Best Ski Tracking Apps in Austria

By Best:in Editorial Team · Updated September 2026

In September 2026 the strongest all-round ski tracker for Austria is Slopes, which detects lifts and runs automatically on iPhone, Apple Watch and Android. Ski Tracks remains the best one-off purchase for offline recording, and Skiline logs vertical metres from lift-pass scans with no phone battery involved. Resort apps from Ski amadé and Ski Arlberg add live lift status and piste maps that the universal trackers do not carry.

Best Ski Tracking Apps in Austria, ranked

1.

Slopes

Slopes has been on the App Store since 2013 and runs on iPhone, Apple Watch and Android. It separates lifts from runs without you touching the screen, stores resort maps for Austrian areas, replays the day in 3D and pushes finished activities to Strava and Apple Health. The core app is free; the detailed analysis and season totals sit in Slopes Premium. Best choice if you ski several Austrian regions in one winter.

Best for: Best overall tracker

Official website See full facts
2.

Ski Tracks

Ski Tracks from Core Coders launched on iOS in 2010 and is a single paid download with no subscription. It records GPS position and barometric altitude entirely offline, which suits deep Tyrolean valleys with patchy coverage, and it is consistently light on battery. Output covers distance, maximum speed, vertical descent and run count, exported as GPX or KML. There are no live lift feeds and no Austrian piste maps.

Best for: Best one-off purchase

See full facts
3.

Skiline

Skiline is an Austrian service that builds your ski day from lift-pass RFID scans instead of GPS, so a dead phone costs you nothing. Enter the WTP number on the keycard once and every turnstile at a partner area feeds the altitude diagram, lift count and vertical metres. Photopoint cameras at some lifts attach photos to the day. It cannot map the line you skied, and it only works where the lift company is a partner.

Best for: Best battery-free ski diary

Official website See full facts
4.

Ski amadé Guide

The Ski amadé Guide app is published by Ski amadé GmbH and is free on iOS and Android. Inside the 25 resorts of the 5 Ski amadé regions it combines a piste tracker and GPS diary with photo-realistic 3D maps, A-to-B routing, hut and lift information and a friend tracker that locates your group while the app runs in the background. Outside Salzburg and Styria it records nothing useful.

Best for: Best for Ski amadé

Official website See full facts
5.

Ski Arlberg App

The Ski Arlberg app is the operator app for an area with 305 km of marked runs and 88 lifts linking St. Anton, Lech, Zürs, Stuben and Warth-Schröcken. It is free, and it pairs live lift and piste status with an interactive map, webcams and a personal ski diary. Useful for pacing a Weisser Ring day. As a tracker it is region-locked, so it will not follow you to Zillertal or Gastein.

Best for: Best for the Arlberg

Official website See full facts
6.

Strava

Strava carries Alpine Ski and Backcountry Ski activity types, so winter days land in the same training log as your summer riding and running. Founded in 2009, it imports automatically from Garmin, Suunto and Apple Watch, which is the sensible way to use it on snow. There is no automatic lift-versus-run split and no Austrian piste map, so raw distance totals include chairlift rides unless the recording device filters them.

Best for: Best for multi-sport athletes

Official website See full facts
7.

Skitude

5 / 5 out of 18 Google Maps reviews

Skitude supplies the technology behind many branded resort apps in Europe and also publishes its own Ski and Outdoor Tracker. It logs distance, vertical drop and speed, and layers on resort information, challenges and rankings. The catch for Austria is coverage: the experience depends entirely on whether your lift company licenses the platform, and several large Austrian operators build their own apps instead.

Best for: Best white-label resort platform

Official website See full facts

How do ski tracking apps actually measure a day on Austrian slopes?

Two different technologies sit behind the apps in this ranking. The first is phone or watch GPS. Slopes (on the App Store since 2013) and Ski Tracks (since 2010) both read satellite position plus the barometric altimeter, then turn that stream into runs, lift rides, vertical metres and top speed. Slopes splits runs from lifts automatically. Ski Tracks records one continuous track that you start and stop yourself.

The second method uses your lift pass. Skiline reads the RFID check-ins logged when you pass a turnstile, so the data comes from the lift company rather than your handset. It shows lift rides and altitude metres, not the exact line you skied. Resort apps such as the Ski amadé Guide sit in between: they carry a GPS piste tracker and a diary, layered on top of the operator's own map and live lift data.

What do ski tracking apps cost in Austria?

Checked on 15 September 2026, the free tier is generous. The Ski amadé Guide app and the Ski Arlberg app are free downloads funded by the lift operators, and a Skiline ski diary costs nothing once you enter your pass number. Slopes and Strava follow the freemium model: basic recording is free, and the deeper analysis sits behind Slopes Premium and Strava's subscription. Ski Tracks is the outlier, a single paid download with no subscription attached.

Budget the cost against the rest of the trip rather than in isolation. A six-day adult pass in a large Austrian area runs into the low hundreds of euros, so a one-off app purchase is rounding error. The bigger question is whether you ski enough days per winter to justify an annual subscription. Under roughly five days a season, the free resort apps plus Skiline usually cover what most skiers want to look back on.

How do you set up tracking before your first lift?

  1. Install and log in before you travel

    Download the app at home on Wi-Fi, create the account and let the resort map package finish downloading. Austrian valley stations at Ischgl, Sölden or Saalbach get congested at 08:30 and a first-run login over a saturated mobile cell is the classic way to lose the first hour of data.

  2. Register your lift pass with Skiline

    Find the WTP number printed on the keycard, usually 8 to 10 characters, and enter it once in Skiline or the resort app. From then on every turnstile scan is logged automatically, which gives you a backup record on days when the phone dies at minus 12 degrees.

  3. Fix the battery problem first

    Start the day above 80 percent, carry the phone in an inside pocket against your body, and take a power bank on long days. Lithium cells lose usable capacity in cold air, and continuous GPS recording for 6 to 7 hours is the heaviest task most skiers ever give a handset.

  4. Allow background location and motion data

    Automatic run detection only works if location access is set to always, not while using the app. On iOS also enable Motion and Fitness. Without those two permissions Slopes will merge lifts and runs, and your vertical total for the day will read low.

  5. Close the day and export it

    Stop the recording at the last lift, not in the car park, then export to GPX or push the activity to Strava while you still have Wi-Fi in the hotel. Ski Tracks writes GPX and KML files that survive a phone change; a diary trapped in one app does not.

Do resort apps replace a dedicated tracker in Austria?

Only partly. The Ski amadé Guide app covers 25 ski resorts across 5 regions in Salzburg and Styria, with photo-realistic 3D maps, A-to-B routing, a piste tracker and a friend tracker that shows where the rest of your group is while the app runs in the background. That last feature matters if half the party is in a snow park and the other half is in a hut.

The Ski Arlberg app does the same job for the Arlberg, an area with 305 km of marked runs and 88 lifts spread across St. Anton, Lech, Zürs, Stuben and Warth-Schröcken. Both apps stop at the region boundary. Ski a week that mixes Tyrol and Salzburg, or return next winter to a different valley, and the history fragments across several apps. A universal tracker keeps one continuous record of every season.

What ruins the data, and what are the alternatives to a phone?

Three failure modes account for most complaints. Cold kills battery capacity, enclosed gondolas and tunnels break the GPS fix, and a phone left in an outer jacket pocket during a lift queue drains faster than the app records. Barometric altitude also drifts when a front moves through, so vertical totals on a stormy day can differ by several hundred metres between two apps on the same chairlift.

If phone tracking annoys you, there are two ways around it. GPS sport watches from Garmin, Suunto and Apple record alpine skiing natively and feed Strava or Slopes afterwards. Carv, a sensor system that sits in the boot, measures edge angle and balance instead of distance, so it answers a coaching question rather than a diary question. Skiline stays the simplest fallback: the turnstiles do the work and the phone stays switched off.

How is this ranking computed?

  • Tracking accuracy and automatic run detection: 25%
  • Battery life and offline resilience: 20%
  • Austrian resort coverage and piste maps: 20%
  • Cost and value: 15%
  • Data export and platform support: 10%
  • Group and social features: 10%

Entity references

Full factual profiles for each entity on this page:

Official sources

For inquiries, partnerships, or corrections and changes, use the contact form.