By the Sloth team
Polarsteps is genuinely good at what it does. It tracks your route as you travel, builds a timeline of where you went, and produces something shareable at the end. For documenting a trip after the fact — or as a passive tracker while you’re on the move — it’s hard to beat.
The problem is that many people try to use it for something it was never designed for: planning a trip before they leave.
This is not a niche complaint. The r/Polarsteps subreddit contains a steady stream of users hitting the same wall. “I’m looking to switch from other apps like Wanderlog to Polarsteps but I can’t find a way to plan my next trip and add different locations.” “Search option doesn’t work for anything but cities.” The pattern is consistent: someone discovers Polarsteps, loves the idea, tries to use it to plan their upcoming journey, and finds that the planning tools simply aren’t there.
Polarsteps was built to record. Not to plan.
What “planning” actually means
Planning an overland trip is not just putting pins on a map. It means:
- Working out which legs are actually doable — which bus routes exist, which trains cross which borders, which ferry runs on which days
- Understanding what you don’t know yet — which legs are solid, which are uncertain, which need more research before you commit
- Building a rough itinerary: how many days in each place, estimated costs, what transport to book ahead vs. what you can figure out when you arrive
- Checking the current situation — borders that recently closed, conflict zones that weren’t there when the blog post was written, seasonal closures
None of this lives in Polarsteps. The app is a recorder, not a planner. That’s a legitimate design choice — but it means there’s a real gap for anyone trying to plan a complex overland journey before they leave.
The Wanderlog refugees
Wanderlog is the other half of this picture. It’s flight-first — built around airline itineraries, with overland planning bolted on — and a lot of serious overland travellers eventually find its limitations. When they go looking for something better, Polarsteps often comes up in the same thread.
But Polarsteps doesn’t plan. Wanderlog doesn’t do overland well. The gap between the two is where most overland travellers end up: a Notion doc or Google Sheet for the plan, then Polarsteps or nothing for the record.
What the gap actually costs
The cobbled-together approach — spreadsheet for the plan, forum for route questions, separate app for the record — works, but it has real costs.
You spend hours researching routes across disconnected sources, never quite knowing which information is current. The plan lives in one place, your bookings in another, your journal notes in a third. If you check a border status on a blog post from 2021, you have no way of knowing whether it’s still accurate. When the trip ends, you have fragments across five tools instead of one complete record.
The “planning spreadsheet + Polarsteps for tracking” workflow is what most overland travellers default to. It’s not because they want to use five tools. It’s because no single tool does both.
What By Sloth is trying to do
By Sloth is an overland trip planner built around the kind of journeys that fall through the cracks of mainstream travel apps. The core idea: plan your route with realistic, confidence-rated legs, then record the journey as you actually take it — in the same tool.
The planning side exists now. You put in a starting city and a destination, and the app suggests a realistic overland route — trains, buses, ferries, shared taxis, cycling legs. Each leg gets a confidence rating: Safe route (standard connection, AI is confident), Check locally (the route exists but conditions change — verify before committing), or Unverified (limited data, do your own research). Live conflict and advisory data from the UK FCDO and the Government of Canada is surfaced at the leg level, not just as a country-level banner.
The recording side — a text journal tied to each stop, with a “Mark as visited” toggle as you progress through the route — is live now. It’s the part of the product we think fills the specific gap that Polarsteps leaves open.
What it doesn’t do yet
The honest version: it’s a v0.4 in private beta. The planning intelligence grows as community contributors add notes from routes they’ve actually done. Coverage is uneven — stronger in Europe and Southeast Asia, thinner in parts of Africa and Central Asia where overland travel is less documented. The recording features are functional but not as polished as Polarsteps.
If you need a finished product that works perfectly out of the box, the honest answer is: give it a few months.
If you’re planning a complex overland journey in the next six months and want a tool that treats the planning and the recording as one continuous thing rather than two separate problems — that’s exactly what we’re building for.
The longer-term picture
The premise behind By Sloth is that planning and recording a trip aren’t two different activities. They’re the same activity at different stages. The route you planned is the structure of the journal you’ll write. The notes you add during the trip improve the confidence data for the next person who plans the same leg.
Polarsteps does the recording part well. The planning part — particularly for overland travel where the routes are obscure, the schedules change, and the confidence data matters — is the gap we’re focused on.
If you’ve done a route recently that the app has wrong — a leg marked Uncertain that runs fine, or a route we’ve missed entirely — tell us. The confidence ratings improve when people who’ve been there say what they found.