There is no single best navigation app for France, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. After four seasons cruising French waters with three apps running on two devices, I have settled into a setup that mixes them deliberately, because each one is good at a different job. What follows is the practical breakdown: what each app does well, what it costs in 2026, and which combination I would actually carry.
Before the list, one French wrinkle worth holding in your head: the law here names official charts, and no consumer app is automatically that. I will come back to it, but if you sail beyond 6 miles you need to read up on electronic vs paper charts in France so your lovely app does not land you in a conversation with the Gendarmerie Maritime.
Navionics: the familiar workhorse
Navionics is the app most people arrive with, and for good reason. The cartography is clear, the routing is slick, the community-edited depths and the dock-to-dock autorouting are genuinely useful, and it integrates with Garmin plotters if you have one.
Pricing in 2026 is subscription-based. The regional packages for Europe run to roughly 49.99 euros a year for a smaller area like the Baltic and around 99.99 euros for the broader Northern Europe coverage, with the headline US plan at 49.99 dollars. For a season cruising the French coast you are looking at the European tier, so budget around 100 euros a year if you want the full continent.
What I like: it is reliable, widely used, and the charts are easy to read at a glance under way. What I do not: it is a recurring cost, and its charts are a commercial product, not the official French source, so it answers the navigation question but not the legal one.
Aqua Map: the value challenger
Aqua Map has quietly become the app I recommend to cost-conscious cruisers. It runs official-source raster and vector charts, supports a wide range of regions, and crucially offers both a yearly subscription and one-time purchase options rather than locking you into a forever-payment.
Regional chart and premium-feature bundles sit around 30 to 40 euros a year depending on area, which undercuts Navionics meaningfully. The feature set has grown to rival the bigger names: tracks, routes, tides, marker overlays, offline charts. For a sailor who wants strong cartography without an annual subscription creeping up, it is the value pick.
If you want the head-to-head, I dug into Navionics vs SHOM in a dedicated comparison, because the choice between commercial convenience and official accuracy is the real decision for France, and Aqua Map sits interestingly between the two.
SHOM: the official source, not a polished app
SHOM is the French national hydrographic service, the authority behind every official chart of French waters. It is not a slick consumer app, and it is not trying to be. What it gives you is the official raster GeoTIFF charts, sold per sheet at around 38.80 euros each, which for recreational boats under 24 metres satisfy the French legal carriage requirement when carried on a suitable device.
You will not steer day-to-day off SHOM the way you steer off Navionics. But for compliance, and for the most accurate depiction of French buoyage, rocks and depths, it is the reference everything else is measured against. SHOM also runs a free data viewer online that is excellent for planning at the chart table before you leave.
BoatMap: discovery, anchorages and offline planning
The app I open most for the human side of cruising is BoatMap. It is built for discovering marinas, anchorages, fuel and points of interest, with community reviews and the kind of local detail you do not get from a chart. The piece that has saved me repeatedly is offline mode: I can save a chart area before a passage and still have it when the bars drop 18 miles off Ushant. On a coast where the signal is patchy, that matters, and it pairs naturally with knowing where boat internet in France holds and where it fails.
I treat BoatMap as my planning and anchorage-finding layer rather than my primary helming chart, and the two roles complement each other well.
What the apps cost over a season
It is worth laying the numbers side by side, because the recurring cost adds up over a few years and people rarely do the sum.
Navionics for the European tier runs around 99.99 euros a year, paid forever. Aqua Map sits at roughly 30 to 40 euros a year for a region, with a one-time purchase option if you would rather own than rent. The official SHOM raster charts are about 38.80 euros per sheet, bought once for the area you cruise. BoatMap covers the discovery and offline-planning layer. A dedicated weather app is separate again, from a few euros a year for Windy Premium up to around 249 dollars a year for PredictWind if you go properly offshore.
Add it up for a focused cruising area and a season costs well under 200 euros in apps and chart sheets, which against the price of the boat, the berth and the fuel is a rounding error. The mistake is paying twice for the same capability, so decide which app is your daily steering chart and do not also subscribe to a second one for the same job.
Weather lives in a different app
A navigation app is not a forecast engine, and the good ones do not pretend to be. For passage weather I run a dedicated tool, and on a Biscay or Gulf of Lion crossing the routing matters more than the chart. The serious options are covered in my rundown of weather-routing apps for Biscay and the Med, and I would not set off across open water relying on a chart app's weather tab.
Phones, tablets and the redundancy rule
A few hard-won habits.
Run your primary navigation on a tablet, not a phone. The bigger screen is safer in a busy channel and the battery lasts longer. Keep a phone running a second app as backup. Phones die, overheat in the cockpit and go overboard, so never let one app on one device be your only chart provision offshore.
Download everything before you cast off. Every app here works offline if you preload the charts, and on the French coast you will be glad you did. The dead zones mid-Channel and across Biscay are predictable, so there is no excuse for being caught with a spinning download bar 20 miles out.
The setup I actually carry
For a season in France my layered kit looks like this:
- A tablet running Aqua Map or Navionics as my day-to-day working chart, because the cartography is clear and the routing is quick.
- BoatMap for finding anchorages, marinas and fuel, with chart areas saved offline before each leg.
- The official SHOM raster charts for my cruising area loaded on a device, to satisfy the French carriage requirement beyond 6 miles.
- A dedicated weather app for passage routing, separate from the chart apps.
- A phone as an independent third device, so no single failure leaves me blind.
That layering costs perhaps 130 to 180 euros a year in subscriptions and chart sheets, gives me redundancy, and keeps me legal. No single app does all of that, which is exactly why I run more than one. Pick your working chart for clarity, add BoatMap for the local knowledge, carry the official SHOM charts for the law, and you have a navigation kit that holds up whether you are threading the Chenal du Four or just hunting a quiet anchorage for the night.
