I used Waze for several years before switching to Apple Maps this year. My main reason for switching to Apple Maps was mostly due to privacy concerns. When the drive notifications on Waze stopped working for me, I took it as a cue to try out another navigation app. Here are the differences that I’ve noticed between these two navigation apps:

Apple Maps

• Comes free with an iPhone.
• No ads, which means your data is not being sold to advertisers.
• Provides navigation overlay on top of other apps. This works when you have another app running, in addition to Apple Maps. When you switch to another app while you have Apple Maps navigating in the background, it will show an overlay on top of the current app informing you of the next turn you need to take.
• Has very good lane guidance. Meaning it tells you what lane you should be on. Can be really useful on those confusing highways that split into two or three other roads.
• Very good battery consumption.
• Can sometimes provide the wrong navigation instructions.
  • For example, when we tried using it to navigate to the place where my son gets his haircut, it lead us to an apartment's parking lot across from the destination. The problem was that there was a fence in between. So we couldn't just get off the car and walk. We had to drive back out to the road, go around the block before arriving at the destination. To be fair, Waze also did the same thing. Only Google Maps got it right actually.
    • Lesson learned here, if navigating to a new destination, I should double check the location on Google Maps or Bing Maps with satellite view turned on.
  • When we tried to navigate to the Dallas zoo, for some reason it could not figure out the correct entrance to the zoo. Waze did figure this out though.
• It is less intuitive to use than Waze. For example, asking the app to re-evaluate routes is easier to do with Waze.
• Has very basic reporting features which pales in comparison to what you can do/report with Waze.