Ask ten different hiking groups how they organise their trips and you'll get ten different answers. Most of them involve some combination of spreadsheets, group chats, and apps that weren't specifically built for the job.
Some of this cobbled-together approach works fine. Some of it creates friction that the group just absorbs as a normal part of trip planning, when it doesn't have to be. Here's an honest breakdown of the tools most commonly used for group adventure logistics, what they're genuinely good at, and where they struggle.
1. WhatsApp (and Signal, Messenger, etc.)
Almost every group trip starts here because everyone already has it. Group chats are easy to create, free, and they work.
Where they shine is real-time coordination: "I'm running ten minutes late", "which track do we take at the fork?", "does anyone have paracetamol?" For day-of communication and quick questions, a group chat is genuinely hard to beat.
The trouble starts when you try to use the same thread for planning over a period of weeks. Important information gets buried under chat, files shared three weeks ago take real effort to find, and the same questions get asked repeatedly because nobody can locate where the answer was posted. Attendance is impossible to track properly — counting "yes" replies in a thread while accounting for people who joined late or muted the group is not a system.
Most groups end up using the chat for conversation and then wondering why nothing important ever sticks.
2. Google Sheets
The eternal fallback, and for good reason. Spreadsheets are flexible, free, and everyone knows how to use them at a basic level. For a simple gear list or a cost split, a shared Google Sheet works well enough.
Where it gets complicated is anything that requires structure you have to build yourself. Meal planning that auto-generates a shopping list, gear assignments that notify the right person, attendance tracking that gives you an accurate headcount — none of that comes for free. You have to build it, and then maintain it, and then fix it when someone accidentally deletes a formula.
Spreadsheets also reward the person who built them. If you hand a trip over to someone else mid-planning, they inherit your logic, your naming conventions, and your column structure. Half the time they rebuild it from scratch rather than deciphering what you made.
3. Splitwise
If there's one thing Splitwise does well, it's settling up who owes whom at the end of a trip. Enter expenses as you go, choose how to split them, and by the time you get home there's a clear record of who needs to pay who and how much.
For cost-heavy trips — multi-day camping, ski weekends, van rentals — having a running record of expenses rather than trying to reconstruct it from memory afterwards is genuinely useful. Splitwise handles the maths so nobody has to do it on a napkin.
Where it falls short is that it's purely reactive. You record costs after you incur them; it doesn't help you estimate a budget in advance, coordinate who's responsible for buying shared food, or flag when you're heading over budget. And because it's separate from everything else, someone has to remember to actually enter the costs as they happen, which often doesn't happen.
4. AllTrails / Komoot / OS Maps
For route planning and navigation, specialist mapping apps are significantly better than dropping a pin and hoping. AllTrails has a large community database of trail reviews, difficulty ratings, and user photos. Komoot is strong for multi-day route planning and generates useful data like elevation profiles and estimated completion times. OS Maps is the serious option for UK hillwalking, with the full 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey mapping.
The limitation is that these apps are solo-focused. You can share a route with your group as a link or GPX file, but after that point you're back in a WhatsApp thread trying to make sure everyone has downloaded it. There's no integrated way to say "this is the route we're doing for this trip" and have it sit alongside the gear list, attendees, and itinerary.
5. AdventureForge
Built specifically for the coordination side of group outdoor trips, where most of the above tools fall short.
The core idea is that all the pieces of a trip — who's coming, what gear everyone is bringing, meal plans with an auto-generated shopping list, the route, costs, tasks, and the daily itinerary — live in one place that the whole group can see and update. When someone confirms they're attending, they can see the gear list and claim items without going through the organiser. When the meal plan changes, the shopping list updates automatically. When you upload a GPX file, the route is visible on a map in the same place as everything else.
It's not a chat app and it's not a map app. It's the connective tissue between all the pieces that usually live in separate places.
Where it makes the most difference is on trips with larger groups, multi-day logistics, or where the organiser is carrying too much in their head. For a spontaneous two-person overnight with friends you've camped with before, a spreadsheet probably still works fine.
Picking what's right for your group
The honest answer is that most groups end up using several of these at once, and that's not necessarily wrong. A group chat for conversation, a mapping app for the route, and a dedicated planning tool for everything that needs to stay findable — that combination covers most bases without too much overhead.
The tool you should probably drop is whichever one you're using for planning that was never built for planning. If that's a WhatsApp thread with 400 messages about one weekend, you know the one.