TravStats vs. Polarsteps
Polarsteps is a travel app for your phone: it plans a trip, tracks the route while you travel, lets family and friends follow along, and can turn the finished trip into a printed book. TravStats is something else — a logbook you keep after the fact, on your own server. The two overlap less than the word “travel tracker” suggests, so this page is mostly about which job you need done.
At a glance
Section titled “At a glance”| TravStats | Polarsteps | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Self-hosted travel logbook | Phone app for planning, tracking and sharing trips |
| Hosting | Your server (Docker) | Polarsteps’ cloud |
| How entries arrive | Booking emails, PDFs, boarding passes, list imports, manual entry | Route tracked by the phone; steps with photos and text |
| Automatic route tracking | No (location history from a Dawarich server, beta) | Yes, in the app; works offline |
| Flights | First-class records: airline, aircraft, registration, times, delays | Added to a planned trip by flight number; a flight line drawn on the map |
| Cruises | Yes, with ports and sea days | No |
| Hotels / stays | Yes — a domain of its own since 2.6.0 | Stays can be added to a planned trip |
| Followers and sharing | None — no public surface | Per trip: only me, followers, or everyone |
| Printed book | No | Yes, the Travel Book (paid) |
| Cost | Free, open source | Free; optional Polarsteps Plus at €8.99/month or €29.99/year (prices may vary by region) |
| Mobile | Web (responsive); a Companion app in testing, beta | iPhone and Android app, plus the website |
| Data export | Whole-logbook spreadsheet, JSON, database backup | Download of your data: JSON plus photos |
Where TravStats wins
Section titled “Where TravStats wins”1. Flights, cruises and stays as records
Section titled “1. Flights, cruises and stays as records”Polarsteps knows a flight as part of a plan, or as a line between two steps — it draws one when two steps lie at least 200 km apart at speed. TravStats keeps a flight as a record: airline, aircraft, registration, scheduled and actual times, cabin, seat, cost. Cruises carry their ship, ports and sea days; stays carry the house, the nights and the price. That is what makes statistics like punctuality, cost per kilometre or nights slept possible.
2. The past, not only the next trip
Section titled “2. The past, not only the next trip”Polarsteps is at its best while you travel. TravStats is built for the years before you installed anything: a Flightradar24 export, a CSV, a spreadsheet, and — the headline — the booking emails already in your inbox, read automatically. See Imports & Parsers.
3. Nobody else in the room
Section titled “3. Nobody else in the room”Polarsteps is social by design: followers, trips visible to followers by default, and trips set to “everyone” can end up in search engines. All of that is under your control there. TravStats simply has no audience — no profiles, no followers, no public pages — and runs on a server you own.
Where Polarsteps wins
Section titled “Where Polarsteps wins”1. It tracks for you
Section titled “1. It tracks for you”Switch on the tracker and the app records your route as you go, even offline, with low battery use. TravStats records nothing by itself. The nearest thing — pulling tracks from a self-hosted Dawarich server onto the road, hike and bike sections of a trip — is behind the beta switch, and needs a location-history server you run yourself.
2. The phone is the product
Section titled “2. The phone is the product”Polarsteps is an app on iPhone and Android, made to be used on the road. TravStats is a web application; its phone app, the Companion, is in testing and behind the beta switch.
3. Sharing the journey
Section titled “3. Sharing the journey”Family can follow a trip as it happens, with photos and stories per step. If that is why you want a travel app, TravStats does not do it at all.
4. Planning and the book
Section titled “4. Planning and the book”Polarsteps plans the trip before you leave — stays, activities, flights — and turns the finished one into a printed hardback. TravStats keeps upcoming bookings alongside past ones, but it is no trip planner, and it prints nothing.
Moving data between them
Section titled “Moving data between them”There is no Polarsteps importer in TravStats. Polarsteps offers a download of your data from its website (Account settings → Download my data): steps, routes and profile information as JSON, photos as files. That is yours to keep either way, but TravStats cannot read it directly; turning its locations into a CSV for places (itself a beta domain) would be a job for a script.
The two can also sit side by side: Polarsteps for the trip in progress, TravStats for the long record of flights, cruises and stays imported from the bookings.
Verdict
Section titled “Verdict”If you want your phone to remember where you went and your family to watch it happen, use Polarsteps. TravStats is not trying to be that.
If you want a complete, private record of how you have travelled — every flight with its aircraft, every cruise, every hotel night, on your own hardware — that is what TravStats is for.