6 Apps Like CityStrides for Walking Every Street (And the Catch They All Share)

If you have ever decided to walk every street in your city, you have run into CityStrides within about a day. It is the tool the whole every-single-street community is built around, and for good reason: it turns a vague ambition into a number, and that number is weirdly hard to stop watching.

But people go looking for alternatives constantly, and usually for one of three reasons. The processing feels slow. The street-completion rules feel arbitrary. Or, most often, they hit the requirement nobody mentions in the first ten minutes.

So here is the honest version of that list, including the catch.

What CityStrides actually does

CityStrides is a web app, not a phone app, and that distinction matters more than it sounds.

You sign up, connect a Strava or Runkeeper account, and it pulls your recorded activities in. It then cross-references every one of them against street data from OpenStreetMap, which models each street as a chain of nodes. Walk through a node and it is marked complete. Complete every node on a street and the street itself flips to done. All of it stacks up on your LifeMap, a single map of everywhere you have ever recorded a walk or run.

By default a street counts as complete at 90% of its nodes, which quietly forgives dead ends and the bit of pavement you could not legally reach. Hard Mode demands 100%.

The free tier is genuinely usable, which is worth saying because a lot of alternatives lists imply otherwise. You get the full LifeMap, street and city completion percentages, and leaderboard placement without paying. Supporter, at $5 a month or $50 a year, buys convenience rather than the core product: the Node Hunter route planner, near-instant processing instead of a queue, full screen maps, date filtering, and Hard Mode.

The catch nobody mentions

CityStrides does not record your walks. Neither does StreetFerret, Wandrer, or Squadrats.

Every one of them is a viewer sitting on top of data Strava already has. You walk with Strava running, Strava saves the GPS trace, and then these services read that trace and colour in a map. No Strava account, no street coverage.

That is completely fine if you are already a Strava person, and most runners are. It is a real obstacle if you are not, because it means signing up for a fitness social network, remembering to hit record before every walk, and accepting a second company in the chain between your feet and your map.

Worth knowing before you pick, because it splits this list cleanly in two.

If you are happy with Strava in the loop

1. StreetFerret

The closest like-for-like swap, and the one most CityStrides refugees end up on. Same basic engine, Strava activities checked against OpenStreetMap, but a noticeably cleaner and faster interface.

Its most-cited advantage is how it treats streets you cannot reasonably walk. Reviewers repeatedly single out that it does not demand you cover roadway that is unsafe on foot, such as a stretch of state highway with no pavement, which in CityStrides is the classic reason a city sits stuck at 99%.

Best for: people who like CityStrides' idea and not its interface. The trade-off: a smaller community, so the leaderboards and the local rivalries that make CityStrides addictive are thinner.

2. Wandrer

A different unit of measurement, and the right answer more often than people expect. Instead of asking "have you completed this named street," Wandrer asks what percentage of everything in a region you have covered, and it counts any sport. It will also write your new mileage back into the Strava activity itself, which is a genuinely nice touch.

The free tier imports only your last 50 activities, so unless you are brand new, you are effectively evaluating the paid version. Pro is $40 a year, raised from $30 in May 2026, and unlocks your full history, the monthly exploration challenges, and the achievement and routing tools.

Best for: covering a whole region rather than finishing one city, and for cyclists. The trade-off: the 50-activity free limit makes it hard to try properly, and the pricing has moved recently.

3. Squadrats

Squares, not streets. The map is divided into roughly one-mile squares, and a square becomes yours the moment you enter it. Squadratinhos are the fine grained version, sixty-four to a squadrat, which is where the game actually lives for people on foot.

The appeal is that progress never stalls. A street you are 90% through gives you nothing in CityStrides until it is done; a squadrat gives you something the moment you set foot in it.

Best for: people who find street completion too punishing and want steady visible progress. The trade-off: it is a coarser picture. Clearing every square in your neighbourhood does not mean you have walked every street in it, and if street-level completeness is the point, this is not that.

4. CityStrides itself, on the free tier

Not filler. A large share of people shopping for alternatives are really just annoyed by the processing queue, and the honest answer is that the free tier already gives you the LifeMap, the completion percentages, and the leaderboards. If your complaint is "it took an hour to show up," you want the $5 Supporter tier, not a different product.

If Strava is the part you want gone

5. Fogbreaker (ours)

The honest positioning first, because this list is not much use without it.

We do not do named-street completion. There is no "Elm Street: 87%," no node counting, no city completion percentage ranked against other people in your town. If a rigorous audit of which specific streets remain is what you came for, CityStrides or StreetFerret is a better tool and we would rather say so than pretend.

What we do instead is remove the middleman. Fogbreaker records the walk itself, on your phone, with no Strava account anywhere in the chain. Your map starts completely hidden under fog of war, and walking is the only thing that clears it, permanently. On top of that sit XP, levels, daily streaks and a friend leaderboard, so the map is the scoreboard rather than a report you go and read afterwards.

The practical difference is when the feedback arrives. The Strava-based tools are a review: you walk, you sync, you look at what changed. A fog map is live, and the thing you are chasing is visible while you are still outside deciding whether to turn left.

Best for: people who want the every-street feeling without joining a fitness social network first. The trade-off: we are newer and smaller than CityStrides, and we do not give you its street-by-street audit. Free on iOS and Android, with optional in-app purchases that are never required.

Since it matters for anything that maps where you walk: Fogbreaker is built by Teratis Solutions GmbH, a German company. Your data sits on servers in the EU, it is GDPR compliant, we do not sell it or share it with third parties for advertising, and you can delete your account and everything in it yourself at any time.

6. Strava on its own

Worth naming for completeness. Strava records beautifully and shows you individual routes, but it has no concept of street coverage. There is no map of everywhere you have been in aggregate, and no notion of what is left. If you already use it, you are one connection away from any tool above, and that is its real role here.

Quick comparison

So which one

Sorted by what is actually bothering you:

• The queue is slow. Stay on CityStrides and pay the $5.
• The interface annoys you, and a highway is blocking your city. StreetFerret.
• You want a whole region, or you also ride. Wandrer, budgeting for Pro.
• Street completion feels like a grind that never rewards you. Squadrats.
• You do not want a Strava account. Fogbreaker.
• You want the audit and the live map. Run CityStrides and Fogbreaker together. They are not really competing, one is the scoreboard and the other is the record.

And if you have not started yet, the tool matters less than the boundary. Pick an area small enough to finish, then read how to actually complete it.