The best group travel app for planning a trip and splitting the costs

The best group travel app is the one that holds both halves of a group trip at once: the plan and the money. Most apps do one. You end up with a group travel app for the itinerary, a second one for splitting costs, a group chat where the bookings actually live, and a running argument at the end about who paid for the boat.

This is an honest run through the group travel apps worth having on your phone in 2026, what each one is genuinely good at, and where each one stops. We build one of them, so read the Deline section with that in mind - but the rest is written the way we would want to read it before downloading anything.

What a group travel app actually has to do

Before comparing anything, it helps to be specific about the job. A group trip goes wrong in four predictable places, and every app on this list is really an answer to one or two of them.

1. Nobody has the whole picture. One person has the hostel confirmation, someone else has the train times, and the dinner reservation exists as a memory. This is the failure that produces the sentence every group trip contains at least once: wait, does anyone know where we are staying tonight?
2. Everyone is paying for everyone. Different amounts, sometimes different currencies, always at the moment somebody's card works and somebody else's does not.
3. Plans move. A booked train and a maybe-we-should look identical in a chat thread, so the group cannot tell what is settled from what is still an idea.
4. The end. Somebody has to reconstruct two weeks of spending from memory and ask four friends for money, which is the least fun conversation in travel.

An app that solves one of those and leaves the other three is not wrong, it is just partial. The thing to work out is which ones your group actually gets stuck on.

The best group travel apps in 2026

Deline - the trip and the money in one place

Deline is built around the trip as the unit, not around the expenses. The whole itinerary sits on one shared timeline laid out like a metro map, with four colour-coded lines running through it: food, activities, stays, and everything that moves you between them. Everyone in the group sees the same map, updating live, which is the point - the "where are we staying" question mostly stops being asked because the answer is already on the screen.

Costs live on that same timeline rather than in a separate app. Add what a dinner cost under the dinner, tick who was in on it, and it is attached to the thing it belongs to. At the end, Deline collapses the chains of who-owes-who into fewer transfers, so five people are not sending each other seven transfers over a pizza.

Two things are genuinely different from the rest of this list. Receipt scanning is in the free tier - 5 scans per trip, more on premium - rather than paywalled entirely. And premium is bought once for a trip, not once per person: if one person in the group has it, everyone in that trip gets the premium features. That matches how group trips actually work, where one person is the planner and everyone else just wants it to work.

Where it stops: it is iPhone only at the moment, with Android in progress. It does not do ongoing, non-trip expense tracking - if what you want is a permanent tab with your flatmates, this is the wrong tool. And it is new, which is a real thing to weigh against apps that have been around for a decade.

Free to download and free for everyone you bring. Premium is 49 kr a month or 349 kr a year with a 3-day free trial; the subscription terms have the exact numbers.

Splitwise - the default for splitting money

Splitwise has been the answer to "who owes what" for over a decade and it earned that. Its debt simplification is genuinely clever: if you owe one person and they owe someone else, it collapses the chain so fewer payments need to happen. It works for any kind of shared cost, not just trips, and it is on iOS, Android and the web.

What has changed is the free tier. Through 2026 Splitwise has capped how many expenses free users can add per day - reports put it around three or four - added ads to the interface, and moved receipt scanning behind Splitwise Pro at roughly $5 a month. On a normal week that cap is invisible. On a trip, where you log breakfast, a taxi, museum tickets and dinner before the day is over, it is not.

Where it stops: Splitwise groups are open-ended, which is right for flatmates and a mismatch for a trip with a start date, an end date and a set of bookings. There is no itinerary in it at all. We wrote a longer Deline vs Splitwise comparison if that is the decision you are actually making.

Wanderlog - the best free itinerary planner

If your problem is the plan rather than the money, Wanderlog is the strongest free option here. Unlimited trips, unlimited collaborators, everything on a map, places organised by day, and several people can build the same itinerary at once. For a road trip or a multi-city route where the sequence matters, it is very good.

Where it stops: the expense side is a budget tracker rather than a splitting engine. You can note what things cost; you cannot really run the group's money through it. Most Wanderlog groups end up with Splitwise open as well, which is two apps again. More on that in Deline vs Wanderlog.

TripIt - for confirmations, not for groups

TripIt does one thing extremely well: forward it a confirmation email, or let it read your inbox, and it builds a tidy itinerary out of your flights, hotels and car hire without you typing anything. Pro adds flight alerts and is around $49 a year.

Where it stops: it is built around one traveller's bookings. Sharing is possible but it is not a collaborative planning surface, and there is no cost splitting. It is a great companion app and a poor group app.

Tricount and Settle Up - free splitting, no trip

Both are solid, both are free, both handle unlimited expenses without a daily cap, and both are on iOS and Android - which makes them the sensible pick for a mixed-device group that only needs the money side. Expect ads on the free tiers.

Where they stop: same as Splitwise. There is no itinerary, no bookings, no shared plan. See the full list of Splitwise alternatives for how they compare against each other.

A group chat and a shared doc - the one everyone actually uses

Worth naming honestly, because it is the real competition. It costs nothing, everyone already has it, and it works for about four days. Then the doc goes stale because updating it is somebody's job, and the chat has scrolled past the booking. We wrote about exactly how that fails.

Group travel apps compared

How to pick one

Answer one question first: is the hard part the plan or the money? Almost every group knows which, and gets it wrong by picking on features instead.

• Both, and everyone is on iPhone. Use Deline. That combination is the reason it exists.
• Only the money, mixed devices. Splitwise if the free cap does not bite, or Tricount if it does.
• Only the plan. Wanderlog, and settle up however you already do.
• You are the only one who will maintain anything. Pick the app with the fewest steps to add something, because you are the one doing it eighty times.

Whatever you pick, pick it before you leave, and get everyone in before the first night. An app introduced on day four does not get backfilled - which means the first three days stay in somebody's memory, and that is where group trip money goes wrong. How to split costs on a group trip covers the rules worth agreeing on before you go.