How this compares
Most of what's written about "Mountain Project alternatives" is out of date or wrong. Here is what each of these actually does, what we do instead, and a source for every claim. Where a competitor does something better, it says so.
Mountain Project
The US default, owned by onX. Far more routes and photos than we have, twenty years of comments, and a partner finder we don't try to match. Its app's recent reviews are about offline areas re-syncing on every open and ticks duplicating; it takes an onX, Facebook, Apple or email login. Its sun tool "does factor in latitude, but not topo relief". Its pin for a route is, in every case we checked, the parent area's coordinate copied onto the route, with nothing on the page saying so.
Here: no account, no ads, no background sync — a crag you save for offline stays on your phone, and nothing re-downloads behind your back. Sun and shade count the terrain around the wall, measured from the elevation model. And every route says where its point came from: right now 1 of 30,089 routes have a start measured by two independent sources, and we say so on How sure are we? rather than drawing 30,089 pins. We take nothing from Mountain Project; where a route exists there, we link to it.
OpenBeta
A volunteer-run nonprofit whose open catalogue (CC0) is the backbone of this site, as it says on every page. Its own site has no route descriptions and a map its users call slow. We aren't an alternative to OpenBeta; we're one of the things it makes possible, and we send GPS surveys back upstream.
theCrag
The largest catalogue outside the US, strongest in Australia and Europe, with a published, open-source grade model we admire. Its own discussion board lists load times and contributors giving up as its two main problems. Thin in Colorado. We link to it and take nothing from it.
KAYA, The Topo, Rakkup, Sloper
Paid digital guidebooks: topos, photos, descriptions, GPS to the wall, for a subscription or a per-area price, and for the crags they cover they are more complete than we will ever be. The question with each is how the guidebook author is paid. The Topo passes half its subscription to authors; KAYA's 2025 dispute with authors ended with its own admission that it "should not have visualized this data" before contracts were signed.
Here: no topos, no descriptions, no photos of pages — those are the author's work. We cite the book and page a fact came from and link to where to buy it, from the publisher where they sell one. If you want the full picture of a crag, the answer is still the book.
ShadÅ, Climbit
Conditions apps that model sun and shade from terrain, launched in 2024–2026, both better-looking than our tables. Neither carries a route catalogue or closures. We do the same terrain calculation for every Colorado crag whose aspect is known and put it on the crag page next to the routes, the weather and whatever a person has verified about access — seven seasonal lists come out of it.
What none of them show
How sure the location is. Which book says a bolt count. When a closure was last checked, by whom, against what. A count of what the site doesn't know. That's the whole idea here, and it's why the site can be free: it costs nothing to say what you don't know.
Sources are linked above and collected, with the research behind them, in the repository's docs/COMPETITIVE-2026-09-29.md. Numbers on this page are the current build's. If something here is out of date, write to us.