

From there, you can take a look at the area in Google Street View, glance at user photos, or read reviews of the businesses in the area. You can search for a specific address, a business name, or even just a type of business (like “coffee shops” or “Italian restaurants”).

Google Maps has a lot more in the way of navigation options.

It does all this automatically, using live traffic data to keep your route updated without you needing to do anything. Waze is all about shaving time off your drive, so it will often take you on smaller roads or force you into weird u-turns in order to “shorten” your drive. As you’re driving, Waze displays things like police location, broken down cars, accidents, and road closures on the map. Waze shows you your next turn in a big bold note at the top of the screen, with the turn after that one listed below. Once you’re driving, Waze pans the view and zooms in, much like a traditional turn-by-turn GPS unit you’d keep in your car. You can change the route, by looking at text description or a map view. When you pop into the search menu, you can type in an address or a business name, then Waze gives you a route. When you search around the map, it’s just roads. When you take a look at Waze, it’s pretty obvious it’s meant for driving. These interface differences don’t seem like they’d be a big deal for people, but they really are, and the usability of both apps depends on what you plan on doing with them. Waze is a traditional turn-by-turn navigation interface that looks a lot like a GPS unit you’d put in your car circa 2005. Google Maps is a traditional map interface, like a digital version of a paper map. Surprisingly, Waze actually has a lot more options for customising navigation, including setting Waze to avoid highways by default or take the shortest route instead of the fastest, so if you like to tweak your defaults, Waze is a better approach. That’s it for the big stuff, though there are plenty of nitpicky, minor differences as well. Traffic jam indicator counts down the time you’ll be in a jam Learns frequent destinations, commuting hours, and preferred routesĮasily search for the cheapest gas on a route Social network integration that includes live traffic reporting from other usersĪbility to send live, updating information with your ETA to friendsĪdditional celebrity voice navigation options Tracks and saves location data over times Shows map information when looking at different routing options
#Waze vs google maps Offline
Offline mode with turn-by-turn navigationĭisplays business hours in searches and alerts you if you’ll arrive too late Live traffic conditions, incident reports, and optional reroutingīusiness information for millions of places Voice navigation options for driving, biking, and walking Navigation options for driving, biking, walking, and using public transportation Waze (right) really stresses roads.īoth Google Maps and Waze do a fine job of turn-by-turn voice navigation, but let’s take a look at the big feature differences between the two apps. Google Maps (left) looks like pretty much every map, ever. Though, while Apple Maps was certainly a joke when it launched, it’s caught up well enough and tends to be comparable to Google Maps in major cities. They share data occasionally, but otherwise they’re totally different apps with different functions and different navigation tricks.įor those curious, we’re skipping Apple Maps since it’s limited to just Apple devices.

Google Maps is much more akin to a traditional map, has a variety of transportation options, and is packed with additional information about businesses, monuments, and everything else you’re used to seeing in a map app.īack in 2013, Google bought Waze, but has kept Google Maps and Waze separate for the most part.
#Waze vs google maps drivers
Waze is a turn-by-turn navigation app that focuses on a social network where drivers can share information about accidents, police officers, road closures, and more. We’ll dig into the big differences between Google Maps and Waze in a second, but let’s quickly run through the broad strokes. They might both be owned by the same company, but they work completely differently. You wouldn’t really think there could be that much difference between turn-by-turn navigation apps, but even just a glance at Google Maps and Waze shows how different they are.
