Stop Paying for Route Planning — Garmin Connect Already Does It Free

Stop paying to plan your routes

Komoot Premium runs about €59.99 a year. Worse, since Komoot changed hands in 2025, users who signed up from March that year onwards need a subscription just to sync a route to an external device — the one thing you actually wanted it for. Region packs are gone too.

Meanwhile the app already on your phone does the same job for nothing. Here's how.

Building a course in Garmin Connect

1. Open Garmin Connect and go to Training & Planning → Courses → Create Course
2. Pick your activity type — run, cycle, hike, gravel. This isn't cosmetic: the routing engine changes with it, so a cycling route avoids stairs and footpaths while a running route happily uses them
3. Either drop points on the map yourself, or let Garmin build it — type a distance, pick a starting direction, and it generates a loop that brings you back to your front door
4. Check the elevation profile at the bottom before you commit. This is where you find out your "flat" 10K has 200 metres of climbing in it
5. Save it, and it syncs to your watch automatically

The setting that makes it genuinely good

Turn on Popularity Routing. Garmin calls the underlying data Trendline, and it's built from the billions of activities Garmin users have actually recorded. With it on, your route follows the roads and trails real runners and riders use — not whatever the map thinks is shortest.

That's the same fundamental idea as Komoot's community data. It's the difference between a route that looks fine on a map and one that doesn't dead-end at a locked gate or push you onto a road with no shoulder.

Following it on the watch

On your watch: Navigation → Courses, pick the one you made, and start. You get turn-by-turn prompts and off-course alerts telling you when you've drifted off the line.

And here's the part most people don't realise: you do not need a premium watch with onboard maps for this. A watch without maps still follows the course as a breadcrumb line with directions — you just don't get the topographic map underneath it. The planning all happens on your phone, so even an entry-level Forerunner can navigate a route you built this morning.

What it costs

Nothing. No subscription, no map packs, no per-region purchase. It's part of Garmin Connect, which you already have because you own the watch.

Round-trip routing generated on the watch itself is limited to models with built-in maps, so if you want to improvise a loop mid-run without your phone, that's a reason to look at a mapping watch:

Compare Garmin devices →