Places to reach, no containers to find
RLQuest hands you a few outdoor quests every morning, some to real castles and viewpoints, and checks that you did them. For iPhone and Android.
Geocaching is more than an app. People hide containers in the world and publish the coordinates for others to find, and the official app from Groundspeak is the front door to that community. If you're looking for an alternative, it helps to be precise about what you'd be walking away from.
This page describes Geocaching fairly, then explains what RLQuest does instead. They overlap in one respect, both get you to real places you'd never otherwise visit, and differ in almost every other.
Geocaching is a GPS treasure hunt. Members hide caches, small containers, and publish the coordinates on geocaching.com; other members navigate to the spot with the app, find the container and record the find. The official app, for iOS and Android, is free, and a Premium membership unlocks premium-only caches, offline maps and more detailed filters. Groundspeak also publishes a separate, free app, Adventure Lab, for location-based mini adventures.
What makes it work is the community. Every cache was placed by a person who chose that spot for a reason, and the finds are shared with everyone who came before and everyone who comes after. It is a well-established game with a loyal following and its own culture, and none of that transfers to any other app.
Geocaching is about finding a thing that a person hid. The container is the point; the walk is how you get there. RLQuest has no hidden objects and nothing physical to find. Its quests are about what you do: walk this far, photograph that, be outside at this hour, get to this castle. The places it sends you to are real and public, drawn from OpenStreetMap, more than 1.5 million castles, lighthouses, viewpoints, ruins and old city gates across Europe and North America, but nobody has left anything there for you.
The rhythm differs too. Geocaching is open-ended: you look at the map and choose. RLQuest picks for you: three to ten quests each morning from a library of more than 2,700, fitted to your age, interests, the weather, the season and the time you've said you have, with the option to swap any you don't like. Where Geocaching has you record your own find, RLQuest checks what it can automatically: the recorded route, new tiles on your map, your step count, the photo itself. It tells you when a quest can't be checked.
| Geocaching | RLQuest | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A community treasure hunt for hidden containers, with an official app as the front door | A daily quest app with real places and a map that fills in as you walk |
| How you play | Pick a cache on the map, navigate to it, find it, record the find | Get 3 to 10 quests each morning, go and do them, the app checks |
| What it asks of you | Searching at the site, sometimes patiently; recording your find | Completing the quest as set: route, photo, steps or clock have to match |
| Who made the content | Other members hid the caches | A curated library of 2,700+ quests; places come from OpenStreetMap |
| Premium adds | Premium-only caches, offline maps, more detailed filters | More quests per day and extras |
| Platforms | iOS, Android, geocaching.com | iPhone, Android |
Geocaching suits people who enjoy the search itself, who like knowing a real person placed what they're looking for, and who want a hobby with a community behind it. If the hunt for the container is the fun part, nothing here replaces it.
RLQuest suits people who want something new to do outside most days without planning it, who'd rather be given a task than choose one, and who like the idea of a map that fills in as they go: hexagon tiles about 350 meters across, working offline, with real places on top and 213 achievements in 69 series to work through. It is free to download for iPhone and Android, and a Premium subscription adds more quests per day.
Plenty of people will do both. They don't compete for the same afternoon so much as for different moods. Prices and store privacy labels aren't compared on this page; check the current store pages for both.
Sources: Geocaching on the App Store (US), Geocaching Premium membership (as of 2026-09-30)
RLQuest hands you a few outdoor quests every morning, some to real castles and viewpoints, and checks that you did them. For iPhone and Android.