Traviary vs. Polarsteps vs. Been
Three very different answers to the same question: where have I been? Polarsteps records your route while you travel. Been lets you colour in a map by hand. Traviary reads the travel history you've already written — the photos on your iPhone — and turns it into a journal automatically, without an account and without uploading anything.
Pick Traviary if you want your past travels — every country, city, and trip — reconstructed automatically and kept private on your phone. Pick Polarsteps if you want to record and share a trip while it happens. Pick Been if you just want to tick countries off a map by hand.
Side by side
| Traviary | Polarsteps | Been | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How your journal gets built | Automatically, from the photos already on your iPhone | GPS tracking while you travel | You tap each country by hand |
| Covers trips you took years ago | Yes — your whole photo library, decades back | Only by adding past trips manually | Only what you mark yourself |
| Account required | No account, ever | Yes | Optional (for sync) |
| Where your data lives | On your phone — no servers, nothing uploaded | Synced to the cloud | Backed up to your account |
| Works fully offline | Yes — even airplane mode | Tracks offline, syncs later | Mostly — sync needs a connection |
| Trips with distance & travel mode | Yes — flights, drives, and walks inferred per trip | Routes recorded as you go | No |
| Countries, cities & regions | 240+ countries, 230,000+ cities, resolved on-device | Countries and places along tracked routes | 250+ countries, regions in 50+ of them |
| Price | Free to try, one Premium tier | Free, Plus at €8.99/mo or €29.99/yr | Free, one-time Premium purchase |
Polarsteps and Been details reflect their public feature pages as of 10 July 2026 and may change.
The real difference: past vs. present, cloud vs. device
Polarsteps is a tracker — it shines when it's running while you travel, recording your route to its cloud so you can share it live and order a printed travel book afterwards. It can't know about the ten years of trips you took before you installed it, unless you re-enter them yourself.
Been is a checklist — a beautiful, simple map you fill in manually. It never claims to be a journal; there are no trips, dates, distances, or stories, just the countries and regions you tap.
Traviary is an archive. Your photo library already records when and where you've been, going back as far as your oldest photo. Traviary reads that metadata on-device and rebuilds the whole story — every country and city, every trip in order, how far you went and how you got there — usually in about a minute, with nothing to track and nothing to type in.
If privacy is the deciding factor
This is where the three part ways completely. Polarsteps and Been are account-based apps: your travel history lives on their servers so it can sync and be shared. Traviary has no account, no servers, and no network calls — the journal is built and stored on your iPhone, works in airplane mode, and backs up only through your own end-to-end-encrypted iCloud backup. Your photos are never uploaded; only timestamps, GPS coordinates, and the favorite flag are read. The full details are in our privacy policy.
When the others are the better choice
- You want friends and family to follow your trip live, or you want a printed travel book at the end — that's Polarsteps' home turf.
- You travel without taking photos, or with a camera that stores no location data — Traviary can only reconstruct what your library records, so a GPS tracker will capture more of the route.
- You want the simplest possible scratch-map on Android as well as iOS — Been keeps it deliberately minimal.
And they're not mutually exclusive: plenty of people track a big trip with Polarsteps while Traviary quietly keeps the complete, private archive of everything.
See your own map in about a minute
Traviary is free to try on the App Store. Open it, grant photo access, and watch your travel history assemble itself — no account, no setup, nothing leaves your phone.
