I’ll go against the grain here. My wife and I use MRA for planning, but we both much prefer Scenic for navigation.
Scenic works brilliantly in CarPlay. MRA only recently got the ability to manually alter zoom in CarPlay! With Scenic, CarPlay doesn’t feel like a second class citizen. The developer ensures that CarPlay is front of mind when releasing features and changes as he’s very aware just how many people use it like that nowadays.
Scenic also doesn’t use anywhere near as much battery as MRA. I can easily do 8 hour days without the phone on charge. With MRA I’d be lucky to get 4 hours out of it.
One thing to watch for is that Scenic uses OSM, whereas MRA uses Here maps. It’s not a big deal though - when you import the route from MRA (or other apps), it shows you the blue line of the original MRA route and overlays the purple Scenic calculated route. If they differ you can just add in a via (Scenic name for a shaping point) or two to correct it. Using OSM also means that if you see mapping errors you can fix them yourself on the OSM website, and within a few weeks they’ll be incorporated in the next map update (which happen around every month or so).
We find the colour scheme and general map layout much more readable in Scenic. This should be even better in the next week or two as the ability to totally customise the colours of different road categories, change font sizes etc should be going into beta this week. Scenic previously had this but the developer had to quickly move from Here maps to OSM in October due to contract issues with Here. This meant a complete rewrite of the app in a very short time, so the map customiser was low on the priority list.
One thing MRA does that Scenic doesn’t do is incorporate layover times in Stops, e.g. if in MRA you say you’ll be at lunch for an hour the ETA gets pushed back an hour. Speaking of ETA, Scenic has a feature you can enable, which we love, where the display line alternates between ETA to the next stop and the final destination. MRA can’t do this.
Scenic has some other features we use, such as auto trip recording and playback. MRA requires manual initiation of recording if you start a route with CarPlay. Scenic also has a vehicle log that supports multiple vehicles - you can attribute recorded rides to the vehicle you used, as well as record things like maintenance costs etc.
There’s also a load of settings you can change in Scenic, such as detour behaviour where you can say how many recalculations before a via is skipped. You can also select to not auto skip via, guide you back to the last via, guide you to the next Stop (Scenic name for a must visit location), or simply guide you back to the route. Scenic deals really well too with entering a route somewhere else - none of this long pressing on the next via that you have to do in MRA (and can’t do on CarPlay). With Scenic you just get on the route and it knows where you’re up to.
The biggest thing for us though is the speed of response of the develop. Issues are normally fixed within a few days or so if we report them. MRA are good at responding in their forums, but fixes usually take a long time.
I’ve used MRA a lot for navigating, and was on the beta for the new version (MRA Next), but always found Scenic better.
MRA is much better for planning, although Scenic supporting importing directly from Google Maps is handy at times.
Another thing we love about Scenic is that one of us imports the route into it and shares it with the other person. From that point on, changes to the route by the person that shared it will be reflected on everyone’s route - no need to keep resharing after changes. We did this last week. At the lunch stop my wife made a change to the route and when I got back on the bike my route reflected the changes.
Given the above, we’ve chosen what in our view is the best tool for the job. Scenic to navigate and MRA to plan, despite having lifetime subscriptions to MRA Gold planner and also navigator, along with lifetime Scenic membership.
Obviously if you’re on Android ignore all the above as Scenic is Apple only.
Honestly, everyone will have a different view and find different apps better. Only you can decide what you prefer, so I recommend trying them both. Make sure you give them a full on test though, and if there’s something you don’t like then make sure you’ve investigated the settings and options to see if you can change it before deciding against that particular app. You won’t do either app justice if you try them for one trip and jump to a conclusion.
With regards to Kurviger, I believe the CarPlay version is still in beta. Scenic’s curvy routing method though does use the Kurviger system to calculate routes. It used to offer native support for all Kurviger settings, but when they recently released CarPlay beta Kurviger limited what features third party apps can use.
