned to do was closed, trying to find/discover an alternative on the Gaia app was useless... so we gave up and went home). Thx!

Like the simplicity of oNx. How reliable is it?

Im using a Samsung Galaxy tab A with only 16G of memory and 2G of RAM. The tablet just doesnt have enough for onX. Would it be a problem with Gaia? Just bought the tablet and figured this out.

I have and use both. But ON-X does not work in portrait mode on my iPad… it does but a lot of the controls disappear. Been talking to them for a year about this and they don’t seem interested in fixing it,… so Gaia it is… Seeing your version of on-x on your iPad (the same) in landscape mode, I have never seen (to this day) that lower tool bar… are you using some beta, because that’s not there on mine (latest as of this writing)

Where can I find that hoodie?

can you actually navigate with OnX? I'm wanting to use it for single track dirt bike riding. mark a spot and find my way out of a big area. On areas that don't actually have official trails. In your opinion would this be a good dirt bike single trail app for finding trails and for navigating? I went to a big ohv park the other day and got lost. I used my phone to find my way back but that got me to thinkng about an app like these and of corse thought of OnX because they are like you said advertising like crazy. Thanks for the video.

Do people use .gpx or .kml more often? Any reason to choose one file type over the other?

New release of Gaia has weather. pretty nice!

Hi. I am a new Premium GAIA user. I am having trouble. I started a new track. At one point I "paused" the hike since I was picking up something at the store. Once I went back outside I restarted it (technically speaking I unpaused it}. Once I finished I saved it to the GAIA cloud since I am a new PREMIUM user. So, on my phone it appears complete with total mileage and time. When I go to view the route on my PC it only shows the route up to the point I set it to "Paused"?? What happened here?? TIA everyone.

Looks like this video was made 2+ years ago now. In that time have there been any changes to either app that would change your pro/con list?

Anything like this for a galaxy watch 4

What about your navigation system, such as Glo 2, Dual, Bad Elf… what are you using ?

How do you show the mvum overlay on the Gaia mobile app?

Can you import and export between GAIA and OnX?

On Gaia my GPS location seems to float or wander and is rarely over my actual position. OnX seems to be right on when it comes to GPS. I use Android systems, is there an issue on my end or is this common?

any better alternatives? I've done some good multi day routes with gaia but holy shit trying to manage files and find downloads made me cancel my premium subscription. I got onx premium and there doesn't seem to be very much you can do.

My version (purchased) of onX Offroad does give you private land information. Land owner, property size

So what your saying is to use both.

I love GAIA, but my biggest con is the slow downloads when I am downloading maps for off line use.

Do either or both of these GPS apps allow others to see where you are in real time? I ride alone 50%+ and my fam would like to be able to know where I’m at... Thanks Chris

Your video is specific to the PC view. When downloaded off grid OnX resolution really falls short. There’s a major difference on a iPad or phone when on 4/5G or wifi compared to a cleared cache download. The comparison is not really close at all, Gaia take it all day long.

how do i see your Ozark adventure map?

Update with dyrt pro? 🤷‍♂️😁

Is there a place on the Interenet to share Gaia trips with other users? TNX

If you are only using gia mobile apps is it worth it for premium?

I like OnX, but you have me sold on Gaia

I have been looking at Gaia for about two months. Honestly there is nothing that I like about it. Maby I don't know how to use it yet, but there isn't a thing intuitive about it. at the 30,000 foot view nothing is labeled and once I zoom down on it to get labels, you can't see where you are in relation to anything else.

I like GAIA better because I can store waypoints in a hierarchy of folders, ONX has only one base level of folders. I like GAIA because I can add my own text to waypoint as labels, ONX does not have that feature. Also GAIA has hundreds of waypoint symbols the user can select while ONX symbology is limited for waypoints. High resolution imagery in GAIA is clearer compared to the same high resolution imagery displayed in ONX.

Haven't tried OnX yet but Gaia is just too manual for me. I don't want to spend hours ahead of time drawing out a route.

I like gaia but the fact that the map doesn't follow you and they can't do any type or turn by turn just bugs me. I honestly use Google maps and just down load the area I'm going to be around and it works offline just fine

OnX is garbage for the reasons you listed and the price is an insult. For Gaia you get the whole country for the price approx $40 but for Onx , unless they have updated pricing, you have to pay for each state or about $100 for the whole country. Gaia is always updating and making their experience and features better. The combination of Gaia and Google Maps for both online and offline is a huge win.

onX now has public lands info for $100 a year.

One thing that is a big annoyance with Gaia when working with folders is the ridiculously tedious repetition such as the example you gave making the 3 routes and the waypoint in one of your past videos. You had to one at a time manually select then enter each item in a folder. When creating a new route or waypoint, Gaia should have an option to immediately add it to a folder of your choice when you create it. Also, same thing when uploading tracks or waypoints you might find on the internet. Gaia does not allow you to tell it where to put the track. Instead you have to go find the track or waypoint that is now downloaded and once again manually add it to a folder. Secondly, Gaia makes an additional folder with the name of the track(s) you just downloaded. After entering the track into a folder of your choice you now have to track down the empty useless folder with the original name that Gaia created and delete each and every one.

This is for. You ozark dude wtf i jave watched you for months how dear you fool us like this .

For those comparing Gaia vs OnX, don't bother with Gaia. They have their comments turned off. Which, makes me not trust that company. I have used OnX as a premium member. Even though it wasn't perfect, I have to learn more about it. You can reach out to them at any time and they will respond to you.

You are presenting a lot of info, but your voice levels are uneven, thereby making it harder to hear it all.

I'm just starting to get into this, and this video did not answer a single question. For example, how does one actually navigate using one if these apps? Is it ourselves by visual, thus having to read an impossible see phone display in full sun? Or do they, like Google Maps, give turn by turn instructions. I learned from this video that I can print maps from one of these apps. WTF am I going to do with a printed map? Duct tape it to my motorcycle handlebars??? No: this video assumes pre existing familiarity with off-road GPS navigation, and launches directly into the secondary and tertiary features, which at the moment I care for not at all, whatsoever. First, show me how you use it to get around. I'll worry about exporting files, and printing maps, a couple years later.

Talk about being bias!

This app is not for jeeping dont buyit its for hiking dont be fooled he is paying his bills with this

"...Gaia GPS Vs OnX Offroad - which is the best ..." Oops, it should read "which is better." Recall your grammar school grammar class, they taught the proper use on good, better, best. When comparing two item always use better, you are comparing two the Gaia GPS Vs OnX, Only when comparing three or more items use best.

OnX doesn’t do sh!t on CarPlay. Basically just a paper map on your dash. That’s it. Nothing more. Actually worse! Paper maps have names and a scale so you at least use your fingers to estimate distance OnX ? No route info. No waypoint info. No navigation. Not even a scale!! What’s the name of that trail or waypoint? Is it a mile away? 100 miles away? If OnX knows, it ain’t tellin ya!! Just a map with a bunch of lines on it that you can zoom in/out with no clue to the scale. Definitely would NOT recommend

So, Once you "plot" a route and waypoints, how do you follow it?????

Trails Offroad would be the best once they add more trails that are included on Gaia and OnX. For now, I have to use OnX for finding trails and their rate, and Gaia to navigate. Gaia is loaded with awesome information, more than we typically use, but they miss the most useful and important features, such as trail rates by vehicle type, user reviews, and pictures, and if the trail is closed or open. Once Gaia does add these features, I will drop OnX.

You sold me on the Gaia just for the land owner info… OnX off-road offers that map if you pay for their elite version, but it is $99 ! (I don’t own ether, still shopping around)

Are all of the windrock trails on the Gaia app or the onx off-road app ? (Or both?)