UKC

What’s the best subscription app for guide/topos of Europe and the Balkans?

I have physical copy’s of the places we’re heading to in Spain but for the rest.. 

27Crags? Vertical life?

Very much dependent on where you go - Croatia and Montenegro are well covered on 27crags, as are the southern parts of Slovenia (Osp & Trieste area) and Kalymnos. The Greek mainland sometimes has local pages, sometimes things that come from climb greece. Bosnia, Bulgaria and Romania seem less weel covered in general, so you might have to rely on local guidebooks and / or thecrag.

I’d start with 27Crags. But only use the free version. It still shoes you all the locations, amounts of routes/boulders and the detailed sector/parking/block maps. And in case it’s a commonity ”crag” you’ll even see tge topos. For the premium crag topos, you need to enroll. Of course, Depending on How long you’re travelling affects things. I recall 27Crags subscription for a month is like 5 Eur… so like a point or two. Just remember to cancel After you no longer need it.

£7.99

Ah, so three pints then.

Or one pint at the airport 😂

There are so many apps, each with strengths and weaknesses and a geographical focus. I keep all of them updated on my phone and then opt in and out of subscriptions depending where we're headed. Here's our experience...

Of the paid apps, we find Vertical Life good for Italy, Switzerland and Greece and there's good if patchy coverage elsewhere. As someone mentions further up the thread, 27 Crags was pretty good for Croatia.

The Crag / Topo Guru has maybe the widest coverage across the whole of Europe and the free version has quite a lot of topo content, especially for more obscure crags. Climbing Away is a good crag-finder in France especially, but not for topos. A shout out for Climb Around - coverage quite localised to northern Spain but it's free and has a nice interface. 

... and of course it would be rude not to mention Rockfax as we're posting on UKC - we have had an annual subscription for many years now, and as well as giving increasingly comprehensive coverage of the UK (including Scotland nowadays) it's also strong in Spain and France.

Finally, definitely not a topo replacement, but hopefully a handy resource for photos, beta and a bit of psyche - it's always worth checking https://rockaroundtheworld.co.uk/ - it's free, ad-free and friendly, and there must be getting on for 1,000 crags on there by now. I've started the mammoth task of creating a map-based search, but only got as far as Portugal so far https://rockaroundtheworld.co.uk/crag-finder/ but for everywhere else it works fairly well to just scroll down to the list of countries / areas to browse.

Enjoy your trip! Cheers, Dom