Products
The 10 EV route planners compared here
Ten products that are not doing the same job. Start by working out which job you have.
There is no overall winner here and we do not publish one. These are not ten versions of the same product: a roaming card, a community map, a routing engine and a car’s built-in navigation solve different problems, and the right choice depends on the car you drive and the country you drive it in.
Free tier; Premium around €5 per month or €50 per year
A Better Routeplanner
The routing engine most of the others are measured against. Free to plan with; the features that make it usable while actually driving are behind the subscription.
Free
Apple Maps
EV routing built into the maps app already on the phone, but only for cars whose manufacturer has wired it up. Where it is supported it is seamless; where it is not, it is an ordinary map.
Free app; Chargemap Pass tiers, with paid tiers adding route planning and live availability
Chargemap
A European roaming pass — one card and one bill across a very large number of networks — with a map and a route planner attached. Bought for the pass more often than for the routing.
Free
Chargeprice
Answers one question the routing apps mostly ignore: what this specific stop will cost you, on the card you are actually carrying. Not a navigation app and does not pretend to be.
$4.99 per month or $39.99 per year; no free trial
Drive Charge Eat (our own app)
A planner built on the premise that a charging stop is also a rest stop, so it routes to chargers that have food, restrooms and other people around rather than the nearest plug in an empty lot.
Free to join; charging billed at network rates, stated as passed through without markup
Octopus Electroverse
A free roaming account and card covering a very large share of European public charging, from an energy company. Strong on paying for the charge, thin on planning the journey.
Free
Google Maps
EV routing has moved into the default map. On a supported car it plans stops from the real battery level with no extra app and no subscription, which is a serious problem for everyone else in this table.
Free
PlugShare
The community map. Its value is the check-ins: what the last few drivers found when they actually plugged in, which routinely contradicts the operator status feed.
Included with the car
Tesla in-car navigation
Only relevant if you drive one, and close to unbeatable if you do. It is the car, so it knows the real battery state and can warm the pack before a stop — which no third-party app on this list can reliably do.
Free; Zapmap Premium adds discounts and removes ads, price not stated on the page checked
Zapmap
The UK charging map, with payment attached. Deep where it operates and absent everywhere else, which makes it an easy decision either way.