Find Green Lanes has grown into a genuinely feature-rich tool since it launched, and it's worth a proper look on its own terms rather than a passing mention. For the wider picture of every option out there, see our full comparison, this one's a direct, honest look at how it stacks up against Holloway specifically.
What Find Green Lanes actually offers
It's a big map, 76,606 lanes mapped across England and Wales at last count, built on OpenStreetMap data with satellite imagery and elevation layered on top for 3D terrain and relief shading. Lanes are shown as Byway Open to All Traffic, Restricted Byway or Bridleway, and the site is genuinely feature-rich beyond the map itself: route planning with GPX export compatible with OsmAnd, Gaia and Komoot, a street view peek at a lane's entrance, live-follow tracking while you're actually out riding, user ratings and difficulty grades, photo geolocation, and community tools including direct messaging and a "Top Explorers" leaderboard. It's free to join as one of the first 1,000 "Pioneer" members, with future pricing not yet specified.
That's a real, social, crowd-powered take on the same problem Holloway's solving, and worth naming honestly: the leaderboards, live-follow tracking and messaging are genuine features Holloway doesn't currently have. If what you want is a map with a community built around it, that's a real strength on their side.
Where the two tools actually differ
The title says it plainly because it's the real distinction: Find Green Lanes' difficulty grades and ratings come from its own users, open, crowd-contributed, and useful in the way any community rating is useful, lots of real opinions, but not independently checked before they're shown. Holloway's grading works differently on purpose. A lane starts as a raw, ungraded OSM import and is labelled as such, difficulty only gets upgraded once a moderator has actually assessed it (or, for a minority of lanes, once real trail-condition tags from the source data support an evidence-based estimate, itself labelled distinctly as estimated rather than a rider assessment). Nothing on a Holloway lane page claims more confidence than the data actually supports.
Legal classification works the same way underneath. Both tools ultimately draw on OpenStreetMap as a base layer, that's genuinely fine, it's the same open, attributed data most tools in this space use, including Holloway's own. But Holloway layers real council and definitive-map-sourced data (via rowmaps.com, covering roughly 149 English and Welsh rights-of-way authorities) on top of the OSM base specifically to catch what OSM's own volunteer tagging misses, and distinguishes BOAT, UCR, ORPA and restricted byway as four separate categories rather than folding UCR in with the rest. Every lane also carries a one-tap Legal Status Search pointing straight at the relevant council's current traffic notices, and a live closures and TRO reporting system means a fresh closure can reach every visitor immediately rather than waiting on the next data refresh.
What's actually free
Find Green Lanes' free access is currently framed as a limited window, the first 1,000 members join free forever, with pricing for everyone after that not yet announced. Holloway's free tier isn't a launch window, browsing the map, checking a lane's legal status, and seeing hazards and closures stays free for every visitor, no account and no cutoff. Route planning, GPX export and live navigation are Holloway Premium, £20 a year.
Which one actually fits you
If you want a big, social map with ratings from other riders, live tracking, and a sense of a wider community exploring alongside you, Find Green Lanes does that well. If you want to know a lane's legal status came from checking against real council records rather than just whichever OpenStreetMap tag happened to be there, and you'd rather see an honest "not yet graded" than a crowd-sourced grade with no way to tell how carefully it was checked, that's the gap Holloway's built to close.
Have a look at what's near you, browsing and checking legal status is free, no account needed.