Polarsteps vs MapMyWorld: Which One Actually Records Your Travel?
· Nen
Two apps show up in every "how to track travel" search: Polarsteps and MapMyWorld. Both put pins on a map. That's where the similarity ends.
Polarsteps is a GPS journey tracker. It watches where you go while you're travelling and draws the route automatically. MapMyWorld is a travel record. It holds everything about where you've been — places, trips, expenses, UNESCO sites, airports — whether that travel happened last week or fifteen years ago.
This is a category comparison as much as a product one. If you understand the category difference, the choice mostly makes itself. Here's the breakdown.
Quick comparison
| Polarsteps | MapMyWorld | |
|---|---|---|
| How it works | Automatic GPS tracking during travel | Manual logging, any time |
| Retroactive history | No — starts from install | Yes — CSV/KML import |
| Expense tracking | No | Yes — 27 categories, multi-currency |
| UNESCO site tracking | No | Yes — 1,200+ sites |
| Airport log | No | Yes — all 7,906 airports |
| Social sharing | Strong — built for it | Share card (stats snapshot) |
| Battery/privacy | GPS-always-on | No GPS required |
| Native mobile app | Yes | Web-first (PWA) |
| Free tier | Yes, limited | Unlimited places, 3 trips |
| Paid from | ~$3.99/mo | $7.99/mo, or $199.99 lifetime |
The category difference
This is the part most comparisons skip, and it's the only part that actually matters for your decision.
Polarsteps records movement. Install it, turn it on, and it tracks your GPS position throughout a trip — building a live map of your route, complete with distance travelled and a timeline you can share with people following along. It is very good at this. The problem is that it only knows about travel that happened after you installed it and remembered to turn it on.
MapMyWorld records history. You can add a trip from 2012 as easily as a trip from last week. There's no GPS requirement, no "did I remember to turn it on" anxiety, and no dependency on the app existing at the time of travel. The trade-off is that nothing populates automatically — you're the one entering it.
If you have significant travel history already behind you — and if you're reading a comparison like this, you probably do — the GPS-only model means most of your travel simply doesn't exist in Polarsteps. That's not a criticism of the product. It's a structural fact about what it's built to do.
Feature-by-feature
Retroactive travel history
Polarsteps: Not supported. There is no meaningful way to add a trip from before you installed the app. Your travel record starts the day you started using it.
MapMyWorld: CSV and KML import (Pro) lets you reconstruct past trips. If you have 20+ countries behind you, this is the difference between a record that reflects your actual history and one that reflects only your future.
Expense tracking
Polarsteps: Not a feature. Polarsteps tracks where you went, not what it cost.
MapMyWorld: 27 expense categories with multi-currency support and automatic conversion to your home currency. Every expense is trip-linked, so you can see exactly what a trip to Southeast Asia cost you, broken down by category.
UNESCO World Heritage Sites
Polarsteps: Not tracked. Your route might pass through a UNESCO site's coordinates, but the app has no concept of it.
MapMyWorld: 1,200+ UNESCO sites, each one loggable as visited (not just passed through). Recommendations surface sites near places you've already logged.
Airport history
Polarsteps: Not tracked as a distinct category, though flights show up as route segments if GPS caught them.
MapMyWorld: All 7,906 airports in a searchable, trip-linked log — every departure, arrival, and layover, including the ones from before you had a tracking app installed.
Social sharing
Polarsteps: This is a genuine strength. Real-time trip sharing with a polished, purpose-built interface. If broadcasting an active trip to friends and family is the priority, Polarsteps does it better.
MapMyWorld: A branded share card summarising your full stats — countries, places, UNESCO sites, airports, years travelled — as a single image. Built for showing what your record looks like, not for live trip-following.
Privacy and battery
Polarsteps: Requires GPS-always-on during a trip to function as intended. Continuous location access and the battery drain that comes with it are the cost of the automatic tracking.
MapMyWorld: No GPS requirement. You log manually, which means no background location access and no battery cost — a deliberate trade-off, not a missing feature.
Native mobile app
Polarsteps: Native iOS and Android apps, which matters if automatic GPS tracking is the point — a browser tab can't track your location in the background reliably.
MapMyWorld: Web-first with a PWA. No native app at the time of writing. Worth noting directly: if a native app is a hard requirement for you, this is the one honest limitation to weigh.
Pricing
Polarsteps: Free tier available; paid plans from around $3.99/month.
MapMyWorld: Free tier with unlimited places and 3 trips. Pro is $7.99/month, $59.99/year, or $199.99 as a one-time lifetime purchase.
Who each app is actually for
Polarsteps is right for you if: you're taking an active trip and want your route tracked automatically without manual effort, and sharing that trip in real time with people following along matters to you. It's built for the trip happening now, not the trips you took before.
MapMyWorld is right for you if: you have real travel history — 20, 30, 50+ countries — and you want more than a route on a map. You want to know what trips cost, which UNESCO sites you actually walked into, how many times you've transited a given airport, and you want all of that to exist as a permanent record independent of whether you remembered to open an app while travelling.
Use both, if it makes sense for you: they're not mutually exclusive. Some people run Polarsteps during an active trip for the live route and sharing, then log the trip into MapMyWorld afterward for the permanent, deeper record — expenses, UNESCO sites, and all.
The honest verdict
Polarsteps is an excellent GPS tracker. Judged as what it is — automatic route capture with strong social sharing — it earns its 15 million users.
But "GPS tracker" and "travel record" are different products solving different problems, and the comparison only gets confusing when that distinction gets lost. A GPS trace tells you where you moved. It doesn't tell you what a trip cost, which UNESCO sites you actually walked into, or how many airports you've transited across a decade of travel — because it was never built to.
If what you want is a complete, permanent record of your travel history - past and future, deep and specific - MapMyWorld is built for that job specifically. If what you want is your current trip tracked automatically and shared live, Polarsteps does that well.
Start your record free at mapmyworld.app.
Published July 2026. Written by Nen, founder of MapMyWorld. Nen built MapMyWorld after coming home from Japan with too many places to add to Google My Maps. Read more →