GeoKit: A Free FieldMove Clino Alternative

1. What FieldMove Clino Does Well

FieldMove Clino was created by Midland Valley Exploration and, since Petroleum Experts (Petex) acquired Midland Valley in 2017, has been part of the Petex family of geoscience software. It's a genuinely well-regarded digital geological compass, widely used in university field courses and industry alike.

Its strengths are real and worth acknowledging:

• Reliable strike & dip capture with a clean, focused compass interface
• Built-in stereonet visualization for reviewing your measurements
• A recognized name in academia with an established track record
• A path into the wider Move desktop suite if you already work in that ecosystem

The catch is the free tier. The free "Clino" app is capable but limited, and the more advanced structural and data-management capabilities live in paid pro features and the desktop Move platform. That's a perfectly reasonable model — but if your goal is a fully free field toolkit, it leaves gaps.

2. Where GeoKit Fits In

GeoKit is built to be the free, all-in-one option: no ads, no subscriptions, and no in-app purchases. It combines a one-step tilt-compensated strike & dip compass — lay the phone flat on the plane in any orientation and it reads strike, dip, and dip direction with true-north and magnetic declination correction — with in-app structural analysis: an interactive stereonet, a strike rose diagram, and a dip histogram, all generated from your own measurements.

Around that core it adds the rest of a field toolkit: 5 geological marker types (Fault, Sample, Mineral, Outcrop, and POI), a barometric altimeter, real-time earthquake monitoring from the USGS feed, and export to KML, GeoJSON, and CSV so your data drops straight into QGIS, ArcGIS, or Google Earth.

Everything works offline first — essential for remote fieldwork — and syncs to the cloud automatically when you reconnect, so nothing is lost.

3. Feature Comparison Table

4. When to Choose Which

Neither app is "better" in the abstract — it depends on your workflow:

• →Choose FieldMove Clino if your department or company already runs on the Petex Move desktop suite and you want your field data to feed directly into that pipeline, or if a paid pro workflow is standard for your course or team.
• →Choose GeoKit if you want a genuinely free, self-contained field kit — strike & dip, stereonet, rose, dip histogram, markers, altimeter, and GIS export — that works offline on any iPhone or Android phone with no license to manage.

An honest note: FieldMove Clino has years of use in academia and a direct bridge into professional structural-modeling software. GeoKit is a newer app with a growing community — but for zero cost it covers more of the everyday field toolkit in a single place, and its export formats are open and GIS-ready.

5. Verdict

If you specifically need a free FieldMove Clino alternative for all-in-one fieldwork, GeoKit is the strongest option available today. It delivers the parts that matter most — a one-step strike & dip compass and full structural analysis with a stereonet, rose diagram, and dip histogram — without a paywall, on both iOS and Android.

You can even try the structural side in your browser first: the free GeoKit stereonet plotter plots poles, great circles, and a rose diagram from your own strike/dip data — the same equal-area math the app uses in the field.