Long gone are the days of pulling origami-like paper maps from your car’s glove box to determine your location. These days, nearly everyone has a phone with a first- or third-party map app that offers biking, driving, or walking directions. Map apps are ideal general guides to day-to-day living, as they can highlight the cheapest gas in your area or the nearest fast food joint. But which map app is the best? At PCMag, we’ve been thoroughly testing navigation tech for nearly 20 years, including the current top options: Apple Maps, Google Maps (our Editors’ Choice winner), and Waze. If you’re ready to hit the road, we’re here to help you decide which map app is best for you.
Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
EDITORS’ NOTE
February 27, 2026: With this update, our recommended navigation apps lineup remains unchanged. The existing picks have been vetted for currency and availability.
- Robust maps with Google Earth and Street View options
- Crowdsourced, real-time traffic data
- Detailed directions for biking, driving, public transportation, and walking
- Offers internal layouts for buildings
- Lets you download directions for offline use
- Fuzzy privacy commitment
- Some outdated Street View images
Google Maps is an absolutely indispensable modern app. Google’s nearly infinite crowdsourced data gives you detailed instructions for getting to just about anywhere in the world. You can download maps for offline use, get a closer look with Street View, and even go inside buildings.
Anyone who needs to get anywhere: Google Maps is the top choice for navigation apps. It’s a valuable tool whether you’re in a car, on foot, or lost in a subway system, and it works great on any mobile device and on the web. Despite being a Google product, you can download it on iPhone and iPad.
Android fans: If you fancy Android-powered phones or tablets, Google Maps is available on your device as soon as you hit the power button.
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Google Maps Review
- Clean, simple maps
- Stunning 3D Flyover mode
- Doesn’t hold onto your data
- Air quality reports and temperature readings
- Offline maps
- Full app available only on Apple devices
- Limited indoor maps
Although Google Maps has the edge in raw, accurate data, Apple Maps has closed much of the gap. After years of significant improvements, Apple Maps is a serious contender in the navigation app space. It presents a ton of information and does an excellent job of keeping your own info private. Just note that Apple Maps is available only on Apple devices.
Apple fans: As with the rest of its products, Apple brings technological flair to Apple Maps, including an amazing 3D Flyover view. Combine that with an eye-catching overall look, and you have a navigation app for people who want what only Cupertino can produce.
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Apple Maps Review
- Crowdsourced traffic conditions
- Social connections for drivers
- Lets you manually control streaming music services
- Difficult to create directions from places other than your current location
- Lacks 3D, satellite, and terrain map imagery
- No true offline option
Waze is Google’s supplemental navigation app designed for drivers motoring to their destinations. Meanwhile, custom features like community support, streaming music integration, and traffic conditions are helpful to have at your fingertips.
Drivers: Waze is the ideal navigation app for hitting the road, with settings that you can customize to match your vehicle type. Its interface is less useful for other forms of navigation, like walking or subways, but Waze delivers like nothing else for driving.
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Buying Guide: The Best Navigation Apps for 2026
Are Map Apps Free?
The three map apps in this showdown—Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze—are entirely free. You don’t need to worry about ad banners or microtransactions.
You can access the three apps in different ways. Google’s Maps (a native Android app) and Waze (Google’s driver-focused navigation app) are available on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. Apple Maps comes preinstalled on every iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. The app’s an Apple exclusive, so it’s automatically dropped from contention if you’re an Android owner.
In terms of web options, you can explore Google Maps and Waze via your favorite web browser. Both services let you plan trips on the desktop before sending the directional information to their respective mobile apps. Previously, Apple Maps lacked a browser-based version. However, to make up for that, Apple released MapKit JS, allowing web developers to add Apple Maps services to websites. For example, the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo switched to using it for map-related searches and route planning. Apple is testing a public beta version of Apple Maps for browsers.
Which Map App Is Best for Driving?
Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze each provide satisfactory driving directions, but differ in many ways. Google has the most extensive, information-packed maps—a boon to its Google Maps and Waze products. Apple Maps endured a rough launch over a decade ago, but has made great strides toward nearly achieving parity with Google Maps. All three apps offer hands-free, voice-guided operation via Google Assistant or Siri on their respective platforms.
If driving is all you’re doing, Waze is the best option. Google Maps and Apple Maps will do just fine, but Waze is a cut above for driving to a new place from your current location. Its maps are simpler than the others, with brighter colors, fewer distracting on-screen items, and larger icons. Waze also encourages its users to crowdsource traffic information. Its avid driving community reports accidents, police activity, road closures, and traffic jams far more than its rivals. However, unlike Google Maps and Apple Maps, Waze lacks offline maps.
Which Map App Is Best for Cyclists?
Unlike Waze, Apple Maps and Google Maps have many options for alternate modes of travel. Driving directions still take center stage, but both apps give directions for cycling, public transit, and walking. There are even ride-sharing options that tie into popular services like Lyft and Uber.
For cyclists, Apple Maps has the leg up in terms of general user interface and features. If your phone screen shuts off, Apple Maps automatically wakes up for the next turn-by-turn direction. Google Maps has an option that prevents it from switching to lock mode during turn-by-turn directions. If that option isn’t active, the app sends a push notification that requires you to unlock your phone. Apple Maps also clearly labels steep hills, stop signs, and traffic lights along your route to help you plan properly. However, cyclists have reported that Google Maps gives better results, avoiding routes with too many hills or additional traffic that would make the route difficult.
Which Map App Has the Best Interface?
Apple Maps and Waze provide cleaner, easier-to-read interfaces compared with Google Maps. Bar none, Waze has the clearest overall map in visual contrast and readability. Unfortunately, it’s only for drivers.
Apple is right behind Waze with a map that’s good for at-a-glance information. Major landmarks and businesses are clearly legible, and Apple’s big, shiny green Go button is more immediate than Google’s smaller blue Start button. Apple Maps also includes useful indicators for air quality and temperature.
Apple Maps matches Google Maps’ business hours, ratings, and website links, but if you dive deep enough, you’ll discover that Google has more extensive maps. Google Maps not only covers more international locations, but it also has awesome building interior maps. If you visit a city, Google Maps will likely have detailed internal maps (with multiple floors!) for convention centers, malls, museums, and other public-facing buildings. With Gemini, Google uses AI to summarize user reviews of these places. All that extra information makes Google Maps feel somewhat cluttered.
For daily use, Apple Maps is easier to read, but Google Maps is a tiny, digital Athena with all the wisdom in the world—if you know where to find it.
Recommended by Our Editors
Which Map App Has the Best Street View?
Besides basic mapping information, Apple Maps and Google Maps provide features that deftly expand the navigation experience. For a long time, Google Maps contained far more cool extras, but Apple Maps has caught up and applied a more thoughtful approach to some formerly Google-only features.
Take Google Street View. This handy feature lets you drop into the map and survey the environment via 360-degree photos cobbled together from Google’s fleet of photographing cars and crowdsourced pictures. Street View is available in more places than Apple Maps’ competing Look Around feature. Look Around is easier to use, though. While Street View takes over your whole device screen, Look Around splits the view between the 360-degree photo and the map. This lets you see where you are while looking around. In terms of usability, Look Around is simply better than Street View, especially when you’re lost. Waze has no such feature.
Of course, Google countered Apple by releasing Live View AR mode. This uses your phone’s camera for turn-by-turn directions, tapping augmented reality to project the instructions on the world in front of you. It even highlights certain landmarks. Live View takes everything great about Street View and kicks it up a notch. Neither Apple Maps nor Waze has anything comparable.
While Google Maps and Apple Maps both offer 3D, satellite, and terrain views, Apple Maps’ Flyover 3D mode is simply more impressive than Google’s. Flyover 3D makes select cities look like tiny dioramas, and it’s a stunning display of technology. It’s cool, but not particularly useful yet.
Which Map App Is the Most Private?
If you prize privacy, Apple Maps is the way to go. Your Apple Maps searches and directions remain on your device, not in the cloud. Apple Maps’ location history is tied to random identifiers and resets over time. Google makes it hard to scrub that information, but it is getting better. Still, if you care about privacy and have an Apple device, the choice is clear.
