Compare avalanche apps

The short answer, by where you ski

Most people need one app, and which one is decided almost entirely by geography — because coverage is the thing these products differ on most and compromise on least.

Switzerland, mostly

WhiteRisk. It is built by SLF, the institute that writes the Swiss bulletin. Nothing else in this list has that.

Austria, South Tyrol, Trentino, or the Nordics and Eastern Europe

SnowSafe. Roughly seventeen regions across the Austrian LWDs, Bavaria, northern Italy, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czechia, Poland, Iceland and Norway. No Switzerland and no France.

France

Yéti for a tour rated against today's bulletin, or AvalancheClarity if you want the Météo-France bulletin explained in your own language.

Crossing borders on the same trip

AvalancheClarity or Snowdesk — both put several countries' bulletins in one place, with different trade-offs between breadth and depth.

You want a specific tour scored for today

Skitourenguru for the Alps, or Yéti for France. Both are free, and both rate individual routes daily by combining the bulletin with terrain analysis.

You are planning the day with other people

See planning together below — this is the one dimension where the products differ most and advertise it least.

You are chasing snowfall in the US or Canada

OpenSnow. A forecast product rather than a bulletin product, and no European avalanche coverage.

What each one costs and covers

Prices are as found on the dates given at the foot of this page. Anything marked unconfirmed comes from secondary sources rather than the product's own site, because the site could not be reached when the check ran.

Coverage means bulletins the product ingests or links to, not map coverage, which is usually wider. Prices are annual unless stated.

Feature matrix

Thirteen things people actually choose on. Read the dots with the caveat in the legend: a product marked not established may well do the thing — it means our sources do not say, usually because that product was checked for coverage and price rather than interrogated feature by feature. Reading those as a “no” would invent an advantage out of a gap in our own notes.

• ●Yes
• ◐Partly
• ○No
• ?Not established

Competitor rows come from the sources listed under “how this was checked”. The Snowdesk column is checked against our own source code, which is the only column we can check that way.

What a feature table cannot show you

A table like the one above counts what a product has, so it rewards the app with the most in it. That is worth saying out loud on a page that leads with one, because it misses the thing you notice first when you actually open these apps: how much of each one is not the forecast.

Most of them are platforms. There are modules and tabs, a learning section, a shop, a route library, a community feed, a prompt to upgrade, and in one case adverts. All of that is doing a job for the people who built it, and some of it is genuinely good — WhiteRisk's teaching material is the best in the category by a wide margin. But it sits between you and the number you opened the app to read, on a phone, outside, in a lift queue, wearing gloves.

Snowdesk does one thing: a map, and the forecast for wherever you touch it. There is no learning module, no shop, no upgrade prompt, no advertising, and nothing to buy. You do not need an account to read a bulletin, and there is no app to install before you can see anything.

The honest half of that

Restraint is a trade, not a free win. The things we leave out are things other people want. If you are learning to read a bulletin, WhiteRisk will teach you properly and we will not. If you want a library of routes to pick from, Whympr has a hundred thousand and we have none — we hold the one you bring us. If you want the day's outings from people who were just out there, that is Whympr too.

And the same scepticism this page applies elsewhere applies here: an app with nothing to sell you also has no business model, which is a fair thing to hold against it. We note above that AvalancheClarity has no visible way of paying for itself and that this is worth knowing before you depend on it. That is exactly as true of us.

Planning together, and your own content

Reading the forecast is one job. Deciding a route, agreeing a meeting point and getting four people to the same trailhead at the same time is another, and it is the dimension these products differ on most while advertising it least. Two are worth separating: whether you can bring your own route into the app, and whether anyone else can see the plan.

Bringing your own route

Whympr and Snowdesk both take a route you supply. WhiteRisk lets you draw one and keeps a personal tour library that syncs between the web and the app, which is the same idea reached a different way. Skitourenguru and Yéti work the opposite way round: their value is a curated database of about 13,000 tours that they score for you, so the route is theirs, not yours. SnowSafe states plainly that it is not a planner.

Sharing the plan with other people

This is where the list thins out. Whympr has by far the richest community layer — trip reports carrying current conditions, an activity wall of the last ten days of outings, GPS tracking and a logbook — but it is a feed of what people did, published after the fact, rather than a plan for a day that has not happened yet.

Snowdesk is the only product here where a trip is a shared object: a route on a named day, at a stated time and meeting point, behind one link anybody can open and read before deciding anything. Saving it to your own trips needs an account, and everyone who saves it reads the same trip rather than a copy, so when the organiser moves the time or the meeting point, nobody is left on a stale plan. No equivalent was found in any other product checked — though see the note on what that does and does not prove, below.

Reporting what you saw

WhiteRisk added a crowd-sourced form for marking an avalanche's starting point and logging its size and type. Whympr takes field reports without a login at all, and expires them after 90 days unless another user corroborates them, which is a neat answer to stale conditions reports. Snowdesk takes field observations and shows them on the map. The other products in this list are read-only.

The products in detail

Grouped by what each product is fundamentally for. A bulletin app and a trip planner that happens to show a bulletin are different purchases, and comparing them feature-for-feature flatters the wrong one.

The official one

WhiteRisk

WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF · web and mobile, four languages · checked 30 Aug 2026

Not a third party interpreting an official product — it is the official product, from the institute that writes the Swiss bulletin. Four modules: an avalanche knowledge base, structured e-learning with per-lesson quizzes, a tour planner, and professional tooling for instructors. The planner is the part that matters most: draw a route and WhiteRisk marks the critical cruxes against terrain and avalanche information, with an elevation profile and estimated duration for alternatives.

The 2025/26 redesign added the French bulletin outright, a crowd-sourced form for logging an avalanche seen from the field, and clearer crux display. Maps cover Switzerland, France and Austria with slope-angle and avalanche-terrain layers; the free tier drops to OpenStreetMap. Readings from the automated measuring-station network are free.

Strongest at authority, terrain-aware route analysis, station data, and the deepest educational material in the category by a distance. Weakest at reach beyond Switzerland — Austria and Italy get map coverage but not a first-class bulletin — and it is a platform with modules, licences and an account, which is more than some people want when they are checking one number in a lift queue.

Bulletin-first apps

SnowSafe

First Line Solutions GmbH, Austria · iOS and Android, no web surface · checked 30 Aug 2026

Explicitly not a planner. The design principle its makers state — as simple and reliable to operate as a transceiver — shows in the product. Coverage is the Austrian avalanche warning services plus Bavaria, Alto Adige/Südtirol, Veneto, Trentino, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czechia, Poland, Iceland and Norway. No Switzerland and no France.

Its most recent release added push notifications for danger levels and a weather-station map layer with interactive charts. Alongside those sit a clinometer for measuring a slope, an aspect compass pairing slope aspect with the day's danger patterns, mountain weather forecasts, and offline reading of bulletins synced while you had signal.

Strongest at alerting on rising danger and on a mid-day re-issue, station data, and field instruments in the same app as the forecast. Weakest at everything around the bulletin: no map-first entry point, no history or season view, no route handling, and nothing on the web. The bulletin itself is never paywalled, which is the right call.

AvalancheClarity

Simon Perry, a Tignes-based guidebook author · app plus an embeddable widget · checked 30 Aug 2026, secondary sources only

The broadest cross-border coverage of anything in this list, built by one person rather than an institution. It translates the official bulletin, explains it in plain language, and pushes a notification the moment a new bulletin or a revision publishes for a region you follow — the only product here that alerts on a re-issue rather than only on a danger level.

Translation depth is uneven, and this is the thing to check before relying on it. Switzerland gets all 134 micro-regions in eight languages and France gets all 36 massifs, but Austria, Italy, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Andorra, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czechia, Finland and Scotland get a map link to the official bulletin rather than a translated one.

Strongest at reading a foreign-language bulletin in Switzerland or France, and knowing the instant one changes. Weakest at everywhere else, where it is a link rather than a translation. No terrain or route tooling, and no stated business model — worth knowing for something you would come to depend on.

Snowdesk

The publisher of this page — read the disclosure at the foot · web, installable, works offline · English only

Three providers normalised into one shape, so a Swiss bulletin and an Austrian one are rendered by the same model rather than as two different documents, down to each problem's aspects and elevation band. It is a website rather than an app: nothing to install, and it keeps working without signal once a page has loaded. It shows the provider's bulletin in full rather than a summary, on the view that deciding what to leave out of an avalanche forecast is not ours to do.

Around the bulletin: a slope-angle overlay using the same band classification as the Swiss maps, the national topographic basemaps for Switzerland, France and Austria, mountain weather forecasts refreshed four times a day, uploaded routes, and shared trips.

Strongest at reading the same way across four countries, on a phone, offline, with nothing to install — and at planning a day with other people. Weakest at alerting, which it does not do at all; observed weather-station readings, where it has forecasts but no live station network; per-tour risk scoring, which it deliberately does not do — a trip page states where your line enters the ground each problem names, and stops short of rating the day; languages other than English; and teaching material, where WhiteRisk is far ahead. If you ski only in Switzerland, WhiteRisk is the better product and it is not close.

Tools that rate a specific tour

Skitourenguru and Yéti

Günter Schmudlach (CH) and the Petzl Foundation (FR) · free · checked 30 Aug 2026

Two sibling products answering a narrower and more useful question than "what does the bulletin say": given today's bulletin and the terrain a particular tour crosses, how risky is that tour today. Skitourenguru covers the Alps generally and is Swiss-rooted; Yéti is the newer France-only sibling pairing the Météo-France bulletin with terrain analysis from an elevation model. Both were previously gated and are now free, over a database of about 13,000 tours.

Strongest at the single most decision-relevant output in this whole list, free, over a large route database — and the methodology is credible enough that a major tour portal now licenses it as a map layer. Weakest at coverage: no one product spans the whole Alps, and funding rests on a foundation rather than revenue, which is a different kind of risk from a subscription.

Planning platforms

Whympr

Whympr, born in Chamonix · iOS, Android and web · checked 30 Aug 2026

An all-in-one mountain trip planner covering hiking, ski touring, mountaineering, climbing, trail running and snowshoeing, in which the avalanche bulletin is one tab. The draw is everything around it: over 100,000 routes and points of interest, eleven national topographic maps, 3D and LiDAR terrain, slope-gradient shading across Europe, weather, 23,000 webcams, and offline area downloads with your chosen map and layers.

Its terrain layers carry an explicit warning that a rating can shift a full grade with season or weather, which is the correct framing for any such layer.

Strongest at being the only app you need to open before a tour, if planning matters more to you than forecast depth, and at community content by a wide margin. Weakest at the bulletin itself, which is a thin pass-through of the official product — no normalisation across providers, no history, and nothing that reads the forecast for you.

Weather-first platforms

OpenSnow

Cloudnine Weather, Inc., United States · iOS, Android and web · checked 30 Aug 2026

Included because it is the most commercially proven shape in the category, not because it competes in the Alps — it does not. The question it answers is where it will snow, not whether a slope will hold. Its spine is a human-written daily forecast narrative per region by named local meteorologists. People subscribe to a writer, which is a different business from selling access to a data feed.

Around that sit threshold alerts you set yourself, side-by-side comparison across several mountains, ten days of past snowfall and snow line per mountain, and an in-house forecast model the company claims is materially more accurate in mountain terrain than what it replaced.

Strongest at editorial voice and alerting — proof that in this category people pay for a person's read, not raw data. Weakest at avalanche work, which is a bolt-on: no European coverage and no bulletin normalisation. Its pricing is the most aggressive here.

Also worth knowing about

Products that come up often but have not been checked to the same depth as the profiles above. Treat these as pointers, not assessments.

• Skida (Norway) — a ski-touring app gathering official bulletins from several national providers in one place without altering their content, drawing each avalanche problem as an aspect-and-elevation diagram.
• avalanche.report — the official web front end for Austria and northern Italy, and the region map those tourers already know.
• Varsom (Norway) — state-run observations and forecasts at national scale, with slope-angle and runout map layers for Norway and Svalbard.
• onX Backcountry (US and Canada) — no Alps coverage, but the most careful terrain layer of any of these: a terrain-exposure scale plus a distinct rating for ground with no avalanche exposure at all, which frames the layer as ruling terrain safe rather than rating everything else dangerous.
• Bergfex (Austria) — the default tour-and-weather portal across Austria and Germany, with avalanche information attached.
• Outdooractive and alpenvereinaktiv — tour portals with alpine-club backing, carrying institutional trust in Austria and Germany.
• Camptocamp and Skitour.fr — the French community route corpora other apps source from, and where many French tourers actually plan.
• Avalanche Canada and avalanche.org — the North American forecast agencies, both with their own apps.
• FATMAP — the 3D terrain mapping product, acquired by Strava and retired in October 2024. Listed so nobody spends an evening looking for it.

How this was checked

• Each profiled product was checked against its own website and store listing in August 2026, and re-checked twice since.
• Several of these sites block automated fetching, so some claims are corroborated across independent secondary sources rather than read from the product itself. The two that matter most are OpenSnow's prices and AvalancheClarity's coverage and cost. Check both yourself before paying for anything.
• A feature not described here may still exist. These notes record what was found, and a product that is not said to do something may simply never have been asked — which matters most in the planning and community section, where features are often buried rather than advertised.
• Coverage figures describe bulletins a product ingests or links to, not map coverage, which is usually wider and is not the same promise.
• This is a snapshot of a category that moves fast. In the last year alone WhiteRisk added a second country's bulletin, SnowSafe added push alerts, and Skitourenguru and Yéti became free. Anything here can be out of date by the time you read it — tell us if it is.

Disclosure

This page is published by Snowdesk, which is one of the products listed on it. We have tried to be useful rather than flattering — the guide above sends you to WhiteRisk for Switzerland, to SnowSafe for Austria, and to Skitourenguru or Yéti for a scored tour, and Snowdesk's own entry lists what it does not do. Read it with the conflict in mind anyway.

Nothing here is a recommendation about whether to go into avalanche terrain. The official bulletin from your national avalanche warning service is the authority, and the decision is always yours to make with training, equipment and partners. If you are new to reading one, start with how to read a bulletin.