Deline vs Wanderlog: itinerary planner or group cost splitter?

Deline vs Wanderlog is not really a comparison of two rivals - it is a question about what your group keeps getting stuck on. Wanderlog is one of the best free itinerary planners around and has been for years. Deline is a group trip app where the plan and the money sit on the same timeline. They overlap in the middle and they are built around completely different problems.

We build one of them, so treat the Deline sections accordingly. The Wanderlog sections are written the way we would want to read them.

What Wanderlog is very good at

Wanderlog's strength is the map. You add places, it puts them on a map, it groups them by day, and it can tell you how long it takes to get between them. For a road trip, a multi-city route, or any trip where the sequence and the geography actually matter, that is the right shape of tool.

Three things in particular are worth naming:

• The free tier is unusually generous. Unlimited trips, unlimited collaborators, real-time editing. A lot of planning apps put collaboration behind a subscription; Wanderlog does not.
• Import from anywhere. Paste a link, forward a confirmation, save a place from a map. Getting things in is fast.
• It is on everything. iOS, Android and a proper web app, which matters more than any feature if your group is mixed.

Where Wanderlog stops

The money. Wanderlog has budgeting - you can record what things cost and see a total - but it is a tracker, not a splitting engine. It is not built to answer "Anna paid for the apartment, three of us went on the boat, who owes who at the end". That is a different calculation and it is the one group trips actually need.

Which is why the standard Wanderlog setup is Wanderlog plus Splitwise: one app for the plan, one for the money, and the two never talk to each other. That works. It also means every expense is entered somewhere that has no idea what it was for.

What Deline does differently

Deline's timeline is not a map, it is a metro map: four colour-coded lines - food, activities, stays and transport - running down the trip in time order, with everything the group has planned sitting on them. It answers "what is happening and when" faster than a list, and it is the same view on everyone's phone, live.

The costs live on that same timeline. Add what a dinner cost under the dinner, tick who was in on it, and at the end Deline collapses the chains of who-owes-who into fewer transfers. No second app, and every expense is attached to the thing it was for - which is what makes it readable three weeks later.

There is also receipt scanning in the free tier - 5 scans per trip - and premium that covers the whole group when one person buys it, rather than per person.

Where Deline stops

Fairly, because this is the half most comparison posts skip.

• iPhone only right now. Android is in progress. Wanderlog works for everyone today.
• No map view. Deline is a timeline. If your trip is a driving route and you need to see the distances, Wanderlog is doing something Deline does not.
• No place database or recommendations. Wanderlog can suggest restaurants and pull in guides; Deline holds what your group decided, not what a city has.
• It is newer. Wanderlog has years of use behind it.

Deline vs Wanderlog, side by side

Can you use both?

Yes, and for some trips that is the right answer. If you are driving three thousand kilometres and the route planning is genuinely the hard part, plan it in Wanderlog. Then run the trip - the day-to-day, the bookings everyone needs to see, the money - in Deline.

The honest version is that two apps is a cost, and most groups will only maintain one. So pick based on which problem is actually yours. If the group's failure mode is "we never decided where we are going", plan first. If it is "nobody can find the booking and nobody knows who owes what", that is the other one.