coastnav.com

What It Is

CoastNav is a marine route-planning and GPS-assisted navigation tool for sailing yachts and motorboats, with a focus on cruising areas such as Croatia, Italy, Greece, France, Spain, Turkey, and the Caribbean. It is not general-purpose enterprise software, but rather a niche maritime planning SaaS/Web app suited to skippers who want to plan stopovers, passages, and export routes before setting sail.

Core Features

Its core capabilities include real-time GPS navigation, showing speed, heading, ETA, and the next waypoint. Its smart water-routing algorithm can automatically avoid land and islands. The POI database covers bays, marinas, and ports, with information such as depth, shelter directions, facilities, and pricing. Users can plan itineraries based on cruising speed, draft, departure date, and number of days, with support for saving, sharing, optimizing, and exporting routes in GPX format. Map layers also include wind, temperature, precipitation, AIS, and other data. The site also shows mechanisms such as adding new POIs, suggesting edits, and review queues, indicating that it may have some form of community-driven data maintenance workflow.

Pricing and Monetization

The captured content does not show any plans, pricing, subscription periods, or paid feature entitlements, nor does it clearly state whether there is a free version or trial. The site provides registration and login options, and some features appear to require login, but it is not possible to determine whether premium paid features exist. As a result, its value for money can only be assessed conservatively.

Pros and Cons

Its strengths are its focused use case: route planning is not just simple straight-line connections, but emphasizes “real sea routes” and avoiding land. GPX export makes it easier to use routes with chartplotters or tablets, while multilingual support and coverage of multiple cruising regions are friendly to European boating users. Its limitations are that it explicitly states it is not a certified navigation system and cannot replace official nautical charts. Some regions are marked as not yet available, and key SaaS information such as security compliance, API access, enterprise permissions, and SLA is missing.

Who It’s For

CoastNav is better suited to private boat owners, yacht charter travelers, sailing club members, and skippers who need to plan multi-day passages. It is useful for pre-departure planning and assisted navigation. It is not suitable as the sole navigation system for commercial vessels, professional maritime organizations, or highly regulated enterprises.

Access from China

Access from mainland China is unknown. Payment methods are not disclosed. If your main cruising areas are in Europe or the Caribbean, users in China may also want to compare alternatives such as Navionics, Savvy Navvy, C-MAP, OpenCPN, and iNavX.