Alternatives to Rick Steves audio tours: a fair comparison

Rick Steves Audio Europe is the default audio guide app for travellers in Europe. It is free, well-produced, and covers the major tourist circuits in Italy, Spain, France, the UK, Germany, and a handful of other countries.

It is also limited. The catalogue covers a specific set of routes. The script reflects Rick's personal taste, which leans heritage-tourism and away from contemporary city life. And once you step outside the covered neighbourhoods, the app has nothing to offer.

This page lists the four main alternatives, what each does better, and who should choose which.

1. VoiceMap

VoiceMap sells individual audio tours, usually €4-€8 each, written and narrated by local guides. The catalogue is global. Production quality is consistent. Tours are downloadable for offline use.

What it does better than Rick Steves: wider coverage outside the obvious tourist cities. Local voices instead of one celebrity narrator. Niche themes (e.g. "Soviet-era Tallinn", "Berlin street art").

What Rick Steves does better: free. One trusted voice across multiple cities. Faster onboarding.

Choose VoiceMap if: you want a serious single-route experience and are happy to pay per city.

2. GPSmyCity

GPSmyCity offers offline self-guided tours with built-in maps for thousands of cities. Most tours are free with ads or a small upgrade fee. Quality varies enormously between routes.

What it does better than Rick Steves: coverage of secondary and tertiary cities. Solid offline maps.

What Rick Steves does better: editorial quality. GPSmyCity's better routes are good; the weaker ones read like Wikipedia abstracts.

Choose GPSmyCity if: you're going to a less-touristed city and want offline maps.

3. izi.travel

izi.travel is a community platform for audio guides. Museums, universities, and individual guides publish on it. The platform is free; some guides charge.

What it does better than Rick Steves: museum coverage. Many Italian and Russian museums publish official audio guides through izi rather than building their own apps.

What Rick Steves does better: consistency. izi quality is hit-or-miss outside major institutions.

Choose izi.travel if: you're visiting specific museums and want their official audio guide without paying separately.

4. Naruho

Disclosure: I built Naruho. Including it here because it is structurally different from the four above and worth understanding.

Naruho is not a fixed tour. It picks up landmarks within forty metres of where you are standing — pulled from OpenStreetMap — and tells you a 30-second story about each one. There are no city packs to download. Coverage is global by default. On Pro, narration runs hands-free as you walk.

What it does differently than Rick Steves: ambient, not scripted. Walks with you instead of dictating a route. Works in any city, including the bits Rick has not covered. Free tier covers a real day of exploring; Pro is $0.06/day.

What Rick Steves does better: editorial voice. Rick has chosen what to talk about; Naruho surfaces everything within forty metres and lets you decide.

Choose Naruho if: you wander rather than follow a route, or you travel to cities Rick has not covered. See how it works.

The wider question: do you actually want a fixed tour?

Most "alternatives to Rick Steves" lists assume the answer is yes — that you want another fixed audio tour, just a different one. For half of travellers, that is the right answer. VoiceMap, GPSmyCity, and izi.travel all serve this need.

For the other half — solo travellers, repeat visitors, anyone who hates being marched A→B→C — the better answer is to skip the fixed-tour format and use an ambient discovery layer that responds to where you actually are. If that is you, read how Naruho works.

Summary table

• Rick Steves Audio Europe: free, fixed routes, covered cities only.
• VoiceMap: paid per tour, global, local voices, fixed routes.
• GPSmyCity: mostly free, broad coverage, variable quality, fixed routes.
• izi.travel: free, museum-strong, variable quality, fixed routes.
• Naruho: free + Pro, global, ambient discovery, no fixed route.