Cedar Weather vs Weather Engine
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Cedar Weather
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Cedar Weather turns the forecast into a decision. Most weather apps hand you a temperature and leave the rest to you. Cedar reads the same conditions and tells you what they are actually good for — a ride, a hike, a day at the beach, a walk through town, or an afternoon indoors with a coffee. WHAT IS TODAY GOOD FOR? The home screen shows live conditions where you are, then rates the day for the things you actually do — cycling, walking, hiking, the beach, a city walk, a cafe day, and skiing where there is snow. The scoring runs on your phone and weighs temperature, wind, the chance of rain and how much of it, UV and visibility together, so cycling weather and beach weather are judged on their own terms. A still, overcast 18 degrees is a fine riding day and a poor beach day, and Cedar says so instead of leaving you to work it out from a row of icons. WATCH THE RAIN MOVE Open the weather map for animated rain radar with a time scrubber, so you can run a shower forward and see whether it clears before you leave. Cloud cover and temperature layers sit on the same map, and every region is coloured by how good conditions are right now. Filter the map to cycling, hiking or the beach and the whole picture recolours for that one activity — useful when the question is not what the weather is, but where the good weather is. HOURLY FORECAST AND THE WEEK AHEAD An hour-by-hour view with rain chance, wind and temperature shows you the window that matters. Tap any day in the 7-day forecast to open its own hourly strip, or tap any region on the map for a full activity breakdown and chart. When a front is moving through, the hourly forecast is the difference between getting caught and getting home dry. PLAN THE WEEKEND Cedar ranks the regions around you by how the weekend weather is shaping up, so choosing where to go is a glance rather than ten browser tabs. Weather for hiking in the hills while the coast sits under cloud, or the other way round — you can see it on one screen. Detailed regional breakdowns run across more than 200 countries, and worldwide city search reaches anywhere else: look up Denver, Seattle, Zurich, London or wherever you are heading and get a 7-day forecast before you commit to the trip. HOME-SCREEN WIDGETS Illustrated weather widgets put current conditions and the day ahead on your home screen, drawn as a scene rather than a wall of digits. Glance at the phone, know the sky. WEATHER ALERTS THAT EARN THEIR PLACE A short morning briefing, a weekly outlook, and severe weather alerts when something is genuinely on the way. You choose which ones arrive and which stay off, and none of them shout for attention. BUILT ON MORE THAN ONE SOURCE Forecast data comes from Open-Meteo, with a second provider standing by as a fallback, so one bad response upstream does not quietly become a bad forecast on your screen. Coverage is near-global, the interface speaks 37 languages, and regions carry the names locals actually use for them. FREE, WITHOUT THE USUAL CATCH No ads. No subscription. No in-app purchases. No account needed to see the forecast, and no tracking. Cedar Weather is made by one developer in Switzerland under the name Florignite, and it stays free and ad-free because it is not selling you or your data to anyone. It began with a small Saturday-morning question — is it worth taking the bike out? — and the answer was never in the temperature alone. If you cycle, hike, walk, chase clear skies at the weekend, or simply want an honest hourly forecast and a rain radar that loads quickly, Cedar Weather was built for you.
Weather Engine
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**Weather Engine** Weather Engine is a professional weather visualization and forecasting application designed for users who want to understand weather beyond ordinary forecasts. Unlike traditional weather apps, Weather Engine combines numerical weather prediction, satellite imagery, radar observations, and interactive weather maps — now including full aviation altitude charts — into a single intuitive interface. Powered by NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS) data and a high-performance native weather engine, the application delivers smooth, precise visualization of atmospheric conditions directly on your device, from the surface up to the jet stream. **Key Features** - NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS) forecasts - Real-time satellite imagery - Weather radar observations - Temperature maps and isotherms - Sea-level pressure contours (isobars) - Aviation altitude mode: 850/700/500/300 hPa constant-pressure charts with geopotential height contours and level wind - Wind streamlines with animated flow, from the surface to jet-stream altitude - Relative humidity visualization - Forecast precipitation - Interactive weather timeline - Coastline and border outline overlay, so land and sea stay legible under any weather layer - Touch any location to view detailed weather information - Automatic weather layer management based on observation and forecast availability - Optimized rendering for iPhone and iPad **Aviation Altitude Mode** Weather Engine now goes beyond the surface. Slide from mean sea level up through the standard aviation constant-pressure levels — 850, 700, 500, and 300 hPa — to see the same geopotential height contours and wind fields pilots read on a real constant-pressure chart. Whether you're studying a ridge at 500 hPa or checking jet-stream wind ahead of a flight, the map adjusts contour spacing and range automatically for each level, and animated wind streamlines scale to stay legible even at jet-stream speed. **Professional Weather Analysis** Weather Engine allows users to combine multiple atmospheric variables on one map, making it easy to understand relationships between: - Pressure and wind - Temperature and fronts - Humidity and precipitation - Radar and forecast rainfall - Satellite imagery and cloud systems - Surface conditions and upper-level flow **Built for Global, Seamless Viewing** The map renders continuously wherever you look — panning smoothly across the international date line, staying correctly aligned while rotated, and covering wide regions without gaps, even when zoomed far out over an ocean or a full continent. Radar and rain tiles are rendered at higher fidelity, and the new coastline/border outline option keeps geography readable no matter how many weather layers are stacked on top. **Suitable for** - Weather enthusiasts - Outdoor activities (hiking, camping) - Sailing & fishing - Pilots & drone operators - RF and microwave engineers - Amateur radio operators - Teachers, students, and researchers **Interactive Timeline** Move seamlessly through time to explore past observations, current weather, and future forecasts. Weather layers automatically appear or disappear depending on data availability, and the altitude slider works alongside the timeline so you can track how a pressure surface evolves over the next five days. **Native High-Performance Engine** Combines Flutter with a native C++ weather engine for efficient GRIB2 decoding and smooth visualization of NOAA weather data, tuned with adaptive level-of-detail so contours, heatmaps, and wind particles stay sharp at every zoom level from a single country to a full hemisphere. **Data Sources** - NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS) - Weather Radar - Satellite Imagery **Privacy** Weather Engine does not collect personal weather data. Location access is used only to display weather conditions around your current position.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Weather Engine at daily against Cedar Weather's every 9 days. On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Cedar Weather ships an update every 9 days, Weather Engine daily. The most recent releases landed on September 30, 2026 and September 29, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Cedar Weather | Weather Engine |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | Every 9 days | Daily — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Devices | iPhone, iPod | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 — better | 15.6 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 84 MB | 64 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Florian Ignat | Heebok Lee |
In-app purchases
Cedar Weather
No in-app purchases
Weather Engine
No in-app purchases









