Guide
A Polarsteps alternative that doesn't track your live location
Polarsteps is good at what it does: it follows a journey as it happens, plotting your route from your phone's location. If that live trail is the point for you, it's a fine choice. But a lot of people want the opposite — a private record of the places they've been, without an app quietly logging where they are. If that's you, here's how Minnekart compares.
The core difference
Polarsteps is oriented around the live journey: tracking a route, following friends, a public trip profile. Minnekart is oriented around memory: a globe you fill in afterwards, one pin per place, private unless you decide to share a single trip. It never needs your live location, because it's a record of where you've been — not where you are.
What you get with Minnekart
- A globe of your places you can spin, with the story, dates, and photos attached to each pin.
- Private by default. Nothing is public until you turn on a share link for a specific trip — and you can revoke it later.
- Your photos, cleaned up. Images are processed in your browser before upload, which strips the EXIF data — including the GPS location cameras write into each photo.
- No trackers, no analytics, no ads. There is no third-party tracking anywhere in the app, and no live-location feature is planned — see the privacy page.
What it deliberately doesn't do
Minnekart won't follow you in real time, won't plot a live route from your phone, and won't give you a public follower feed. That's not a missing feature — it's the whole idea. If you specifically want live tracking and a social trip stream, Polarsteps is the better fit. If you want a quiet, private atlas of your life's travels, that's what this is.
Trying it
It's free to start, and the guide to keeping a private travel record walks through how to build one. When you're ready: