Ask me for the best Sydney ferry app in 2026 and my honest answer is that it depends which job you need doing, because not one of them does the whole lot. What I want to get into here is not timetables though. They've all got the timetable sorted. It's the alerting, which is the part the app store listing never spells out.
Here's why that matters more on the water than it does on the rails. Miss a train at Town Hall in the morning and another one turns up in eight minutes. Miss your ferry and most routes leave you standing there for twenty or thirty minutes, watching the boat you wanted get smaller. So “I'll check the app before I leave” is a worse plan than it sounds. The delay that catches you is always the one that lands after you've closed the app and picked up your keys.
So here's every ferry app I use, what it's great at, then what it will and won't tell you when your boat runs late.
The quick answer: which app for which job
- Best offline timetable: TripView. Still the fastest way to see what's leaving.
- Best live map: AnyTrip. Watching your vessel cross the harbour is lovely.
- Best for your Opal card and the big disruptions: Opal Travel.
- Best for a trip you've never done before: Google Maps.
- Most authoritative when something's gone properly wrong: the official Transport for NSW trip planner.
- Best at nudging you before your regular ferry: none of them, honestly. I'll come back to that gap at the end!
TripView: the timetable everyone already has
TripView has been on my phone for over a decade and it's still the one I open when I just want to know what's leaving. It keeps the timetable offline, so it answers instantly whether you've got signal or not. Saved trips put your wharf one tap away and the live ferry departures are quick and reliable. After all these years that's still not nothing!
Will TripView tell you your ferry is running late?
Only once you open it. The free app shows you the delay the second you look and it won't come to you first. Alarms are a paid feature and even then you set them by hand, per trip. That's fine for the odd Friday when you want a reminder about one specific boat. It is not something that quietly watches your Tuesday morning for you. That's the gap most people are really trying to fill when they go hunting for a TripView alternative.
Opal Travel: your card first, disruptions second
Opal Travel is really the card app and it's good at being the card app. Your balance, your top ups and your travel history all live there, so it earns a spot on the home screen whatever else you run. You can also save favourite trips and switch on disruption notifications for them, which genuinely does push a message to your phone when the operator declares something significant.
It all hangs on that word significant. A suspended route or a wharf out of action clears that bar. Your usual 7:35 sitting six minutes behind does not, so on the ordinary mornings, which are most mornings, your phone stays quiet. I've been through every official channel and what each one covers in my guide to Sydney ferry delay notifications if you want the full picture.
AnyTrip: the nicest live map on the harbour
AnyTrip is the one I show people. You get a live map with the actual vessels moving on it, so you can watch your ferry come across from Manly instead of trusting a number on a board. On a messy afternoon when the timetable has stopped meaning much, it's the quickest way to work out what's really going on out there. I reckon it's the most impressive piece of transit software in this city.
For alerting though, on the free tier it's a watch-it-yourself tool. Notifications sit behind the AnyTrip Plus subscription, so otherwise the app waits for you to come to it. Brilliant for the ten minutes you're already looking. No help at all for the ten minutes you're not.
Google Maps: best for the trip you've never done
Nobody installs Google Maps as a ferry app and it still does a job the local ones do not. If your trip is a walk, then a boat, then a bus at the far end, Maps plans the whole thing better than anything else here. It'll surface a ferry delay too, at the moment you're looking at the route.
Alerting is the wobbly bit. Google can send updates about a commute you've saved, though how well that lands depends a lot on your phone. It's been noticeably stronger on Android than iPhone for years. Either way it's built around journeys you plan rather than the crossing you make every weekday, so I would not lean on it as your delay alarm.
The official Transport for NSW trip planner: the source of truth
The trip planner at transportnsw.info and the official app that goes with it are what everything else is downstream of. Live departures, real-time journey planning and the service alerts all come straight from the operator, so when something has gone properly wrong this is the version I trust. It's also where the planned stuff shows up first, like your wharf closing for maintenance over a weekend.
None of it is personal though. The alerts are written for a route or for the whole network, not for your departure, so you are still the one who has to go and read them. Transport for NSW will email you ahead of planned changes if you sign up, which is worth doing. Day to day though, nothing in there knows you are the one who catches the 7:35.
The pattern once you line them all up
Put the five side by side and they sort into two piles. One pile broadcasts. It shouts at everyone on the route the moment the operator decides things are bad enough, which is exactly right for a cancelled service and no use at all for a six minute drift. The other pile holds gorgeous live data that sits perfectly still until you open it.
Not one of them does the obvious third thing. Nothing on that list knows I leave from Circular Quay on weekdays between 7 and 8:30. Nothing on that list is willing to speak first.
What I built instead
I'm Daniel and I write software down in the Sutherland Shire. After enough mornings of this I went and made the third thing. Ferry Alerts is a free web page that reads the same official live departures everything else on this list reads, then messages you a few minutes ahead of the boats you actually catch. If your 7:35 slips, so does the message. No app, no account and about two minutes to set up. My setup guide covers the whole thing properly, including the Home Screen step iPhones want before push works and the confirmation email you have to click before an email alert starts running.
Fair warning while I'm here selling it. This is an alert about boats leaving your wharf, not a journey planner, so it does not replace a single app above. It also cannot tell you about a service that never makes it into the live data, which is the tip I'll finish on.
One thing no app makes obvious
Worth knowing before you trust any of these, mine included. Sydney Ferries is not the only company running boats off the harbour wharves. Manly Fast Ferry and Captain Cook Cruises are out there too, often from the same pontoons. The awkward bit is how that looks in the data feed. Every one of those departures comes through under a single mode and who runs it is tucked away in a field of its own, so anything filtering by mode alone hands you the lot.
That matters at the gate, because a share of those departures are ticketed by the operator instead of through Opal. Which ones is not a clean company-by-company split, so the safe habit is reading the operator for the departure in front of you rather than assuming from the brand. None of the apps here surface that difference loudly in their alerting and mine does not either yet. Circular Quay and Barangaroo are where it bites, since the services queue up almost next to each other.
So what should you actually run?
For most of us it's two things, not one. Keep whichever timetable app you already like, because you'll want it for the unfamiliar trips. TripView if you like it fast and offline, AnyTrip if you like watching the harbour, Google Maps if your trip has legs either side of the water. Then put an alert on the crossing you make every week, so the routine one stops depending on you remembering it. These apps are all good at what they were built for. They just were not built to interrupt your morning.
One practical tip to finish and it's a ferry-only one. Keep half an eye on the weather before a big southerly. Rough conditions can put services on a changed timetable or swap them for buses. No alert on earth can tell you about a boat that isn't running, so ten seconds on the official alerts the night before saves you the walk down.
Cheers for reading! I hope it saves you a few of those long waits on the pontoon. See you out on the harbour!