PredictWind vs Windy
PredictWind vs Windy:
it comes down to one question.
Do you want software that shows you the weather, or software that makes a decision? Windy is the finest answer to the first question ever built, and it’s free. PredictWind is a serious answer to the second, and it starts at $249 a year. Everything else in this argument follows from which one you actually need.
The short answer
PredictWind or Windy: which should you buy in 2026?
Buy Windy (free, or Premium at about €19/yr) if you sail within phone signal and your question is what the weather is doing. Its multi-model comparison across ECMWF, GFS, ICON and AROME is free and excellent. Premium mainly upgrades three-hourly forecast steps to hourly, which matters for timing a front or a sea breeze. Windy has no first-party weather routing.
Buy PredictWind Standard ($249/yr) if you make multi-day passages and need real routing, departure planning, and weather that arrives over a satellite link. Its proprietary PWG and PWE runs at 1 km and 8 km are its own, and no competitor has an equivalent. Professional at $499/yr adds boat-motion modelling, high-resolution GRIBs and ocean-current GRIBs.
Buy neither if you’re the sailor in the middle: coastal or short-hop offshore, wanting a properly solved route with your boat’s own polar, and not wanting to spend $249 to get one. That gap is real, it’s where most cruisers actually live, and it’s the reason we built OpenSail at $59.
- Windy
- Free · Premium ≈€19/yr · no first-party routing
- PredictWind
- Routing from $249/yr · Pro $499/yr
- Windy’s routing
- Community plugin, ~23 stock polars
- Written by
- OpenSail, a competitor — sources all linked
Competitor prices and features read from the vendors’ own pages on . Every source is linked at the foot of this page.
Before you read on
We make a competing product
This page is published by OpenSail, which sells weather routing. You should weight it accordingly. What we can offer instead of neutrality is checkability: every price and capability below links to the vendor’s own page or a named independent test, and all of it was read on 10 August 2026.
We have also written down where each of them beats us, on the PredictWind page and the Windy page, in specific terms rather than the polite kind. If a comparison never loses an argument, it’s an advert.
The shape of it
Two products aiming at different things
Windy is a visualisation company
Windy’s achievement is making a numerical weather model legible to a human being in about four seconds. The particle animation is a teaching tool as much as a display, and a generation of sailors understands gradient wind because they watched it move across the screen. Radar, satellite, webcams, waves, swell trains, airport observations: the layer catalogue is enormous and it’s all one map, free.
What it doesn’t do is know anything about the sea floor, your boat, or your plans. It shows the atmosphere magnificently and stops there, on purpose.
PredictWind is a forecasting and offshore company
PredictWind runs its own models. PWG and PWE at 1 km and 8 km are theirs, which nobody else on this page can say, and in the regions where they’re tuned they’re demonstrably sharper than the global runs. On top of that sits routing, departure planning, wave polars, boat-motion outputs, and a satellite path that includes physical hardware in the form of the DataHub.
The cost of that scope is the price ladder and the app sprawl. Routing appears at $249/yr, boat motion and high-resolution GRIBs at $499/yr, and the offshore toolkit is split across separate apps rather than living in one map.
The crux
Routing is where they stop being comparable
If you never want a computed route, this comparison is easy: use Windy, save $249, and get on with it. Most of the argument only starts when you want the software to answer “which line, and when do I leave?”
Windy’s answer is a community plugin. It’s an impressive piece of volunteer work, and it isn’t a substitute for a first-party routing engine.
PredictWind’s routing is a different class of thing: first-party, integrated with its own models, with departure planning alongside it and wave polars available higher up the ladder. If routing is why you’re here, PredictWind is the serious option of these two and it isn’t a close call.
The question is what it costs to get there.
- 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.
Line by line
PredictWind vs Windy, head to head
| Capability | OpenSail | PredictWind | Windy.com |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | ◐Community plugin |
| 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 | —No routing |
| 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 | —No chart data |
| 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 | —Plugin is time-only |
| 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 | —~23 stock polars |
| 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 | ◐Compare by eye |
| Says why it refused a routeWhether a failed solve explains the constraint that stopped it or returns nothing. | ●Structured refusals | —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 | —not offered |
| 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 | —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 | ◐Point alerts |
| 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 | ●Full web app |
| Documented public APIWhether you can pull routes into your own dashboard, race committee tooling or boat systems. | ●REST, keyed | —not offered | ＄Paid, limited |
| Pause the subscription for haul-outWhether you pay for the months your boat is on the hard. | ●Built in | —not offered | —not offered |
● included◐ partial or workaround＄ costs extra— not offered
Read the two competitor columns first and ignore ours if you like. The pattern that matters is that Windy’s gaps are all decision-shaped, and PredictWind’s gaps are all explanation-shaped. Windy won’t tell you what to do; PredictWind will tell you what to do without telling you why.
The gap
The sailor neither is built for
Here’s the pattern we keep seeing, and it’s the reason this page exists at all.
A cruising couple with a 38-footer does a few hundred miles at a time. Bahamas hops, the Chesapeake to Newport, Palma to Sardinia. They’re within VHF of land most of the time but they’re absolutely making passages, and passages have weather windows. They want a solved route for their actual boat, they want to know whether Thursday beats Friday, and they want to know when the models stop agreeing.
Windy can’t answer any of that. PredictWind can answer most of it for $249 a year, which is a lot to spend on capability sized for a Pacific crossing they aren’t making this season. So they end up doing what everybody does: two tabs, a lot of squinting, and a decision made on feel at the dock.
OpenSail is built for exactly that sailor.Unlimited routing at $59 a year with the boat’s own polar, depth checked on every segment against GEBCO bathymetry, four comfort modes so the trade between speed and heel is explicit, a departure planner that solves every leaving time you’re weighing, and GFS against ECMWF re-sampled along your own track so you can see the hour agreement breaks down. The free account solves one real route a week, so you can test the solver before deciding anything.
If you’re crossing an ocean, buy PredictWind. If you only want to look at the weather, use Windy and keep your money. If you’re in the middle, try ours and see.
Questions sailors actually ask
PredictWind or Windy — which is better for sailing?
They answer different questions, so “better” depends on what you’re asking. Windy is the better weather map: free, gorgeous, and its model comparison across ECMWF, GFS, ICON and AROME costs nothing. PredictWind is the better offshore system: proprietary 1 km and 8 km models, real weather routing, and a satellite hardware path that works mid-ocean.
The practical rule: if you can see the shore and you have a phone signal, Windy is probably enough. If you’re leaving for several days and can’t get fresh data easily, PredictWind earns its price.
Does Windy have weather routing like PredictWind?
Not as a first-party feature. Routing comes from a community plugin, Passage Planner, which does isochrone expansion over Windy’s data. YACHT’s test found it producing routes with loops and figure-eights the weather didn’t explain, and it carries roughly 23 polar diagrams. The structural limit is that Windy isn’t a chart: no depth contours, no fairways, no buoyage, so the plugin can’t route around a shoal or a traffic separation scheme. PredictWind’s routing is first-party, appears in its feature list from the $249/yr Standard tier, and is a considerably more serious piece of engineering.
Is PredictWind worth $249 a year?
If you’re making multi-day offshore passages and pulling weather over a satellite link, very likely yes. That price buys real routing, departure planning and an offshore workflow that Windy doesn’t attempt. If you’re a coastal cruiser who sails weekends within phone signal and mainly wants to know whether Saturday is windy, it’s a lot of money for capability you will rarely reach, and free Windy plus a $59 routing subscription covers the same ground for less than a third of the price.
Can I just use both?
Most serious cruisers do something like it. Windy for the big picture and the model comparison, something else for the routing. The only thing worth checking is that you aren’t paying $249 for PredictWind and then doing all your actual looking in Windy anyway, which is a surprisingly common pattern and an expensive one.
Who is writing this comparison?
OpenSail, which makes a competing product, so read it with that in mind. We have linked every source and every price to the vendor’s own page so you can check the facts without trusting us. Where PredictWind or Windy is genuinely better than us, this site says so on their pages, in writing, with specifics.
Where these numbers come from
Prices and capability for both products were read from the vendors' own pages, alongside a named independent test of the Windy routing plugin. 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.
- 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.
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.
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