4 reasons why I switched to this Google Maps alternative

Google Maps is a great app overall, but since I’m trying to de-Google my life this year, it’s time to say goodbye to it. Well, at least for the most part.

After partly moving away from Gmail, Drive, and Photos and switching to Proton’s suite of apps earlier this year for privacy reasons, I’ve been on the search for the best Google Maps alternative out there. It’s not an easy task since Google Maps gets a lot of things right, but I eventually landed on HERE WeGo, which I’ve been using for the last few weeks.

There are four reasons why it’s a better app than Google Maps for me, despite it falling short in several areas.

HERE WeGo is all about simplicity, and I’m all for it. I take a lot of day trips over the weekend, and whenever I plan on visiting a new location, I always check it on the map first to get a feel for it. I zoom in a bit and look at the layout of the city, find the best parking lots, and so on. I also check how long the drive is, whether it’s on regional roads or the highway — which comes with extra fees in my part of the world — and the rest of the essentials.

That’s all I need, and HERE WeGo delivers. Granted, Google Maps also tells me all these things, but it also adds a bunch of extra info on top that I don’t care about at that moment. Facts about the city, the weather, hotels, neighborhoods, and photos. These things aren’t necessarily bad per se, it’s just that they show up when I don’t need them, whereas on HERE WeGo, I can just focus on what matters to me at a given time due to the simpler nature of the app.

There’s even a big difference when I open both apps without selecting a specific location on the map. Maps has a search bar on top with various options below it (restaurants, gas…) as well as a pull-up tab below. It just takes up space and creates too much visual clutter for me, especially when I’m trying to just see the layout of a city. HERE WeGo is much simpler with just a search bar at the bottom and a small weather widget up top, resulting in more screen real estate for the things that matter to me.

Roaming can get expensive really fast, so when I’m traveling to a foreign country, I always download the maps I need on my phone. The two apps offer completely different experiences, with HERE WeGo being the more user-friendly option.

If you’ve ever downloaded an area in Google Maps, you know it’s not that great. For example, when I traveled to Italy and went to a lot of different places across several regions, I just wanted to download the map of the entire country. Seems like a reasonable thought if you ask me. However, that’s not possible on Google Maps. I can only download a set area at a time — roughly 120,000 square kilometers, capped by Google — via a box that I have to position and size myself on the screen. That’s nowhere near enough to cover a country in one go, so there’s no option to just grab “Italy” the way you can pick a country in HERE WeGo. So, to download the entire country, I’d have to do that multiple times and make sure the boxes overlap so I don’t accidentally miss any parts.

On HERE WeGo, I just log in and either download the map of the entire country or specific regions to save space on my phone. Simple, fast, and efficient, as a task like this should be.

When it comes to navigating city streets or driving from one place to another, the two apps are neck and neck in my experience. But when it comes to walking directions, at least in my location, HERE WeGo wins hands down.

I compared the two by asking for walking directions to the top of a popular hiking trail, and the results were completely different. HERE WeGo showed me the easiest path from my building, making sure I walked on sidewalks, crossed pedestrian-only bridges, and even took a shortcut through a field — not marked on the map, but a real, walkable path. The total walking time was estimated at about an hour and a half, which is accurate since I’ve hiked that trail many times over the years.

Then there’s Google Maps. It thinks the best way to get to the top is to just follow the main road, where there are no sidewalks, walk right into a busy roundabout filled with cars, and then continue following the road as close to the top as possible — extending the walk by an hour and making it extremely unsafe. It’s surprising that it’s this bad, considering it’s the biggest navigation app in the world that a lot of people completely trust.

There are also a bunch of smaller features in HERE WeGo that I find value in, and I’ll bundle them into one section for the sake of brevity.

First, there’s parking. HERE WeGo shows me a lot more parking spaces in all the locations I’ve checked compared to Maps. While Google’s app is mostly focused on parking garages and things like P+R (park and ride) locations, HERE WeGo shows a lot of smaller parking lots close to the city center.

It also shows me house numbers on each building, which Google Maps doesn’t — even when clicking on a building, in most cases. This makes it easier to locate the correct building, as that red location icon on Google Maps that shows up when I type in an address isn’t always precise. The default map view is also a lot more accurate in my location on HERE WeGo, showing newly built buildings that Google Maps ignores completely.

Then there’s the ability to avoid unpaved roads in HERE WeGo while navigating. This makes sure the system won’t lead me down narrow gravel roads across the hills in my area just because the trip is a mile shorter on paper, as Google Maps once did. I also trust the app more with my data than Google, which is known for collecting all sorts of information from users for targeted advertising and other business purposes.

Lastly, I also like how HERE WeGo shows me transit lines across my location and surrounding European countries, making it easier to visualize and plan a train trip. While Google Maps technically also has this feature, none of the train routes show up in my location when I enable it.

I don’t want to make it sound like HERE WeGo is a better version of Maps. It’s not. It’s just better for my use case at the moment. I really like it, but I still switch back to Google Maps from time to time.

While I generally prefer the simplicity of HERE WeGo, those extra features like restaurant reviews and business hours do come in handy often. Street View is also a major bonus, as I can check the condition of the road if I’m driving over a mountain pass, for example, get a better view of the parking situation in a given city, or just cruise through the center of the city I plan on visiting.

It’s also better at showing me traffic conditions and roadworks, so I can be more prepared when heading out on a trip. Additionally, its satellite imagery is more up to date than its rival’s, giving me more confidence that I’m not looking at something outdated.

It’s a great app, but overall, HERE WeGo is the better fit for me. What about you? Let me know in the comments.