TravelSpend vs Spentrip: An Honest Comparison
Two apps built for tracking travel expenses. Both handle multi-currency. Both organize by trip. But they come at the problem from opposite directions, and those differences shape who each app works best for.
Here’s how TravelSpend and Spentrip actually compare.
The Core Difference
TravelSpend is a manual-entry app with strong budgeting tools and mature group splitting. It’s been around for years, it’s polished, and it leans into the philosophy that typing in your expenses makes you more aware of what you’re spending. Everything is deliberate — you enter it, you see it, you feel it.
Spentrip starts with a free manual tracker, then layers automation on top. AI receipt scanning, voice input, and shared trips are premium features that reduce the friction of logging expenses — particularly when you’re dealing with foreign-language receipts or want to speak a quick “fourteen euros for lunch” without pulling over to type.
Expense Entry
TravelSpend is manual-only by design. You tap in amounts, pick categories, done. One useful touch: you can spread a single expense across multiple days, so a five-night hotel booking shows up as a daily cost rather than one spike that throws off your averages. On iOS, there’s an Apple Pay automation shortcut (iOS 17+) that prompts you to log an expense after every Apple Pay transaction — not fully automatic, but it catches purchases you might forget. No Android equivalent exists.
Spentrip gives you three entry methods. Manual entry works the same way and is free with no limits. Premium adds AI receipt scanning — photograph a receipt in any language and it extracts the amount, merchant, date, and individual line items. Voice input lets you speak an expense hands-free, which is more practical than it sounds when you’re juggling bags at a train station.
The trade-off is straightforward: TravelSpend’s manual approach works everywhere, including fully offline. Spentrip’s automation saves real time but the scanning and voice features need a connection and a subscription.
Currency Handling
Both apps support 150+ currencies with automatic conversion — log an expense in Thai baht and see the equivalent in your home currency.
TravelSpend adds custom exchange rates. If you swapped cash at an airport kiosk and got a worse rate than the market rate, you can enter the actual rate you received. Spentrip uses market rates only and doesn’t offer this.
For most travelers paying by card, the difference is negligible — your bank’s rate is close enough to the market rate. But if you’re backpacking through Southeast Asia and exchanging cash at street-side booths, TravelSpend’s custom rates let you track the real cost.
Trip Budgets
TravelSpend has a dynamic daily budget feature that recalculates as you go. Set a total budget and the app divides your remaining money by your remaining days. Overspend on Tuesday and your Wednesday allowance shrinks automatically. For month-long trips where a single expensive day can quietly wreck your finances, this kind of pacing is genuinely useful.
Spentrip takes a different angle — it shows where money is going rather than how fast you’re burning through it. Category-level breakdowns reveal whether food, transport, or activities are eating most of your budget, and spending charts make patterns visible across the whole trip.
They’re solving different halves of the same problem. TravelSpend answers “am I on pace?” Spentrip answers “where is it all going?”
Group Expenses
This is where the two apps diverge most.
TravelSpend has full group expense management: split individual bills between members, track running balances, see who owes whom, and settle debts within the app. If your group does a lot of shared costs — one person books the Airbnb, another covers the rental car, someone else pays for groceries — TravelSpend keeps a ledger of it all and tells you exactly how to settle up at the end. These features are premium-only.
Spentrip approaches group travel differently. Its shared trips feature (also premium) lets everyone on the trip log their own expenses into a single shared trip in real time. Everyone sees everyone else’s spending as it happens, and a “By Person” breakdown in the reports shows how much each member spent individually. There’s no automatic debt calculation or settle-up feature, but knowing exactly how much each person spent is most of what you need to square up — you just do the arithmetic yourself.
Which approach matters more depends on how your group handles money. If you’re constantly splitting individual bills throughout the trip — one person covers dinner, another pays the cab — TravelSpend automates the ledger-keeping. If your group mostly pays their own way and you want a shared view of everyone’s spending with a clear per-person total at the end, Spentrip gives you that without the overhead of tagging every expense as split or shared. For a deeper look at how group finances play out on trips, there’s a post specifically about that.
Reports and Data Export
TravelSpend exports to CSV, with PDF export also available. Both are premium features. Since TravelSpend doesn’t have receipt scanning, exports contain your expense data but no receipt images.
Spentrip generates full expense reports as PDFs — with category breakdowns, per-person spending summaries for shared trips, and all receipt images attached inline. If you need to hand your employer a complete record of a work trip with photographic proof of every expense, this is where Spentrip pulls ahead. CSV export is also available. These are premium features.
Offline Use
TravelSpend works fully offline. Every feature — entry, budgets, group splitting — is available without a connection.
Spentrip’s manual entry works offline, but AI receipt scanning and voice input need internet. For remote destinations where connectivity is spotty, this is worth knowing.
Unique Features
A few things each app has that the other doesn’t:
TravelSpend:
- Multi-day expense spreading (divide a lump cost across a date range)
- Map view showing where you spent money geographically (premium)
- Custom categories with custom icons (premium)
- Apple Pay automation shortcut on iOS
Spentrip:
- AI receipt scanning in any language
- Voice expense entry
- Full expense reports with receipt images attached
- Apple Watch app and Siri Shortcuts (iOS)
- “By Person” spending breakdowns in shared trips
Pricing
Both apps are free to download with optional premium subscriptions. Spentrip’s free tier is broader — unlimited manual entry, multi-currency conversion, spending charts, and PDF summaries with no paywall. TravelSpend’s free tier is more limited, with features like data export and group splitting locked behind premium. Check the App Store or Google Play listings for TravelSpend’s current pricing, and Spentrip’s store page for its subscription options.
Which One Fits?
TravelSpend if:
- You travel in groups and need to split costs and settle debts
- You want daily budget pacing that recalculates automatically
- You exchange cash often and want custom exchange rates
- You need full offline functionality for remote areas
- You prefer the discipline of manual entry
Spentrip if:
- You want a generous free tier for basic trip tracking
- You collect receipts in foreign languages regularly
- You prefer speaking or photographing expenses over typing them
- You need complete expense reports with receipt images for reimbursement
- You want everyone on a group trip logging to the same place in real time
Neither app is trying to be everything. TravelSpend is the deliberate, manual tracker with the best budget pacing and group splitting. Spentrip is the automation-first option with stronger reporting and a free tier that covers the basics without a subscription. Try whichever matches how you actually travel — the only real mistake is not tracking at all.
