BRouter and GraphHopper — offline routing without Google

When RouteConverter turns a list of waypoints into a driveable, rideable or walkable route, something has to calculate the roads and paths between them. The OpenSource Edition does that with BRouter or GraphHopper — two independent, open-source routing engines that both run entirely on your machine, with no account and no internet connection once their data is downloaded. (The Google Edition can use Google's Directions API instead — see Google API keys.)

Pick your routing service under Extras → Options → Routing.

BRouter

BRouter routes using two kinds of data:

• Segments — pre-built routing tiles covering a region, downloaded once per area you route in.
• Profiles — small text files (.brf) that describe how to weigh roads for a particular way of travelling: avoid motorways for a bike, prefer footpaths for hiking, penalize unpaved tracks, and so on.

Every .brf file you have in the profiles folder shows up as a travel mode in RouteConverter — trekking is the default, and you can add more profiles (car, bike, moped, and BRouter's other stock profiles) from BRouter's own profile collection without any code changes.

GraphHopper

GraphHopper builds its own routing graph from a downloaded OpenStreetMap extract (a .osm.pbf file) for the region you're working in. It offers three fixed travel modes — car, bike, and foot — baked into the engine rather than defined by separate profile files.

Which one to use

Both are free, offline and give sensible results on ordinary roads. In practice:

• Want more travel modes than car/bike/foot, or want to fine-tune how a profile weighs road types? BRouter's .brf profiles are the more flexible, more hackable option.
• Want one file per region and don't need custom profiles? GraphHopper's OSM-extract approach is simpler to set up.

There's no harm in downloading data for both and switching between them in the Options dialog to compare a route.

Straight line: the built-in fallback

If you haven't downloaded routing data yet, RouteConverter falls back to Straight line — it just connects your waypoints with direct lines, no roads involved. It's not a router in any real sense, but it keeps distance and duration figures roughly meaningful until you set up BRouter or GraphHopper.