MapMyWorld vs Visited: Is the Country Count Enough?

There is a small ritual almost every well-travelled person performs. You open a world map app, tap the country you just came home from, and watch a number tick upward. Forty-one. Forty-two. It feels good for about four seconds. Then you close the app, and nothing about the way you remember that trip has changed.

Visited is the app that performs that ritual better than almost anything else. If you have been searching for a Visited alternative, it is worth being precise about what you are actually looking for — because in our experience most people searching that phrase are not unhappy with Visited. They have simply outgrown the question it answers.

This is an honest comparison written by the people who make MapMyWorld. We have a stake in the outcome, so we have tried to be specific about where Visited is genuinely better, and where we are genuinely worse.

What Visited does, and does well

Visited is made by Arriving In High Heels, a small studio that built the app out of their own travel over roughly 69 countries. It has been in the App Store since 2014 and is still actively maintained — the iOS listing showed version 4.5.7 updated the day we checked.

The core of it is a world map you colour in. Beyond countries, it goes deeper into geography than most rivals: regional maps for more than 20 countries, a separate cities map, and a large library of curated travel lists — the marketing site claims over 175 of them, covering things like national parks, culinary destinations and heritage sites. It computes your percentage of the world, your country count, and a dashboard of comparable statistics. You can compare maps with friends and put your map on a printed poster.

Two things deserve real credit. First, Visited does not follow your location. It only holds what you type in, which puts it in the same privacy camp we are in and a very different one from GPS-driven apps. Second, the geography model is more granular than ours: we do not have a cities map or per-country regional maps, and if colouring in the departments of France is the thing you want, Visited does it and we do not.

The question the country count cannot answer

Here is the test we keep coming back to. Pick a trip from four years ago. Not last month — four years ago.

Now answer three questions about it. What did it cost you, all in? Where did you sleep, and was it worth what you paid? What was the name of the restaurant you still talk about?

Almost nobody can answer all three. The country count cannot help you, because the country count was never a record — it is a tally. It compresses two weeks in Vietnam and a four-hour layover in Vietnam into the identical unit of measurement. That is not a flaw in Visited's execution; it is the definition of the product. A tally is a summary of a record you never kept.

The gap matters most for the people who travel most. If you have been to eight countries, your memory is still doing the archiving for you. Past about thirty, it quietly stops. You keep the highlights and lose the texture, and no percentage-of-the-world figure will give the texture back.

Where Visited stops

To be fair to a good app, these are not bugs. They are the edges of its scope, and they are exactly the edges people hit when they start looking for something else.

What you might want	Visited	MapMyWorld
Countries and regions coloured in	Yes, including cities and 20+ regional maps	Countries and places, no regional or city maps
Curated travel lists	175+ lists	UNESCO layer only
Cost of a trip	Not offered	27 expense categories, multi-currency
Airport log	Not offered	Every transit, linked to a trip
UNESCO World Heritage layer	Appears within general lists	1,250 sites as a dedicated layer
Per-place notes, dates and rating	Notes on Premium	On every place, free and paid
Bulk data export	No documented export	CSV and JSON on Pro
Location following	No	No

On expenses, airports and export we searched the App Store listing, the Google Play listing and visitedapp.com and found no mention of any of the three. A user review on the App Store asks for spreadsheet export, which suggests it was not available at the time of writing. If Visited has shipped an export since, treat that row as out of date and tell us — being wrong about a competitor is the worst thing a comparison like this can do.

What we built instead

MapMyWorld starts from the assumption that the map is the index, not the product. Underneath each pin there is a place record with a visit date, a departure date, free-text notes and a rating, so a pin can carry what actually happened rather than just where it happened.

On top of that sit the layers a tally has no room for. Expenses are logged against a trip across 27 default categories in whatever currency you paid in, converted to your home currency, which is what lets you answer the "what did it cost" question years later. Airports are their own log, tied to the trip that used them. UNESCO World Heritage Sites are a dedicated layer of 1,250 sites you can mark off and get suggestions from. There are 33 achievements across four categories for the people who like a target, 199 countries in the reference database and over 10,000 airports.

For getting your history out again, Pro includes bulk CSV and JSON export of the whole record, and any single trip can be exported as a PDF of its places and expenses.

If you want the same comparison against a GPS-driven app rather than a map-colouring one, we wrote Polarsteps vs MapMyWorld. If expenses are the specific thing you are missing, the Trail Wallet alternatives piece covers that category properly. And the wider field is laid out in our comparison of travel history apps.

Where we are worse than Visited

We are web-first. There is an installable progressive web app, but there is no native iOS or Android build, and if a home-screen native app is non-negotiable for you, that alone should decide it.

We have no cities map and no per-country regional maps. We have no equivalent of Visited's 175 curated lists — our curated layer is UNESCO and nothing else. We have no itinerary-planning feature, because we are built for what already happened rather than what is coming.

Our free tier is a demo, not a permanent home. And retroactive entry is manual: every historical place is added by hand with its dates, one at a time. There is no bulk import at present, so reconstructing fifteen years of travel is an evening's work, not a file upload. Several people have asked for it and it is the most requested thing we do not yet have.

Which one should you use

Use Visited if the map itself is the point — if you want to colour in French departments and Japanese prefectures, browse curated lists for your next destination, and you would rather pay once than subscribe. It is a good app, honestly priced, and it does not follow you around.

Use MapMyWorld if you have reached the stage where the number stopped being interesting. If you want to know what a trip cost, which airports you have passed through, which of the 1,250 UNESCO sites you have stood in front of, and what you thought of a hotel four years after you checked out, a tally will not get you there.

And there is no rule against both. Visited's regional maps and our record layer barely overlap. Colour the map where you like colouring maps, and keep the record where the record belongs.

Start your record — free at mapmyworld.app.