Splitwise Alternatives for Group Travel
Splitwise is the default for a reason — the balance maths is clean, everyone’s heard of it, and the free tier does the core job. People look for an alternative for three reasons: the free version added limits on how many expenses you can log per day, it handles multi-currency trips awkwardly, or it tells you who owes whom without ever telling you what the trip cost.
If it’s the first, Tricount and Splid do the same job free. If it’s the second, Settle Up handles currencies better. If it’s the third, you don’t want a splitting app at all — you want a travel expense tracker, and that’s a different category.
Here’s the comparison.
At a glance
| App | Free tier | Multi-currency | Works without accounts | Trip budget and categories |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Splitwise | Core splitting, with daily limits | Basic | No | No |
| Tricount | Full splitting | Yes | Yes, via share link | No |
| Splid | Full splitting | Yes | Yes, no signup at all | No |
| Settle Up | Full splitting, ad-supported | Strong | Partial | No |
| TravelSpend | Manual tracking only | Yes | No | Yes |
| Spentrip | Tracking, charts, conversion | Yes | No | Yes |
The right-hand column is the fault line. The first four answer “who owes whom”. The last two answer “what did this trip cost”. Most groups think they want the first and discover halfway through that they wanted both.
1. Tricount
The closest like-for-like replacement, and the one most people switch to.
Tricount does group expense splitting with no paywall on the core function — add expenses, assign who paid and who shares, and it computes the settle-up at the end. Participants can join through a share link without creating an account, which removes the friction of getting five friends to sign up mid-trip.
Better than Splitwise at: unlimited free expense entry, letting people join without accounts, multi-currency trips.
Worse at: the polish and the ecosystem. Splitwise has more integrations and a more refined interface.
2. Splid
The lightest option. No account, no email, no signup — you create a group, share a code, and start adding expenses. It works offline, which matters more on trips than people expect.
Better than Splitwise at: getting started in thirty seconds, offline use, privacy (there’s nothing to sign up to).
Worse at: longer-term use. If you want a running history across years of shared costs with a housemate, Splitwise is the better home for that.
3. Settle Up
The strongest multi-currency handling of the splitting apps. If your group spends across three currencies in two weeks, Settle Up keeps the conversions coherent in a way the others don’t quite manage.
Better than Splitwise at: currency handling, and showing the group’s balances in several views.
Worse at: the free tier carries ads, and the interface is more utilitarian.
4. TravelSpend
A travel expense tracker with splitting attached, rather than the other way round. Group splitting and debt settlement are premium features, but you get a trip budget, daily pacing, and category breakdowns alongside them.
Better than Splitwise at: telling you what the trip actually cost, and pacing your remaining budget across remaining days.
Worse at: the splitting itself is behind a subscription, and there’s no free-tier equivalent of what Splitwise gives away.
5. Spentrip
Spentrip takes a different position, and it’s worth being clear about the trade-off rather than pretending it’s a drop-in replacement.
It doesn’t do automatic debt settlement. There’s no “Sarah owes you €23” calculation. What it does instead is shared trips — everyone on the trip logs their own expenses into one shared trip, and a per-person breakdown shows exactly how much each member spent. Squaring up is then arithmetic on two numbers rather than a ledger.
Alongside that you get what the splitting apps don’t have: category breakdowns, multi-currency conversion at the day’s rate, spending charts, and receipt scanning that reads receipts in any language. Manual entry, conversion, categorisation, and PDF summaries are free; shared trips and receipt scanning are premium.
Better than Splitwise at: knowing what the trip cost, tracking foreign-currency spending, and keeping receipts.
Worse at: the actual splitting. If your group constantly covers each other’s individual bills, use a splitting app. If everyone mostly pays their own way and wants a shared picture, this is the better shape.
Which problem are you actually solving?
This is the question worth answering before installing anything, because picking the wrong category is why group expense apps get abandoned by day four.
Use a splitting app — Splitwise, Tricount, Splid, Settle Up — when the shared costs are the point. One person books the villa, another rents the car, a third buys the groceries, and at the end you need to know who pays whom.
Use a travel tracker — TravelSpend, Spentrip — when everyone mostly pays their own way and the question is what the trip cost, per person and per category.
Use both when it’s a long trip with a lot of shared infrastructure. Plenty of groups run Splitwise for the villa and the car, and a tracker for everything else. That’s not redundancy; they’re answering different questions.
There’s more on how this plays out socially — and why the money conversation goes wrong on group trips — in the longer piece on splitting expenses without splitting friendships.
Common questions
What is the best free Splitwise alternative?
Tricount and Splid both do unlimited free expense splitting with no daily caps. Splid requires no account at all, which makes it faster to start; Tricount is more polished and better suited to a group you’ll keep using it with. Settle Up is a third option with the strongest multi-currency support, at the cost of ads on the free tier.
Why do people look for Splitwise alternatives?
Mostly the daily expense limit on the free tier, which arrives at exactly the wrong moment on an active trip. After that: multi-currency handling on international trips, wanting people to join without signing up, and wanting to know the trip’s total cost rather than just the balances.
Do any of these apps work offline?
Splid works offline by design. Tricount and Settle Up sync when a connection returns but need one to share updates with the group. This matters more than it sounds — on a trip, the moment you want to log an expense is usually the moment you have no signal.
Can I move my Splitwise data to another app?
Not directly. Splitwise can export a group’s expenses to CSV, which gives you a record, but none of these apps import it. The practical approach is to settle up the existing group, close it, and start the new app at a clean trip boundary.
Which app is best for splitting expenses in multiple currencies?
Settle Up among the dedicated splitting apps. If you also want the trip’s spending converted and categorised in your home currency as you go, a travel tracker handles that better than any splitting app does — currency conversion is a core feature there rather than an add-on.
Is Splitwise still free?
There’s still a free tier, but it now limits how many expenses you can add per day, with the full experience behind Splitwise Pro. That limit is the single most common reason people go looking for something else mid-trip. Check the current terms in the app — they’ve changed more than once.
The apps in this list are all competent. The mistake isn’t choosing the wrong one — it’s choosing a splitting app when what the group actually wanted was to know where the money went, then wondering in month two why nobody can answer that question.
