There is a moment, somewhere off the Brittany coast in poor visibility with a strong tide setting you toward rocks, when you stop caring about the brand on your chartplotter and start caring whether it just works. That moment is what you are buying for. Everything else, the touchscreen, the fishfinder, the slick menus, is secondary to a clear, reliable, well charted picture of where you are and where the dangers lie. So let me walk through how I would choose one for France, having got it wrong once and right since.
Do you even need a fixed plotter
A fair question, because tablets are good now. A modern iPad running proper navigation software is a superb planning and pilotage tool, and many of us use one daily. I have a whole view on which navigation apps work for French waters, and for canal cruising or fair weather coastal hopping a tablet alone can genuinely be enough.
But a tablet is not a primary offshore navigation system. It overheats in a sunny cockpit, it is hard to read in glare, the GPS is consumer grade, and it dies the moment it gets properly wet or the battery goes. For real coastal and offshore work, particularly in tidal Brittany or across the Channel, a fixed plotter wired to the boat's power and a good external GPS is the system you trust, with the tablet as a brilliant backup and planning screen. The two together beat either alone.
Screen size and where it lives
Bigger is genuinely better, up to the limit of where it fits and what you can afford. On a small boat a 7 inch unit is the sensible entry point, and it is also the size at which the useful features start. A Garmin GPSMAP 723, for instance, is the opening model in their range that supports radar, which tells you something about where the line sits between a basic plotter and a real networked one.
Where you mount it matters as much as the size. A plotter at the chart table is fine for planning but useless when you are steering through a tricky entrance and cannot see it. A cockpit mounted plotter, readable in sunlight and reachable from the helm, is what you actually navigate by. If budget forces a choice between a big screen below and a smaller one in the cockpit, put the screen where you steer.
Charts: the part that catches out visitors
The plotter is just a screen. The charts are the substance, and France is where a lot of people discover their chart coverage is wrong.
The two big cartography families are Navionics (Garmin) and C-MAP (used across several brands). Both cover France well, but you must buy the right regional card or subscription, and you must keep it updated. An out of date chart is not just unhelpful in France, it can be a legal problem: carrying corrected, up to date charts is effectively a requirement, and I cover the detail in this guide to charts for French waters. Do not assume the worldwide base map that ships with the unit is good enough. It is not. Budget for the proper regional cartography, often 150 to 250 euros for a card or an annual subscription, on top of the plotter itself.
One French specific point: the official hydrographic office is the SHOM, and the best detail for French waters traces back to SHOM survey data. The good commercial charts incorporate it, but it is worth checking that your chosen cartography has genuine large scale coverage of the areas you plan to cruise, especially the rock strewn approaches of north Brittany and the shallow Atlantic pertuis.
Networking: radar, AIS and the wider system
A standalone plotter shows you a chart and your position. A networked plotter becomes the hub of the boat's electronics, displaying AIS targets, instrument data, and radar overlay on the same screen. In France this matters more than in many places.
The Channel and the French coast are busy, and AIS overlaid on the chart is the single most useful safety upgrade you can make. Make sure the plotter you buy speaks NMEA 2000 so you can add AIS and instruments cleanly. Radar is the next step, and on the foggy north coast it earns its place: I have written separately about whether you really need radar for fog on the French coast, and the short version is that if you cruise Brittany seriously, the plotter you buy should be radar capable even if you fit the dome later. Solid state radar domes are not cheap, often 1,200 euros and up, so buying a plotter that can grow into one saves you replacing the whole system in two years.
Brand, and how much to spend
The honest truth is that Garmin, Raymarine, B&G and Furuno all make plotters good enough to cross oceans. The differences are in the software feel, the ecosystem, and the cartography you are locked into. Pick the one whose charts cover your cruising ground best and whose menus you can use without the manual, because in the moment that matters you will not be reading the manual.
On price, a capable 7 to 9 inch fixed plotter sits somewhere in the 500 to 1,200 euro range in 2026 depending on size, touchscreen and whether it bundles a transducer you do not need. Add the cartography, and a sensible navigation install for a coastal cruiser lands around 800 to 1,500 euros all in before radar. You can spend far more, but past a certain point you are paying for fishfinding and big screens, not for safer navigation.
Touchscreen, buttons, or both
A practical decision that gets overlooked. Pure touchscreen plotters are lovely on a calm planning afternoon and infuriating in a slamming seaway when wet fingers and spray make the screen do random things. Tidal France gives you plenty of lumpy days, so I would not buy a touch only unit for the helm. Look for a plotter with physical buttons or a rotary knob as well as touch, or at least make sure the most used functions, range, cursor and the man overboard mark, have hard keys. Glove friendly operation matters more in a Channel chop than any number of pixels.
Screen brightness and a daylight readable display are worth paying for too. The cheap units wash out in direct Mediterranean sun and at the helm in glare, exactly when you most need to glance at the chart. Read the nits rating if the maker publishes it, and if you can, look at the screen in real sunlight before you buy rather than under shop lighting.
What I would buy for France
If I were fitting out a coastal cruiser for French waters today, I would buy a 9 inch fixed plotter from a brand whose cartography I trusted, mount it where I steer, fit a proper external GPS aerial, and make sure it networked over NMEA 2000 for AIS and a future radar. I would buy the full regional chart card and set a reminder to update it. And I would keep an iPad running navigation software as a planning screen and backup, because two independent systems are worth far more than one expensive one.
The plotter that gets you safely through the Chenal du Four in a tide and a bit of murk is not the flashiest one in the chandlery. It is the one with current charts, a screen you can see, AIS overlaid, and a setup simple enough that you trust it when the visibility closes in. Buy for that day, not for the boat show.
