Is AllTrails Peak Worth It?

For those searching for new trails, the AllTrails app has been a mainstay for years. The app’s newest subscription tier – AllTrails Peak – launched this year, and Amy’s been testing it out in the NT.

Earlier this year, AllTrails launched a third subscription tier in addition to its free version and the paid version: AllTrails Plus ($35.99 AUD). AllTrails Peak is available for $79.99 AUD a year and promises additional unique features not available in the app until now.

I was invited along to the early Aussie launch with AllTrails staff from the US and other travel journos in Adelaide back in March.

The AllTrails team talked us through all the new features and offered to give me a year-long free subscription to test it out. Here’s how it’s been going during my dry season in the NT.

Read more: Track Trail Traffic & Build Custom Routes With AllTrails’ New Premium Membership

Why am I the right person to do this review?

I’ve had AllTrails Plus for a few years now but don’t use it religiously. I rarely record my walks, and don’t have a hit list of saved trails that I want to attempt.

The main ways I use it is for offline tracking while on multi-day hikes out of reception, mostly to mentally prepare for upcoming elevation and track how much longer until we reach camp.

I’ve also used it a few times to track where I am while bushbashing between two trails and ensure my mates and I find the path we’re looking for.

And, if I’m in a new area, I’ll have a geez at the nearby trails as well.

Beyond that, it stays pretty unopened on my phone. Maybe the new Peak features will encourage me to whip it out more.

AllTrails Peak Features

AllTrails Peak was pitched to me as having a swathe of new features to enhance people’s on trail experience. Notably, these were:

• Custom routes
• Community heat maps
• On-trail conditions
• Outdoor lens

Custom Routes

I was particularly keen to try custom routes and map out my own off-track paths using the app to share with other friends. I bulk downloaded ‘Litchfield National Park’ (an additional feature of Peak is the ability to download large areas at once rather than just singular trails), packed my bag, jumped in my mate’s car, and tumbled into the bush.

Before we started on our off-track mission to a hidden waterhole, I pulled out my phone, opened AllTrails and attempted to custom-build our route. ‘Tap to place starting point’, the prompt said, so I tapped my current location. As we’d be following a watercourse, I tapped it on the map, a few hundred metres from where we’d start. Nothing happened.

I thought I might’ve made a mistake and should’ve built the route before leaving reception, so I tried the same thing a few days later back home. Nada.

Perhaps I expected too much, but as it turns out, you can only customise and link up routes along marked trails, paths, and roads. Don’t get me wrong, this certainly has its uses, particularly if you’re somewhere paths criss-cross and overlap, being able to map out which turn to take and path to follow ahead of time would be handy.

That’s just not what I wanted to use it for.

Outdoor Lens

The next time I used AllTrails Peak, I was in Kakadu National Park, walking another trail to a waterhole (surprise, surprise). This one was marked and on the app, so we were in business.

Along the way, I decided to test out the outdoor lens feature, which is touted as identifying plants, bugs, and the like. I took a photo of the flower and seed pod of a tree I knew the name of to see how well the lens performed.

When I got back into reception and loaded the results, I was a little disappointed to see that the highest probability match was wrong. Granted, the camera on my phone is terrible, and the tree was pretty dried up as it was nearing the end of the NT’s dry season.

The lens suggested the photo of the flower was a silk cottontree, native to Mexico and South America, when in fact, it was a yellow kapok, native to Northern Australia. Although, it did suggest this as the second most likely option.

While the photo of the seed pod was determined to be a melon. Hmm.

I tested it on a few plants around home and it was much more confident in its answer. So I guess make sure you get a quality photo and take the answers with a grain of salt. Additionally, not being able to load the results while out of reception feels a little useless, particularly if you’re in a situation where you want to know whether something is edible, poisonous, or safe.

Community Heatmap

Where I’ve been testing out AllTrails Peak, the trails are usually pretty quiet. I don’t find the need to search out a quieter trail as they’re rarely overwhelming. So I’ve not put the community heatmap to high use.

However, I’ve found it handy for finding places people visit that may not have a marked or documented track on the app. It’s helped me suss out a few more secret spots that I’d vaguely heard about, but wasn’t 100% sure of the location.

AllTrails says the markings in the Community Heatmap overlay reflect trail activity of app users over the last 12 months, which is updated monthly. You can decide whether your own activity is made public or kept private in the Settings.

My one qualm with the heatmap is the colour coding. When the community heatmap is turned on, it shows you markings of where people have been via purple markings. As more and more people trace the same path and more data is recorded there, the lines grow darker as they multiply.

I understand that’s how the system works, but as a user, looking at a broad area like a national park all at once, it’s difficult to quickly distinguish between light purple and dark purple and gain an understanding of how busy a trail will be.

It’d be much easier to determine if the colour changed after a certain number of people were tracked as visiting that area, using a traffic light system of sorts. As it stands, there’s not enough distinction between high and low traffic, or a very detailed definition of what high and low may mean.

On Trail Conditions

The on trail conditions are actually pretty cool to check out. To be perfectly honest, I barely ever check the daily weather where I Iive because I know it’s either going to be 32ºC and dry or 32ºC and wet, so I haven’t used it much yet.

But with three conditions map overlays – precipitation, temperature, and snow depth – it can be very handy to show you what to prepare for ahead of time.

When you select a trail, you have the weather forecast play through across the distance of the trail and the next few hours of the day. You can check out finer details, including the ‘feels like’ temp, the UV index, the humidity, and the visibility. All super useful info to know when planning a walk into the wilderness.

However, upon even a smidge of online research (including re-reading our own article reviewing AllTrails Plus) it became apparent that the on trail conditions feature isn’t that new after all. In fact, it used to be included in AllTrails Plus, but since the new tier has been introduced, it’s now exclusive to AllTrails Peak. Seems a bit underhanded.

Price

Coming in at $79.99AUD a year, AllTrails Peak isn’t a set and forget app subscription. You’d want to be using the additional features of this app regularly for the cost to be worth it.

Is AllTrails Peak worth it?

Considering many new phones now also have built-in lenses, similar to AllTrails’ outdoor lens, and specialised weather apps can offer similar detail of conditions (granted, not tracking along specific trails, but for a more general area), the two unique features I see of AllTrails Peak are the custom routes and community heatmap.

If to you this is worth an additional $45 a year on top of the capabilities of AllTrails Plus, then Peak is worth considering. But I think I’ll be sticking with AllTrails middle tier, AllTrails Plus, for now.

FAQs AllTrails Peak

What is peak on AllTrails?

AllTrails Peak is the highest subscription tier on the AllTrails app, which allows users to access all the AllTrails features.

When did AllTrails introduce peak?

AllTrails introduced Peak in May 2025.

How much is AllTrails Australia?

In Australia, AllTrails has three different subscription tiers: AllTrails Base is free, AllTrails Plus which is $35.99 a year, and AllTrails Peak which is $79.99 a year.

Does AllTrails have a heat map?

AllTrails Peak has introduced a new feature called ‘Community Map’ which shows the popularity of trails based on data collected by the app of where users have been.