Tiles or roads? The Strava exploration apps, compared

The short answer

• Want it free, with everything included? StatsHunters. No paid tier exists.
• Want the game itself, on your phone, live? Squadrats.
• Want tiles plus deep analysis of your whole Strava history? VeloViewer.
• Bored of tiles because you already fill them in? Wandrer, which only credits road you have never covered.
• Running every street in your city? CityStrides, which is the only one built for feet rather than wheels.

Two games, not one

The reason these apps get lumped together is that they all draw a map with holes in it. The reason people end up disappointed is that they score completely different things.

Tile hunting cuts the world into a grid and colours a square the moment you enter it. Depth does not matter. Clip one corner of a square on a main road and it is yours as fully as if you had ridden every lane inside it. That makes progress fast and the map satisfying early, and it means the endgame is about shape rather than coverage: the largest solid square you can carve out, the largest connected blob.

Road coverage matches your GPS trace against OpenStreetMap and credits only the road or street you have not covered before. Riding your usual loop again earns you nothing. Getting a town from 80 percent to 100 percent means every cul-de-sac, every service road, every dead end behind the supermarket. It is slower, much harder, and the reason people move to it is that their tile map stopped being interesting.

One useful fact if you are choosing between the tile games: Squadrats, VeloViewer and StatsHunters are all playing on the same grid. VeloViewer describes its Explorer Tiles as the standard web map tiles at zoom 14, and StatsHunters says outright that it uses the VeloViewer definition rather than inventing one, calling them “Veloviewer explorer tiles” throughout. Its heatmap will take a tile export from VeloViewer or Squadrats and show you which squares each side is missing, which is the practical proof they line up. Do not be thrown by the fact that they size a tile differently in words, VeloViewer calling it roughly a kilometre and the other two roughly a mile. A tile is not a fixed size on the ground: the grid is drawn on a Web Mercator projection, so tiles shrink the further you get from the equator.

Side by side

StatsHunters: the free one, and it is not a trick

The obvious question about StatsHunters is what is held back, and the answer is nothing. Explorer tiles, max square, max cluster, the full activity heatmap, its 2,300-plus badges, club leaderboards and the Garmin exports work on a plain free account. There is no premium plan to buy. It is a personal project by Stan Ansems, funded by donations, and donating gets you precisely nothing extra.

It is also the most generous about getting the tiles out of the browser. You can pull a KML of missing tiles, a Garmin IMG file you drop straight into the Garmin folder on an Edge, an EveryTile string for the Connect IQ app, or a GPX from the square planner. The heavy geometry runs client-side in a web worker, which is why the numbers recompute instantly as you change filters. Strava is the only source of activities, and it asks for read-only access unless you tick a box that lets it write your tile stats into an activity description.

The catch, such as it is, is breadth over polish. More than fifty badge types across a couple of thousand badges is a lot of surface, and the site leans Dutch and Belgian in its regional features. If you want one clean game rather than a cabinet of numbers, look at Squadrats.

Squadrats: the game, with nothing else attached

Squadrats is the purest version of the idea. There is essentially no statistics section. What there is instead is two grids and four trophies: squadrats at roughly a mile square, squadratinhos at 64 to a squadrat, and on each grid a yard, meaning your largest connected area, and an übersquadrat, meaning your largest perfect square. The two goals pull against each other, which is most of the reason people end up riding down cul-de-sacs.

It is the only one here with real phone apps on both iOS and Android, and they light tiles up as you reach them rather than after the upload, though unlimited live hunting is one of the caps Pro lifts. The browser extension paints your grid inside somebody else’s route planner, which is a genuinely different way to use it: Strava, Garmin Connect, RideWithGPS, Komoot, Karoo and others, so you can see which squares a route would win before you ride it. That extension is desktop only.

Pro at $39.99 a year is at the top end for this category, and what it buys is mostly competitive: country and region tracking scored separately, regional standings, the full standings rather than a partial view, and the ability to look at another athlete’s squadrats. The core collecting is free and Squadrats says plainly that it stays that way. Note also that the account is separate: you sign up with email, Google, Apple or Facebook and then authorise Strava from inside it, rather than signing in with Strava.

VeloViewer: tiles as one feature of a much bigger site

VeloViewer invented the explorer tile as most people know it, back in 2015, and the feature outgrew the site around it. But tiles are not what you are really buying. VeloViewer has been running since 2012 and it is a full analysis platform: segment percentiles and effort history, power curves, speed distributions, monthly and yearly summaries across your entire Strava history, and 3D climb profiles that Eurosport has used in race coverage since 2015. It won the 2025 Strava App Award for Data Analysis.

Its free tier is the least generous here and should be read as a demo: one single sync of your 25 most recent activities, 250 segments from them and 10 routes. Almost every feature works, but only on that slice. PRO at £10 a year is what actually turns the site on, by syncing your whole history. PRO✚ at £20 lifts the roughly-weekly limit on rechecking segment placings. It is also pull rather than push: VeloViewer fetches from Strava when you run an update, instead of watching your account in the background.

Pick it if the tiles are the excuse and the analysis is the reason. If you only want tiles, StatsHunters gives you the same grid for nothing.

Wandrer: for when tiles got too easy

Wandrer is the graduation. It matches your tracks against OpenStreetMap and counts only road you have never been down, then expresses it as a percentage of a real place: your neighbourhood, town, county, country. Re-riding your usual loop scores zero. The last ten percent of a town is nothing but dead ends, and that is the entire point.

It also has the best answer to the problem of actually finding the gaps. Two routing tools arrived in 2025: one builds a route covering every road in an area you draw, the other gets you from A to B while picking up as much untravelled road as it can on the way. You can export the map to a Garmin Edge, a Wahoo ELEMNT or a Hammerhead Karoo, and there is a native Karoo app, so the unridden roads are visible while you are out rather than only at the kitchen table.

Two things to know before you pay. The free tier syncs 50 past activities and gives you 10 map downloads. Wandrer refreshes its underlying map data every two to three months, upgraded accounts can pull that refresh on demand, and everyone else can buy a one-off map update for $5. On price, Craig Durkin announced in April 2026 that Extra Lost would go from $30 to $40 a year at the start of May. It is one person, in Girona, running all of it.

CityStrides: the one for feet

CityStrides is the only app here that will refuse your bike rides, and that clarity is why runners like it. Every street in OpenStreetMap is a string of points called nodes. Pass within 25 metres of a node and it is ticked; hit 90 percent of a street’s nodes and the street goes green. Streets with fewer than ten nodes are all or nothing. A city percentage is simply streets completed over streets that exist.

The free tier is the most honest of the paid apps: unlimited activities, unlimited cities, and the basic map, forever. Supporter at $5 a month or $50 a year buys the hunting tools rather than the tracking, and the one people actually pay for is Node Hunter, which drops a marker on every node you have missed in the current view. Route Builder, priority processing and Hard Mode, which demands 100 percent of a street’s nodes, come with it. If a subscription puts you off, it also sells prepaid blocks from $5 to $100 with no recurring charge, billed in your own currency.

It is a website rather than an app, there is nothing in the App Store, and it has been a one-person project since 2013. Walking and hiking count exactly as much as running, which makes it one of the few Strava tools where a walk is a first-class citizen. We compared it directly against Wandrer in Wandrer vs CityStrides.

What Strava’s 2024 API change broke

In November 2024 Strava changed its API terms so that third-party apps may not show your Strava activity data to anyone but you. Every app here felt it, and it is worth knowing because the social half of these games is quieter than it used to be.

CityStrides activities synced from Strava stopped appearing to other Striders, and their activity pages are blocked as if private, though LifeMaps and completion percentages are aggregate data and survived. Wandrer lost the ability to view another rider’s map at the end of 2024 and it has not come back. Squadrats will not publicly display detailed maps for Strava-synced activities at all, and seeing another athlete’s squadrats is a Pro feature. Your own maps and your own scores are unaffected everywhere.

How to choose in one paragraph

If you have never done this before, start with StatsHunters, because it costs nothing and uses the same grid as the paid tile apps, so nothing is wasted if you move. If the game grabs you and you want it in your pocket, Squadrats is the one built as a game. If you want the tiles to sit alongside serious analysis of your riding, VeloViewer at £10 is cheap for what it is. If you have already filled in your local tiles and want a harder version of the same instinct, that is Wandrer. And if you run rather than ride, go straight to CityStrides and ignore the rest.

Common questions

Sources

• StatsHunters, including its explorer tile definition, exports and badge API
• Squadrats: Explain Squadrats, the rules, grid sizes and FAQ
• VeloViewer and its Explorer Tiles and subscription pages
• Wandrer, including its pricing change in May 2026
• CityStrides, its node rule and Supporter pricing
• Strava Help Center: API Agreement update, how data appears on third-party apps, and the current Strava API Agreement

Related reading

For the head-to-head on the two coverage apps, see Wandrer vs CityStrides. To browse everything in this category, the visualization and routes sections of the directory have the rest.