The Best Apps to Split Expenses on a Group Trip (2026)

We keep a general ranking of these apps in our roundup of the best expense splitting apps, and it holds up for everyday use. Trips are a different problem. A week abroad concentrates more shared spending into seven days than most households produce in three months, in a currency nobody has a feel for, often with no signal when the bill arrives.

Judged on travel criteria, the order changes. An app that's perfectly good for splitting rent can be the wrong tool in Lisbon, and an app most general roundups place mid-table does well on travel. This page ranks four apps on what a trip actually demands.

What Actually Matters on a Trip

These are the criteria we used, and they're deliberately narrow. Dark mode and widgets are nice. None of them decide whether your group settles cleanly.

• How the exchange rate is locked: An expense in yen has to become a number in your group's currency at some point. Whether the app fixes that number when you enter the expense, or recalculates it later at whatever the rate happens to be, changes who owes what by real amounts.
• Offline entry: Roaming is expensive, hotel Wi-Fi is where you aren't, and the moment you'll actually log a meal is right after paying for it. An app that can't accept an expense without a connection loses the entry you were most likely to make.
• Daily expense volume: Coffee, train tickets, lunch, a museum, a grocery run, dinner, a taxi back. Seven shared expenses in a day is unremarkable on a trip, and it is where daily caps bite hardest.
• Short group lifecycle: A trip group gets created, used intensely for a week, settled, and never touched again. Fast setup matters more than long-term organization, and getting everyone in without account friction matters more than either.
• Settlement in the fewest payments: Eight people and forty expenses produce a tangle of small debts. Reducing that to a handful of transfers is the difference between settling on the flight home and chasing people for three weeks.
• Partial-group expenses: Four of six people do the boat tour. Two leave a day early and skip the last night of the rental. Splitting by who was actually there is the normal case on a trip, not an edge case.

If you're splitting with roommates rather than travelers, these criteria are close to irrelevant, and the ranking comes out differently again. Our roommate roundup scores the same apps on household criteria.

SplitterUp

Best for: International trips where expenses land in several currencies and connectivity is unreliable.

We build SplitterUp, so weigh this accordingly. The reason it leads on travel criteria specifically is that its currency handling stores a rate per expense rather than converting the group in bulk. When you enter an expense in a foreign currency, the rate used is fixed to that expense at creation, and the expense detail shows you the rate along with where it came from: the daily rate, a group-wide custom rate, or an override you typed in yourself. A rate that moves next week doesn't retroactively change what anyone owes for last Tuesday's dinner.

The custom rate options exist for a specific and common travel situation. If the group changed cash at the airport at a rate worse than the market, an admin can set that rate as the group's fixed rate for that currency, so cash spending is credited at what it actually cost. Individual expenses can override the rate too, which covers the card transaction that settled at a different rate than the app's daily figure. Settlements can be recorded in a different currency than the debt, with the rate locked to the settlement.

Offline handling covers the full workflow rather than read-only access. Expenses, settlements, and group changes made without a connection are queued locally and sync when you reconnect. There's no daily cap on expenses, so a heavy day logs as it happens.

Pros:

• Exchange rate locked per expense at creation, with the source of the rate visible on the expense
• Group-wide custom rates and per-expense rate overrides for pre-exchanged cash and odd card rates
• Full offline entry, with changes queued and synced on reconnect
• Over 160 currencies, with an option to display expenses in the currency they were entered in
• No daily expense limit and no ads
• Item-level receipt scanning, which handles restaurant bills where orders varied
• Settlement optimization to reduce the number of end-of-trip payments
• Free for a limited time, and accounts created now keep Premium permanently

Cons:

• Newer than the alternatives here, so fewer of your travel companions will already have it installed
• Currency depth is more than a domestic trip needs

Our travel and dining page covers the trip workflow end to end.

Settle Up

Who it suits: Travelers who want precise, editable exchange rates on a free app, and don't mind ads.

Settle Up is usually placed mid-table in general rankings, and on travel criteria that undersells it considerably. Its currency model is the closest thing to SplitterUp's in this comparison. Rates are downloaded daily and applied per transaction, so each expense carries the rate for its own date rather than the group being repriced as a block. You can edit the rate or the converted amount directly, and changing an expense's date pulls the historic rate for that day, which is genuinely useful when you're entering three days of receipts on the flight home.

Offline support is thorough. The app is built on a backend that works offline by design and syncs when a connection returns, across Android, iOS, and web. There's no daily expense cap on the free tier. For a two-week trip with heavy daily spending and patchy data, that combination covers the essentials.

The tradeoffs are ads on the free tier and a paid Premium tier that holds features travelers tend to want, including receipt photos and expense categories. Settle Up doesn't publish a single headline Premium price, and it varies by platform and region. The interface is also plainer than the alternatives, which matters less than it sounds when the group only needs it for a week.

Pros:

• Per-transaction exchange rates with daily updates, so each expense keeps its own rate
• Rates and converted amounts are editable, and back-dating an expense pulls that day's historic rate
• Works offline across Android, iOS, and web, syncing when you reconnect
• No daily expense limit on the free tier
• Multiple split types, including splitting among a subset of the group
• Premium is optional rather than required for core tracking

Cons:

• Ads on the free tier
• Receipt photos and categories sit behind Premium, and there's no item-level receipt splitting
• Interface is dated compared with the alternatives
• Premium pricing isn't published as a single figure

Tricount

Who it suits: Short trips with a group that won't all install an app and make accounts.

Tricount's advantage on a trip is how little it asks of the group before it starts working. Basic use doesn't require everyone to create accounts, which removes the most common failure point on day one: the two people who never get set up and whose expenses end up in a group chat instead. For a long weekend, that alone can decide whether the app gets used at all.

It handles multiple currencies, converting expenses to the group's chosen default, and it lets you set a conversion rate for the group. The app records expenses offline without limits. Currency conversion is the part that needs a connection, since fetching a current rate requires one, so expenses entered with no signal in a foreign currency get their conversion resolved once you're back online rather than at the moment you paid.

Tricount's help center says the separate Premium tier has been retired and its features folded into the standard app, and the app is described as free with no ads and no expense limits. Tricount is owned by bunq, a European neobank that bought it in 2022 and presented the deal as adding Tricount's 5.4 million users to its platform. That is why it costs nothing: the app brings people to bunq, and sign-up runs through bunq's onboarding. What you give up is depth: no item-level receipt splitting with per-person assignment, and thinner settlement and split customization than the others.

Pros:

• No account required for basic use, which gets a whole group started quickly
• Free with no ads and no daily expense limit
• Records expenses offline without limits
• Multi-currency with a group default and a settable conversion rate
• Receipt scanning with OCR

Cons:

• Currency conversion needs a connection to fetch rates, so offline foreign-currency entries resolve later
• No item-level receipt splitting with per-person assignment
• Basic settlement optimization and limited split customization
• Mobile only, since the web app was discontinued

Splitwise

Who it suits: Groups where everyone already uses it, on domestic trips in a single currency.

Splitwise is the most widely installed app here, and on a domestic trip that advantage is real. Everyone has it, nobody needs onboarding, the shared ledger is reliable, and simplified debts reduce settlement to a manageable number of payments. Offline entry works on both iOS and Android for groups and friends already on your device, though you can't create new groups or add new people while offline.

Two things push it down the list on international trips specifically. The first is currency conversion, which requires Splitwise Pro. Free accounts see balances kept separate per currency, which is honest but leaves the group doing the arithmetic. The second matters more than the paywall: the Pro conversion tool converts the group's expenses to your default currency at the current market rate, and Splitwise's own help notes that the conversion applies to all expenses in the group including already-settled ones, and can affect other people's balances. Expenses added after a conversion aren't converted automatically, so you run the tool again and everything is repriced at whatever the rate is then. Reports also indicate the conversion tool has been web-only rather than available in the mobile apps, so treat mobile availability as unconfirmed.

The other constraint is the free tier's daily expense cap. Splitwise doesn't publish the number and it appears to have changed over time; it's commonly reported as 3 or 4 per day. A household rarely notices a per-day cap. A trip day hits it before lunch. Splitwise Pro removes it, at $59.99 per year billed annually or $7.99 per month billed monthly (pricing varies by region). We covered the free tier's limits in our Splitwise free vs Pro breakdown

Pros:

• Largest user base, so the group probably already has it
• Reliable shared ledger and effective debt simplification
• Offline entry for existing groups and friends on iOS and Android
• Available on iOS, Android, and web

Cons:

• Currency conversion requires Pro
• Conversion applies at the current market rate across the whole group rather than locking a rate per expense
• Free tier daily expense cap, commonly reported as 3 or 4 per day, which trips hit constantly
• Ads on the free tier
• Itemization also requires Pro, so free users split restaurant bills equally regardless of what people ordered
• Can't create new groups or add people while offline

Comparison Table

Handling Multiple Currencies Without Arguments

The exchange rate question sounds like a technicality until you put numbers on it, so here are two situations that come up on nearly every international trip.

Your group's currency is USD and you're in Tokyo. On day one someone pays for dinner, 18,000 yen. At that day's rate of 150 yen to the dollar, that's $120, and the group's ledger should credit them $120. By day five the rate has moved to 160. If the app prices that dinner at whatever the rate is when you settle rather than the rate on the day, the same 18,000 yen is now worth $112.50, and the person who paid is credited $7.50 less than the meal cost them. One dinner is a rounding error. A week of meals, taxis, and tickets logged the same way is a systematic drift that always runs against whoever fronted the most money, and nobody in the group can explain where it came from.

The second situation is cash. You change $500 at the airport and get 72,000 yen, a rate of 144 yen to the dollar, which is worse than the market rate because airport rates always are. Every cash expense you log gets converted at the market rate of 150. Your 72,000 yen of spending is credited to you as $480, not the $500 you actually handed over. The group isn't wrong about the market rate. It's just not the rate you paid.

Both problems have the same shape and the same fix. The rate needs to be attached to the expense, not recomputed later, and you need to be able to override it when the rate you got wasn't the rate the app found. SplitterUp and Settle Up both do this, by slightly different routes: SplitterUp fixes the rate at creation with group-level and per-expense overrides, and Settle Up applies a daily rate per transaction that you can edit or back-date. Tricount lets you set a rate for the group, which handles the airport-cash case but not per-expense variation. Splitwise's conversion works the other way around, repricing the group at the current rate whenever you run it.

There's a low-tech version of the same principle that works in any app: agree on one rate at the start of the trip, write it in the group chat, and enter every foreign expense converted at that rate by hand. It's less accurate than the market and nobody cares, because it's applied consistently to everyone. Consistency is what stops the arguments, not precision. Our guide to splitting bills on group trips covers the rest of the ground rules worth setting before you leave.

Which to Pick

International trip, multiple currencies, unreliable signal: SplitterUp. Per-expense locked rates with overrides, full offline entry, no daily cap, and item-level receipt splitting cover the four places a trip usually goes wrong.

You want most of that without paying anything, and ads don't bother you: Settle Up. Editable per-transaction rates and historic rates on back-dated expenses handle the thing that matters most here on a free tier.

Short trip with a group that won't all sign up: SplitterUp still works, because guests join the group from an invite link or QR code without creating an account. Tricount also fits: no account for basic use, free, ad-free, no expense cap. The depth isn't there, but a three-day trip doesn't need it.

Domestic trip in one currency, and everyone already has Splitwise: Splitwise works. None of the currency arguments apply, and the switching cost of moving a group to a new app is real, though it's lower than it used to be now that apps like SplitterUp can import a Splitwise trip directly. The daily cap is the only thing likely to bother you, and Pro removes it.

US-only group settling in dollars: Venmo is worth a look for the payment side. Its Groups feature tracks shared expenses with no cap and splits them into payments, though Venmo's help documentation puts the limit at 30 people per group. It's built around US accounts and US dollars, so it doesn't solve any part of the currency problem. PayPal has been expanding cross-border sending through Venmo, but the tracking side remains domestic.

For the general ranking across everyday splitting rather than travel, the full 2026 roundup is the parent to this page, and the comparison page covers SplitterUp against Splitwise feature by feature.