What’s the best way of circular route planning (starting and finishing in the same place) when using Komoot? It seems to want you to select a start and end point (that are distant from each other) and it’ll create one for you. I want to be able to make a breadcrumb route, but Komoot doesn’t seem to want to let you do that?

In their help pages it says to  pick the furthest point away from your start location (what if you don’t know what that is?) and click round trip, but then it just makes an out and back route…If you start dropping way points, it starts making hugely complex little out and back branches of a single main route

Am I missing something here, or it is it just hugely counter-intuitive, and a waste of time?

There’s a slider for one way vs circular route planning, at the top on the mobile app.

On the quality of its route planning and what it considers to be a right of way, I have found off road it to be variable. It’s only as good as the mapping. However, I mainly use it on road.

I’ve only done it on the computer rather than the app. But select round trip and the type of riding. There are a couple of different MTB options, for example, that give different routes. Select your start/end point and another point you want to include. It doesn’t need to be the furthest point. Initially it will just give you an out and back, but now you can start adding other points on the route to create a circuit. Remember that there is an option to reverse the route if it’s taking you round the wrong way and you can rearrange the order of the points in the left panel if it starts doing strange things. There is a bit of a knack to it but after a while it’s very easy to quickly put together a circular ride.

As for the routes it picks; I’ve usually found them fine and it has taken me on some interesting routes that I wouldn’t have picked myself. But like all these apps it’s down to the quality of the user data that they have. For rights if way I think it’s just using the Open Cycle Map like pretty much all these apps, so they are all much of a muchness in this regard.

Personally I find komoot great for planning longer road/gravel loops. For mountain biking I want a bit more control over exactly which trails I’m taking so tend to use a mix of Trailforks and Strava. But I have used komoot on the “alpine MTB” setting and it worked fine.

+1 on being careful about what Komoot thinks is or isn’t possible.

I found it a frustrating user experience, both planning and in use.

Initially it will just give you an out and back, but now you can start adding other points on the route to create a circuit

Yeah, I tried that, and it just ends up as a spaghetti mess of mini-out and back routes as it tries to take in every point while still keeping to an out and back route… I want to just place point after point on a route (like every other route planning sytsem let’s you do) how do I do that?

That’s strange I’ve never had it do that. As I say, the strength of komoot (for me) is longer (more road focussed) rides where I can put together a (say) 50 mile loop with just a few points. So pick start/finish (e.g. home) pick a point I want to visit, say 20 miles away. Pick another point, say 10 miles to the side of the out and back route and it usually makes an interesting circuit. I can then add other points somewhere near the route and it will make (usually sensible) adjustments. I can also change the type from, say, gravel, to MTB to alpine MTB to see how that changes the options. If I know exactly where I want to go and just want to plot that route I’ll use something else as that isn’t really the point of komoot, which is really about picking an interesting route for you based on just a few points of interest. You can make it go exactly where you want but it does sometimes feel as though you are fighting it.

As you say, it’s not like every other route planner and that’s the point really. I wouldn’t have it as my only option but it does offer something that the others don’t, which can be useful.

it’s not like every other route planner and that’s the point really.

Sure, I get that it wants to be different, but to not offer that choice at all, as well as the ability to have it choose an interesting route for you seems like a massive gap. Also if you choose a way-point from one of its red highlighted points of interest, how do you stop it choosing that as a “start here” or “destination” option? Sorry for all the questions but I’ve just started using it, and it seems like it just doesn’t want to play nicely.

I’ll have another play, but’s it’s hardly intuitive or easy to use, is it?

If you haven’t picked the start or destination point then I think it will want you to select the highlighted point as one of those first, but once you’ve defined those two points any extra points you click on should give you the option to “include on route”.