The 5 Best Geocaching Apps

Geocaching

It’s no surprise that one of the better free geocaching apps is the official one, called Geocaching. You can use it to search for geocaches, log that you did or did not find any particular cache, and more. This is what I use 99% of the time.

However, because there’s also a premium version available, the free app is limited in some ways. If you don’t care about the advanced features, though, you can still use Geocaching to find lots and lots of geocaches without paying a dime.

The free version lets you search for geocaches by location, type (Traditional or Event only), tracking code, and GeoTours. You can also view a geocache’s difficulty and terrain rating, read its description, message the person who placed it, share geocaches with others, and log whether you found it.

Geocaching Premium ($39.99 per year) is available through the app which lets you access all the geocache types, download maps offline, use the Trails maps for off-road geocaching, perform better searches when looking for geocaches, and more.

This app works on Android, iPhone, and iPad.

Cachly

This isn't a free geocaching app, but unlike the official one listed above, it only requires a one-time payment to get features like offline vector maps, lists, and advanced searching capabilities.

Once you’re viewing a particular cache through Cachly, you can use the menu button to find caches nearby. This is a really handy feature to quickly look for more within a reasonable distance from the one you’re working on.

I love the search options. Cachly lets you hide geocaches you’ve already found so that you don’t confuse them with new ones on the map. It can also hide your hidden geocaches, exclude ignored caches, remove inactive ones from the map, and exclude archived geocaches.

Another feature worth mentioning comes in handy when you’re making a list of geocaches to find. You can handpick certain caches and add them to a custom list, but you can also search for geocaches, and even filter them if you like, and then save all the visible caches to a list. This makes it really easy to add caches to a list in bulk.

You can also add notes to a cache for your own personal use, highlight caches so that they stand out to you in the map or list view, sync with Apple Watch to find caches without pulling out your phone, supports importing and exporting GPX files (saved GPS data files), and access templates for logging caches more quickly.

This app is $4.99 and works on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.

GeoCaches

GeoCaches is a much simpler geocaching app than the others in this list. It’s really easy to use and doesn’t include too many settings, so choosing how to use it is pretty straightforward. However, because it’s so simple, you won’t find tons of customization options (but maybe that's a good thing).

When you tap a cache on the map, it shows an S, D, T in the pop-up box. Those refer to the size, difficulty, and terrain levels; the lower the number, the smaller the cache is, or the less difficult it is to find. You can tap on the cache for more information and to show the description, log book, and any available hints.

Since there aren’t a lot of settings in this app, the only real changes you can make are to the map type (satellite, terrain, etc.), show/hide found caches you’ve already found, show/hide caches that are inactive, and filter results for size, difficulty, and terrain levels.

Something not so great about this geocaching app is that you can’t turn on notifications for every cache with a global setting. Instead, you have to go into a particular cache’s information box and turn on Notify me in 300m zone. 

Another thing I don’t like is the restrictive navigation. If you don't want to use the in-app navigation, but instead your own navigation app, you're limited to Apple Maps. To do that, open the details for the cache and tap Export to send the coordinates to Apple Maps.

iOS devices can install GeoCaches, so it works for your iPad and your iPhone.

c:geo

This free Android geocaching app isn’t necessarily the prettiest thing you'll ever install, but it does have lots of useful features you won’t get with the official app.

Using a local list with c:geo is helpful so you can handpick which caches you want to go after, and then see only those caches on your map, even without an internet connection. You can even filter them by distance, type, size, terrain, difficulty, attributes, status, and other criteria.

With offline logging, the app acts as if you were online, even if you're using offline maps or downloaded caches. Then, once you’re connected to the internet, you can use your saved log to log it for real using the internet.

You can use variables when you set up a signature template, like to auto-insert the current date and time, terrain level, owner name, and more to configure a signature that changes for each cache you write a log for.

c:geo lets you pick a primary and a secondary navigation method, like a compass, an external map app, Google Maps (walking/bike/transit/driving), or Maps.me. You can also tinker with advanced settings like hardware acceleration, low-power mode, the orientation sensor, the database storage location, and the GPX import/export directory.

Here are some other notable features I found while using this app: search for caches by longitude and latitude, address, user, keywords, and trackable; nearby cache option; list caches you’ve recently viewed; a “Go to” option to immediately start navigating to any set of coordinates from any other coordinatess; cache filter to either show all cache types or only traditional caches, multi-caches, mystery caches, giga-event caches, earthcaches, and several others; find caches that are located near another cache; a “personal note” option to store information about a cache for only you to see; waypoint extractor; and share caches with others over email or any other sharing app.

This app runs on Android only.