GraphHopper vs Zed

GraphHopper ships a major roughly every six months, with 11.0 in October 2025 the most recent. The architectural work happened in 9.0, which moved vehicle encoded values into the custom model, removed the built-in vehicle parsers' name property and the wheelchair parsers, allowed external encoded values in custom models, and blocked built-in custom model filenames. 10.0 then spent itself on storage layout — byte-based edge storage, a Map-based KVStorage API, wider georef fields — and 11.0 is almost entirely OSM tag interpretation: maxspeed=none handling, separate foot and bike road access, cycleway oneway combinations, toll parsing moved into a country-aware parser.

The configuration model is settled and the effort has moved to routing quality. Nearly every change in 11.0 is about reading OSM tags more faithfully for a specific mode — bicycle handling on living streets, foot instructions at junctions, MTB speeds on compacted surfaces, HGV tolls by country — which is the long tail of work that separates a routing engine that runs from one people trust. Turn restrictions are the recurring source of real bugs, appearing across 9.0, 10.0, 10.1 and 11.0 with via-way handling repeatedly needing correction. The new POST /navigate endpoint accepting a GraphHopper request is the one API-surface addition in this window.

Expect continued profile-level tuning driven by OSM tagging edge cases rather than architectural change, since three consecutive majors have narrowed in that direction. Turn restriction handling with multiple or overlapping via-ways is the most likely source of the next bugfix release, given its record across every version here.