You cross oceans and your weather arrives over Iridium
Buy PredictWind
Proprietary 1 km and 8 km models, boat-motion outputs, and the DataHub — a physical box on your satellite link. Nothing else here matches that offshore path.
Marine weather routing, compared
Five tools. One passage.
What each is actually for.
PredictWind, savvy navvy, Windy, LuckGrib and OpenSail get compared constantly and badly, usually on feature counts nobody sails by. This page compares them on the things that decide a passage: what the router is allowed to ignore, whose boat the polar describes, and what it costs to get a route at all. Every price came from the vendor’s own page. Every competitor gets a section on where they beat us.
The short answer
What is the best weather routing software for sailing?
Nobody wins outright, and the sailors who tell you otherwise are describing their own boat. PredictWind owns offshore: proprietary 1 km and 8 km models and DataHub satellite hardware, with routing listed from $249/yr. savvy navvy owns coastal chartwork: the best chart layer here plus European tidal streams, from £59/yr. Windy owns free visualisation and has no first-party routing. LuckGrib owns one-time value at $89.98 and is Apple-only.
OpenSail is built for the sailor the other four leave in the middle: real passages, normal budget. Unlimited routing at $59/yr, with your boat’s own polar, depth checked on every returned segment against GEBCO bathymetry, four comfort modes, and a plain-language briefing that names which route to take and when to leave. The free tier solves one real route a week.
We publish this page and we sell one of the products on it. So every number below links to its source, and every competitor has a section listing what they do better than we do. Read those first.
- Cheapest routing subscription
- OpenSail Voyager, $59/yr
- Cheapest over five years
- LuckGrib, $89.98 once
- Best offshore satellite path
- PredictWind DataHub
- Best chart layer
- savvy navvy Savvy Charts
Competitor prices and features read from the vendors’ own pages on . Every source is linked at the foot of this page.
Start here
Find yourself in one of these five
You want the best chart on your phone, with marinas and tidal streams
Buy savvy navvy
The Savvy Charts layer with Waterway Guides anchorage detail is the best chart product on this page, and European tidal streams are properly done.
You just want to see what the weather is doing, for free
Use Windy
Free, beautiful, and the multi-model comparison across ECMWF, GFS, ICON and AROME costs nothing. If you never want a computed route, stop here and keep your money.
You’re Apple-only and would rather buy software than rent it
Buy LuckGrib
$89.98 once for the app and routing. Deepest GRIB engine here, mature Iridium GO and RedPort downloads, and cheaper than any subscription after about nineteen months.
You make real passages but you aren’t crossing the Pacific this year
Use OpenSail
Unlimited routing at $59/yr with your boat’s own polar, depth enforced on every segment, four comfort modes, and a briefing that says which route to take and why.
The money
What a routed passage costs, honestly
This is the chart most comparison pages won’t draw, because it has us losing. Over one year OpenSail is the cheapest subscription that includes unlimited routing. Over five years LuckGrib is cheaper than all of us, because a one-time purchase beats arithmetic.
What a routed passage costs
- Windy Premium + plugin$21Routing via a community plugin, no chart data underneath
- OpenSail Voyager$59Unlimited routing, four comfort modes, departure planner
- LuckGrib + routing$90$29.99 app plus a $59.99 routing purchase, bought once
- savvy navvy Explore$121£95/yr — offline charts and the departure scheduler
- PredictWind Standard$249The first PredictWind tier listing weather routing
- PredictWind Professional$499Boat motion, high-res GRIBs, ocean currents, AI polars
Cheapest tier of each product whose own feature list includes weather routing, at list price, billed annually. savvy navvy converted from £95 at 1.27; they set US pricing separately. Windy’s figure buys Premium, not routing — the routing is a community plugin.
The gap that stands out is PredictWind. $249 a year for the tier where routing first appears, and $499 for boat motion and high-resolution GRIBs. That buys real capability, and for an ocean crossing it’s money well spent. For a couple doing Bahamas hops it’s a great deal of money for reach they won’t use this season.
What we actually argue about
The question is what the router is allowed to ignore
Every product here can draw a line between two points. The differences are in what gets checked before that line is handed to you.
OpenSail expands time-layered reachability fans in native Rust, then verifies the returned geometry twice: every segment against GEBCO 15-arc-second bathymetry and your entered draft, and every segment against OpenStreetMap coastline polygons. Not the waypoints. The line between them. Within a mile of shore that distinction is the entire argument.
Isochrone solve · Tampa Bay → Nassauthe engine
A weather map
A rhumb line and your judgement. Which is fine, until the judgement is being made at 0300 by someone who has been awake for nineteen hours.
OpenSail’s solver
candidate states512,408
solve time1.9 s
min depth held4.1 m
Each ring is everywhere the boat could be after another three hours, given her polar, the forecast at that hour, the current, and the depth under her keel. The route is the cheapest path through nine of them. Figures from a real Tampa Bay → Nassau solve.
Underneath it sits the model catalogue, which is the other half of any routing claim:
- NOAA GFS — 0.25° global atmosphere, 240 h, four runs a day
- ECMWF IFS — 0.25° global open data — the second opinion behind model agreement
- NOAA HRRR — 3 km US coastal atmosphere
- Météo-France AROME — 2.5 km Channel, Biscay, western Med
- CMEMS ocean physics — Global currents, fed straight into the solver
- CMEMS waves — Height, period, direction — the inputs behind comfort scoring
No proprietary models, and we won’t pretend otherwise: PredictWind is alone on this page in running its own. What we do instead is re-sample two independent globals along your solved track and tell you where they stop agreeing. Full data sources and licensing.
Line by line
All five, capability by capability
| Capability | OpenSail | PredictWind | savvy navvy | Windy.com | LuckGrib |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weather routing included at the entry paid tierWhether you can get an optimised route without buying the top of the price list. | ●$59/yr, unlimited | ＄$249/yr tier | ●£59/yr | ◐Community plugin | ＄$59.99 add-on |
| Free tier that solves a real routeWhether you can test the actual solver before paying, rather than only viewing forecasts. | ●1 route/week | —Forecasts only | ◐Limited planning | —No routing | ◐14-day trial |
| Per-segment depth verification against bathymetryWhether every leg of the returned route is checked against charted depth and your draft, rather than the grid being sampled at waypoints. | ●GEBCO 15″, per segment | ◐Not documented | ◐Hazard findings | —No chart data | —Not a chart tool |
| Comfort as a first-class routing objectiveWhether you can ask for the passage your crew will tolerate instead of only the fastest one. | ●4 modes incl. Family | ＄Boat motion at $499 | —Speed-optimised | —Plugin is time-only | —Time-optimised |
| Editable polars for your own boatWhether the route assumes your boat’s performance or a stand-in from a small library. | ●Editable + catalogue | ＄AI polars at $499 | —Not adjustable | —~23 stock polars | ●Full polar import |
| Model disagreement measured along your routeWhether the app tells you where two independent models stop agreeing on your track, or leaves you to flip between tabs. | ●Verdict + band | ◐Overlay by eye | —Single model below Elite | ◐Compare by eye | ◐Manual comparison |
| Says why it refused a routeWhether a failed solve explains the constraint that stopped it or returns nothing. | ●Structured refusals | —not offered | —not offered | —not offered | —not offered |
| Plain-language briefing on which route and when to leaveWhether the app commits to a recommendation and shows its reasoning, or hands you a table. | ●Intelligence Layer | —Tables + overlays | —Tables | —not offered | —Charts + tables |
| Anchorage exposure scored hour by hourWhether you can check tonight’s anchorage for the sectors it is open to, in the same app that planned the passage. | ●In the map | ◐Separate app | ◐Alarm, not forecast | —not offered | —not offered |
| Alerts you when a new model run worsens a planned routeWhether you stop re-checking the forecast manually once a passage is planned. | ●Threshold-gated | —not offered | —not offered | ◐Point alerts | —not offered |
| Runs in a browser with no installWhether crew, delivery skippers and shore support can open your plan on whatever machine is in front of them. | ●PWA, installs optional | ◐Web + native apps | ◐App-first | ●Full web app | —Apple only |
| Documented public APIWhether you can pull routes into your own dashboard, race committee tooling or boat systems. | ●REST, keyed | —not offered | —not offered | ＄Paid, limited | —not offered |
| Pause the subscription for haul-outWhether you pay for the months your boat is on the hard. | ●Built in | —not offered | —not offered | —not offered | ●No subscription |
● included◐ partial or workaround＄ costs extra— not offered
A row worth dwelling on is the last-but-two: says why it refused a route. Every product here returns nothing useful when the solve fails, except ours, and that isn’t a small thing when you’re trying to work out whether the problem is your draft, the tide or the fact that the destination is upwind of a gale.
Go deeper
One page per competitor, concessions included
PredictWindRouting starts at $249. We think the reasoning should come with it.Read the comparison →savvy navvyThe best chart here, and independent reviews of what its routes do near hazards.Read the comparison →Windy.comKeep it. It’s superb. It also has no idea where the seabed is.Read the comparison →LuckGribCheaper than us after nineteen months. Here’s when it’s also better.Read the comparison →PredictWind vs WindyThe head-to-head that doesn’t involve us, refereed as straight as we can.Read the comparison →
Method
How this page is put together
Everything here comes out of one file in our codebase, with a price, a source URL and a date attached to each fact. The visible tables and the machine-readable structured data are generated from that same file, so what a search engine reads and what you read can’t drift apart. When a vendor changes a price, we change one number and every page updates.
We don’t compare against features that are on anyone’s roadmap, ours included. Tidal streams are in build here and aren’t claimed as shipped. Where a competitor’s capability is documented but we haven’t verified the detail, the cell says “not documented” rather than guessing a no.
If you find something out of date or wrong, email us and we will correct it, including when the correction favours a competitor. That has happened and it will happen again.
Questions sailors actually ask
What is the best weather routing software for sailing in 2026?
There’s no single answer, and any page that gives you one is selling something. The honest split is by use case. Ocean crossings with satellite weather: PredictWind, for its proprietary models and DataHub hardware. Coastal chartwork and European tidal gates: savvy navvy, for the chart layer and tidal streams. Looking at the weather for free: Windy. Apple-only, one-time purchase: LuckGrib at $89.98.
Real passages on a normal budget: OpenSail at $59/yr, which is us, and which is the gap the other four leave. We have written a page for each of them saying where they beat us.
What is the cheapest way to get real weather routing?
Over one year, OpenSail’s free tier, which solves one real route a week with your draft and your polar at no cost. Over several years, LuckGrib: $29.99 for the app plus $59.99 for the routing purchase, once, and it never asks again. Among annual subscriptions, OpenSail Voyager at $59 is the cheapest tier here whose feature list includes unlimited routing; savvy navvy Essential is £59 and PredictWind Standard is $249.
Which sailing apps check the depth of the route they give you?
OpenSail does, on every segment of the returned route, against GEBCO 15-arc-second bathymetry and the draft you entered, with the geometry also checked against OpenStreetMap coastlines. Windy carries no chart data at all, so its plugin routing can’t. LuckGrib is a GRIB and routing tool by design and doesn’t set out to gate on charted depth. savvy navvy has the chart data, but independent reviewers have reported its routes running through shallows and close past hazards.
Can I trust a comparison written by one of the products in it?
Partly, and only if it is checkable. Every competitor price and capability on these pages links to the vendor’s own page or a named independent test, and each was read on 10 August 2026. Every competitor also gets a section titled “where they win”, written by us, listing specific things they do better than we do. Read those sections first. If they are vague, ignore the rest of the page.
Do any of these replace a chart plotter?
None of them, including ours. These are planning tools. They help you decide whether to go, when to leave and roughly which line to take, and every one of them should be checked against official charts before you actually sail it. OpenSail stamps NOT FOR NAVIGATION on the map for exactly this reason. Your seamanship overrules all of us.
Where these numbers come from
Every competitor price and capability on these pages was read from the vendor’s own page or a named independent test. Last checked . Prices change; if you find one of these out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
- PredictWind — Features, Packages and PricingTier names, annual prices, and which tier first lists Weather Routing.
- PredictWind Help Centre — Standard vs ProfessionalBoat-motion modelling, high-resolution GRIBs and ocean currents sitting above Standard.
- savvy navvy — PricingEssential, Explore and Elite prices, and the feature each tier withholds.
- Yachting World — best navigation apps testedIndependent test findings on routing near hazards and fixed polars.
- Practical Sailor — Navigation App Review: savvy navvyIndependent review of route and timing accuracy against real passages.
- YACHT — Windy Passage Planner weather routing in testPlugin polar count, implausible route geometry, and the absence of chart data.
- Windy Community — Windy Premium featuresPremium price and the hourly-versus-three-hourly forecast step.
- LuckGrib — PurchaseOne-time prices for the app, Offshore Data and Weather Routing, and the no-subscription policy.
- LuckGrib — product siteSupported platforms and satellite download paths.
PredictWind, savvy navvy, Windy.com and LuckGrib are trademarks of their respective owners. OpenSail is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them. Comparisons describe publicly documented capability at the date above.
The comparison that settles it is your own passage
Free account, your boat, your draft, one real isochrone solve a week. Run the trip you’re actually planning and judge the track.
Plan a passage — freeFree account, no card. If it doesn’t beat what you use now, close the tab. We won’t email you about it.