Best Road Trip Planner Apps for Australia 2026: 6 Compared

Quick comparison

Navigation apps are excellent at the drive itself and not designed to show where you can stay overnight. Most trip planners are the reverse. Most travellers use one of each, and the table shows where each app sits.

1. AussieCamps: plan where you will stop and sleep

AussieCamps treats a trip as a list of places rather than a line on a map. You add campgrounds, caravan parks, rest areas or any saved place as stops, put them in order, and see the driving distance and time for each leg and for the whole journey. Each stop can carry an arrival date, and the app shows the forecast for arrival dates within the forecast range, which is the detail that changes plans most often in Australia.

Around the route it keeps a trip checklist and packing list, notes, a cover photo, and visited progress as you go. A trip can be shared or synced to your calendar with its stops and dates. Because the place directory lives on the phone, details for every stop stay readable out of signal, while the map, directions and forecasts need a connection. When it is time to drive, directions open in Apple Maps or Google Maps.

The download is free, as are bookable hotels, motels, B&Bs, holiday parks and tours from BookEasy. Trips, collections and the campground, rest area and dump point data need the AussieCamps Pass, sold as a weekly subscription or a one-off lifetime purchase, with in-app purchases listed at A$2.99 to A$9.99 on the Australian App Store.

Choose something else if you need turn-by-turn navigation inside the planner, if you are on Android, or if your trip is mostly cities, where a general itinerary app fits better.

2. Google Maps: the navigator most people already have

Google Maps is free, covers Australia well and gives live traffic and turn-by-turn directions. For planning, it allows up to 9 stops on a route, counting the final destination, which is enough for a day's drive but not for a two-week loop, so long trips end up split across several routes or saved lists.

Download the areas you will drive through before you leave. Google's help pages say offline driving directions work only when the whole route is inside a downloaded area, offline maps expire unless updated, and traffic is not available offline.

3. Apple Maps: the iPhone default, with more stops

Apple Maps is built into every iPhone and its support guide allows a multi-stop driving route with up to 14 stops, which goes further than Google Maps for a single route. Offline maps can be downloaded, and Apple says they support turn-by-turn driving directions without a connection.

Apple notes that offline maps are not available in every country or region, so download a test area before you rely on it. Like Google Maps, it plans the drive rather than the nights: it will not tell you which rest areas allow an overnight stop.

4. Wanderlog: an itinerary builder for mixed trips

Wanderlog is a general travel planner with a 4.9 rating from more than 5,000 Australian ratings. Its App Store listing says you can add unlimited stops for free and see times and distances between places, which suits a trip that mixes drives with days in Sydney or Melbourne and flights between.

Its help centre, though not its store listing, lists offline access to trip plans and route optimisation as Pro features. The Australian App Store lists several Pro prices, from A$50.99 to A$99.99 a year and A$25.99 a month, so check the price shown to you. It has no dedicated camping or rest area directory and no in-app navigation.

5. WikiCamps Australia: trip planning inside a camping app

WikiCamps includes a Trip Planner: you create a trip, add sections such as regions or days, then places and notes, and drag a progress bar as you travel. Enter your vehicle's fuel use and a price per litre and it estimates fuel use and cost between the places in your trip.

It costs A$9.99 once per platform, and up to three planned trips can be downloaded for use without signal. Its help pages do not mention drive times per leg, so pair it with a navigation app for timings.

6. ExplorOz Traveller: route planning off the bitumen

For outback and 4WD trips, ExplorOz Traveller plans and navigates on its own EOTopo topographic map, which shows named roads and 4WD tracks, with track access notes. With EOTopo access downloaded, it works across Australia with no signal.

The app is A$59.99, and offline use needs EOTopo at A$59.99 a year, the 2026 edition at A$79.99 for four years, or Pro Access at A$99.99 a year. That is far more than a sealed-road trip needs, and exactly what a Simpson Desert crossing does.

Also worth knowing

TripIt organises bookings rather than routes: forward confirmation emails and it builds an itinerary with flights, hire cars and accommodation, available offline. Polarsteps plans and then tracks your route automatically, which suits travellers who want a record of the trip as much as a plan.

We left out Roadtrippers, a popular planner in North America, because its App Store listing says it is designed for road trips in the USA and Canada only.

How we compared them

Each app's price, in-app purchases, rating and limits were checked on the Australian App Store and in the developer's own help pages on 20 October 2026. Stop limits are the ones the developers publish. We looked at what matters on an Australian road trip: how far apart the stops are, whether you can see where to sleep, and what still works out of signal.

Our own app earns its money from the Pass, and none of the others paid for a place here. Tell us through the support page if anything has changed.

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