Although boating has been done for centuries without any fancy apps or technology we have today, we relied on many different apps aboard PIVOT. During our 6,000-mile boating journey around the United States and Canada, we consistently used several marine and boating apps on both our smartphones and tablets. We&#;ve compiled the apps we&#;ve personally used most frequently, from navigation assistance to boat locators and social networking for boaters. By downloading these apps before you leave your dock, you&#;ll set yourself up for success by having the right tools (or apps) to enjoy a stress-free boating experience. In this comprehensive guide, we&#;ll explore some of the best boating apps available today and which ones we actually use. Whether planning a leisurely cruise or embarking on a nautical adventure like America&#;s Great Loop, these apps will surely enhance your boating experience.
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A screenshot of our BOAT Folder pt 1 A screenshot of our BOAT Folder pt 2Navionics is a top-rated navigation app that provides detailed charts and maps for boaters worldwide. Its strengths lie in its extensive coverage and user-friendly interface, making it easy to plan routes, mark waypoints, and navigate safely on the water. We love the ability to mark anchorages, customize relief shading to identify areas of shoaling easily, and its connection to Active Captain. Garmin owns Active Captain, an open-source software that collects reviews on anchorages, marinas, and other important boating information in one easy-to-use platform. Navionics was our most used app while living on a boat.
Price: the app requires an annual subscription, and the price depends on the extent of maps you want. For example, the navigation maps in the United States and Canada cost $49.99/year.
AquaMap is another popular boating navigation app that offers a wide range of features. In addition to detailed charts and maps, AquaMaps includes advanced navigation tools such as route planning, weather, tides, and AIS integration. We used AquaMaps primarily for two use cases:
We also downloaded Bob423&#;s Tracks, which overlaid onto AquaMaps and helped us navigate the chronic shoaling areas on the ICW. AquaMaps also has a built-in anchor alarm, and a connection to Active Captain, which we use frequently! Our friends have also told us that AquaMaps are superior in the Bahamas.
Price: The app requires an annual subscription, and the price depends on the number of maps you want. For example, the navigation maps in the United States and Canada cost $14.99/year or $49.99 for a forever license.
Ditch is a new navigation app released in . Ditch brings &#;Local Knowledge&#; to your navigation by using real AIS data combined with NOAA and USACE, all with their AI Smart Path technology. Waterways are constantly changing, and accurate, historical AIS information is a great way to ensure your tracks are currently navigable.
Price: The app requires an annual subscription, currently $30 / year (as of 7/)
Argo is another navigation app that compiles offline charts, weather, wind, tides, custom depth shading, charts, and routes into one seamless app. We love the custom depth shading, which allows us to identify areas of shoaling and log captain reports easily. Having personally met the founder of Argo, Jeff Foulk, we really like how the app blends marine navigation and social boating. We didn&#;t use Argo while boating, mainly because we didn&#;t learn about it until later! If you use Argo, let us know what you think in the comments!
Price: Free for their Basic Plan, Argo Premium is $19.99/year.
Read The Best Marine Weather Apps for Boating to see what marine weather apps we recommend and regularly use!
Tides is a handy app that provides accurate tide and current information for thousands of locations worldwide. We used Tides to plan our trips to optimize current, save fuel, safely navigate shallow waters, and avoid strong currents. While the app&#;s basic features are free, premium features such as extended tide forecasts and offline access require a subscription. Tides offers essential information for boaters in an easy-to-read format so we can easily plan our cruises with the tides. We often used Tides on the east coast to favor the current in our direction of travel, giving us an extra boost of speed.
&#; Add Tides to your smart watch to know the tides at a glance!
Price: Free
Boating Apps for CommunityOne of the best parts of boating is the community. Hands down. These are a few apps that use apps to strengthen the boating community by allowing you to connect with other boaters, communicate with messaging, and ask for recommendations or suggestions.
Nebo is a unique boating app that combines a captain&#;s log with social networking, allowing users to share their boating experiences with friends and fellow sailors. It was easily one of our favorite apps on the water because it allowed us to connect with other boaters, ask boaters for recommendations, and have a unique flag icon that helped us find other Loopers. We&#;re huge fans of Nebo for elevating our Great Loop experience, and we wouldn&#;t do the Great Loop without Nebo and the hardware device.
Price: The Nebo Starter Membership is free, the Nebo Silver Membership is $53.90/year, and the Nebo Gold Membership is $99.99/year. The Nebo Link has a one-time cost of $199.
Sea People is a new app developed by the crew from Sailing La Vagabonde. This app is designed to track your voyages without needing a hardware device; instead, it uses your &#;s internal GPS. It&#;s designed to make connecting with other boaters and staying in touch with the friends you make on the water easier. If you&#;ve tried Sea People in Beta, let us know what you think below!
Price: TBD
Although Travel Boast isn&#;t a &#;boating-specific travel app,&#; it is a fun way to document your travels by boat (or other means of travel) and share it with friends and family or on your social media accounts. The app allows you to customize your travels through an easy-to-use interface.
Price: Free with in-app purchases for upgraded features
Boating Apps for MaintenanceYachtWave is a comprehensive boating app that offers a wide range of features tailored specifically for yacht managers and boat owners. With a tagline Boat Ownership has Never Been Easier, YachtWave focuses on the daily and yearly maintenance obligations of boat ownership. After setting up your boat(s) and their engines, generators, and heavy equipment, you can add your spares and set up your boat maintenance tasks. The best part is that you can share this with other crew members if you are not personally maintaining your own boat. Since your maintenance is moving from your captain log into the YachtWave App, you can now easily share and search your information and pull it up whenever you need it.
Price: Free for personal use.
Boating Apps for LockingLock Status is a great app for finding information about upcoming locks. We found it a great resource when planning our travel itinerary for the following day, as it allowed us to see what was coming up and the last lock-through that occurred.
Price: Free
Read our post on How to Lock A Boat (Our Step-By-Step Process)
Boating Apps for Vessel TrackingMarine Traffic is a must-have app for boaters seeking real-time vessel tracking and AIS data. With its extensive database of ship positions and comprehensive coverage of maritime traffic worldwide, Marine Traffic provides invaluable insights into vessel movements and navigation hazards. While the app&#;s basic features are available for free, premium features such as extended vessel details and route predictions require a subscription. Marine Traffic remains a valuable tool for boaters seeking to enhance their situational awareness of the water. We frequently used this app since we didn&#;t have AIS and wanted information on barge, tug, and ship traffic in the Chesapeake Bay, Great Lakes, and Midwest rivers. Whenever we experienced fog, we used Marine Traffic to give us extra data on boats near us.
&#;&#; AIS data is sometimes delayed through Marine Traffic so keep that in mind
Price: Free with optional in-app purchases.
Boating Apps for EmergenciesThe US Coast Guard app is a great way to request a USCG Safety Check, review your safety equipment, check state-by-state safe boating information, file a float plan, and report hazards, pollution, or suspicious activity. We used this app to look up boating rules as we cruised, ensuring we followed the rules and obeyed the laws on the waters to the best of our knowledge.
Price: Free
Boating Apps for TowingThe BoatUS app allows you to carry your BoatUS membership card easily, request a tow, add your insurance policy, and find out location information such as weather, tides, buoys, and discounts. We used the app to keep our BoatUS membership card handy as we thankfully did not need a tow.
Price: The app is free, but a Boat US yearly membership costs $215/year for unlimited towing with other cheaper membership options available.
We used BoatUS to have peace of mind while cruising, knowing help was only a radio call away. Sign up for BoatUS here!
The Sea Tow app allows you to request a tow, carry a digital version of your Sea Tow membership card, and show your latitude and longitude.
Price: The app is free, but Sea Tow&#;s yearly membership is $249/year.
The C-Tow app is specifically for Canadian boaters or boaters who are boating in Canada and want towing assistance. The app allows you to request a tow, carry a digital version of your C-Tow membership card, pinpoint your GPS location, check current Environment Canada marine weather conditions, including weather alerts, see tide predictions for coastal areas, check your speed and heading, and locate nearby marinas, marine facilities, and fuel docks. Note that some Sea Tow and BoatUS memberships won&#;t cover you in Canada, so if you&#;re doing the Great Loop you may want to look into C-Tow!
Price: The app is free, but membership ranges between $145-250/year.
Boating Apps for Anchor AlarmsHaving an anchor drag alarm is easily one of the best apps to have readily available if you&#;re planning on anchoring. We recommended downloading a few apps before leaving your home port and testing them one by one when you arrive at your anchorage to find the app you like best. If you don&#;t want another app, specifically for anchor alarms, try out Aquamaps if you already are using it for navitation.
This simple anchor drag alarm is easy to use with various options depending upon your anchoring set up. It allows you to set a circle perimeter or an arch, has a dark screen mode for anchoring at night, and makes adjusting your alarm distance easy.
Price: one-time cost of $4.99
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You can easily set your distance, see your past movements, and set your anchor alarm after anchoring. You can also be alerted on a secondary .
Price: $5.99
This anchor alarm app has many similar features to the previous apps and is free.
Price: Free
Check out our blog post on the best Marine Weather Apps for boaters!
Boating Apps for MarinasDuring our Great Loop, we found that many larger marinas worked with companies to make reserving a marina spot easier. As we planned our route and marina stays, we often reviewed these apps for availability and amenities. Here are the two most popular marina apps:
Snag-A-Slip is owned by Marina Life Company and is an easy way for boaters to book a marina or private boat slip. The app allows you to explore marinas from Canada to the Caribbean, book your slip or mooring ball with their easy-to-use app reservation system, and pay via card. It helps take the Google searches and tag with a marina out of the equation. Snag-A-Slip doesn&#;t charge booking fees and offers their service free of charge with a price match guarantee.
&#; Pro tip: Snag-A-Slip partners with Sea-Tow to give members an extra discount!
Price: Free
Dockwa is a convenient app that simplifies the process of finding and booking marina slips and moorings. With its extensive database of marinas and user-friendly interface, Dockwa makes it easy for boaters to search for available dockage, reserve slips in advance, and manage their reservations on the go, making marina bookings hassle-free. Pro tip: Dockwa partners with Boat US to give members an extra discount!
Price: Free
Use our Referral Code 450ZMS3 for a $15 discount on your Dockwa reservation!
In conclusion, there are many apps for boat navigation and boat apps in general. Whether you&#;re seeking navigation assistance, boating community, vessel tracking, marina bookings, or tide information, an app can help you navigate confidently. As a software engineer (Elliot) who loves to test the latest apps and software development, we thoroughly enjoyed using and experimenting with the wide array of boating apps. We hope this list of boat navigation apps and other boat apps gives you the resources you need to have an enjoyable time out on the water. If you have any favorites that we may have missed, let us know in the comments below!
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Last Updated on May 19, by Boatsetter Team
For almost everything you do today, there&#;s an app that will support, enhance or complement that activity. Recreational boating is no exception, and there are dozens of boating apps to help you enjoy time on the water.
Arguably, marine navigation apps are some of the most common&#;and the most useful&#;available to boaters today, with a range of options to suit different needs. Some boat GPS apps, for example, utilize NOAA raster charts, which are essentially scanned paper charts incorporated into their systems. Some apps offer vector charts, providing electronic charts that allow for scrolling and zooming in for enhanced detail.
The convenience of downloading these apps to your iPhone, Android, or tablet enables you to have them readily available regardless of the boat you&#;re on, significantly enhancing your navigational capabilities.
Best marine navigation apps ( with GPS )These are our top recommendations for boating apps that are great for marine navigation and offer GPS. Most of the apps are free to try.
1. Navionics
A perennial favorite is Navionics because it&#;s easy to use and comprehensive in scope. Navionics mimics a standard chartplotter experience and in some cases can connect to an onboard plotter via WiFi. Creating waypoints and routes, measuring distances and understanding depth contours and aids to navigation is pretty straight forward with this app.
Once downloaded, the charts stay on your device and can be used offline which is great when you&#;re cruising in areas with little coverage. Bonus functionality includes weather and tide information and dock-to-dock routing that helps you set a viable course based on your vessel&#;s parameters like draft.
2. iNavX
Easy to confuse with Navionics (especially when downloading the app), iNavX is a whole different animal. There&#;s a $5 charge to download the app, and then you can download NOAA raster charts for free and vector charts (powered by Navionics and C-MAP) for a fee.
Beyond navigation, details on marinas, fuel docks and other facilities are also available. Weather data overlays and additional features like engine data and AIS collision avoidance information can also be viewed, but the app can get technical in a hurry and may take longer to learn.
3. C-MAP
C-MAP is the primary other choice besides Navionics for the underlying charting information that many apps use with their own user interface. The new C-MAP Embark was designed to be intuitive so after a few minutes, you won&#;t really be looking for the manual to manage the basics like waypoints, routes and nav aids.
A funky feature includes the app changing color based on your environment, so the charts are always easy to read regardless of the surrounding light. The basics include a free download, but chart additions and weather data will be in-app purchases.
SeaPilot sets an ambitious agenda for itself: it&#;s a basic navigation app (which has a free three-day trial) but it ramps up from there. You&#;ll need to upgrade to the premium version so you can add various chart areas, weather forecasting and routing capabilities. Beyond that, you can connect to Facebook to find nearby boating friends.
For sailors, there&#;s a database of polar diagrams which are graphs of the theoretical top speeds attainable by over 300 kinds of sailboats.
For barebones basics, iSail is a great choice because it&#;s inexpensive and you can skip sign-ups and pop-ups. Measure distances to your waypoint, upload waypoints and routes and get quick ETAs to your next intermediate or final point.
iSail uses NOAA raster charts which are downloaded to the device so they can be used without Wi-Fi or out of cell range. There are few advanced features, but this app gets the job done when you need the basics. It&#;s for iOS only.
The best way to describe KnowWake is to compare it to a road-based app you&#;re probably already familiar with&#;Waze. Like Waze, KnowWake is crowd-source and will provide information on congested waterfront locations&#;coastal and on 350 inland waterways.
On a bustling weekend, you can see how busy marinas, restaurants, boat ramps, fuel docks, and dive and snorkel sites are. You can use it in North America, on the Great Loop and in Canada as well as in parts of the Caribbean. The app uses real-time updates and it has location-sharing between users so you can find friends.
All the boating apps above vary in price, complexity and focus, and although some are free, advanced features generally come at a price. Some take a bit of time to learn, but they&#;ll all put some peace-of-mind in your pocket the next time you slip the dock lines.
Bonus Apps: Boatsetter
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Zuzana Prochazka is an award-winning freelance journalist and photographer with regular contributions to more than a dozen sailing and powerboating magazines and online publications including Southern Boating, SEA, Latitudes & Attitudes and SAIL. She is SAIL magazines Charter Editor and the Executive Director of Boating Writers International. Zuzana serves as judge for SAIL&#;s Best Boats awards and for Europe&#;s Best of Boats in Berlin.
A USCG 100 Ton Master, Zuzana founded and manages a flotilla charter organization called Zescapes that takes guests adventure sailing at destinations worldwide.
Zuzana has lived in Europe, Africa and the United States and has traveled extensively in South America, the islands of the South Pacific and Mexico.
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