Adze is a native Mac application for editing GPX files — the open XML standard that GPS devices, cycling computers, and trail navigation apps use to store tracks, routes, and waypoints.
What is Adze?
Adze is a dedicated GPX document editor for macOS, built to give outdoor athletes, hikers, and anyone who works with GPS data direct, hands-on control over the file itself. A GPX file is technically just XML, but cracking one open in a text editor to rename a waypoint or trim a rogue track segment is exactly as miserable as it sounds. Adze provides a structured, purpose-built editing surface for that kind of work — no device cable required, no ecosystem account, no clunky sync wizard.
The name evokes a woodworking tool used for precise shaping, which is a quietly apt metaphor: this is an app about refining and correcting, not creating from a blank canvas. You bring a route home from your device or pull it out of an app export, and Adze is where you go to make it right.
What does Adze do best?
The heart of the app is direct access to a GPX document's structure — its waypoints, track segments, and metadata — presented in a navigable, Mac-native interface rather than a wall of angle brackets. I find it most useful for the cleanup that every serious athlete eventually confronts: the scatter of erratic track points that built up while you stood at a trailhead waiting for a signal lock, or the embarrassing car-park detour that your GPS device recorded with perfect fidelity and that Strava is now ready to immortalise on your activity feed.
Multi-day touring routes are another strong use-case. When you've stitched together a route from multiple sources — an AllTrails export, a friend's Komoot file, a hand-drawn segment — and need to reorganise segments or scrub duplicate waypoints before uploading to your head unit, Adze gives you a clean document-editing workflow rather than forcing you through a sync interface designed around device management.
- Inspect and modify track points, waypoints, and route data directly
- Rename track segments and waypoint labels without touching raw XML
- Navigate a file's full structure as a readable, browsable outline
- Save back to spec-compliant GPX without format drift or corruption
Who should use Adze?
Adze solves a problem that most GPS users don't realise is solvable. Cyclists who plan routes in one app and race them on another know the particular frustration of GPX files that import slightly wrong — phantom loops, misplaced start points, elevation profiles that disagree with reality. Having a proper editor in the workflow means you catch those issues before they reach your device, not after you've already rolled out of the car park.
Beyond sport, the app is useful for travel bloggers embedding accurate GPS paths in articles, cartographers wrangling field-collected data, and developers debugging the output of GPS tooling pipelines. Anywhere a GPX file is the actual deliverable, a dedicated editor beats grep-and-pray in BBEdit.
Is Adze free?
Adze is distributed directly from getadze.com — visit the current page for up-to-date pricing. Focused Mac utilities of this type ship variously as free downloads, one-time purchases, or with a trial period. Whatever the tier, the calculus is simple: if GPX cleanup is a recurring part of your workflow rather than an annual curiosity, a dedicated native tool pays for itself in frustration avoided within the first session.
What are the best Adze alternatives?
Garmin BaseCamp is the incumbent — free, capable, and tightly integrated with Garmin hardware, but it assumes a device at the other end and the UI has not aged gracefully since the Obama administration. GPXSee is a competent open-source viewer with limited editing functions; the Mac build works, though it reads as ported rather than native. Online, GPX Studio handles common track-editing tasks in a browser with zero installation, which is convenient for a quick trim but awkward offline or when working with sensitive location data. QGIS can open GPX files with the full might of a GIS platform behind it, but that is a deliberate sledgehammer for a finishing-nail job.
What Adze offers over all of them is a Mac-first document-editing experience that matches how good Mac apps are supposed to behave: open a file, make your changes, save it, move on.
