If you landed here, you probably hit a wall inside Splitwise: you went to add a fourth expense of the day and the app told you to upgrade. It's a frustrating moment, especially mid-holiday when everyone is throwing receipts at you.
Splitwise spent years as the default answer for "how do we split this?" Then it moved much of its free experience behind Splitwise Pro — daily caps on adding expenses, plus interstitial ads for free users. Plenty of people are fine paying. Plenty of others are now looking around.
This guide walks through the realistic alternatives, who each one is actually for, and how to move your existing groups across without losing history.
A note on accuracy: competitor pricing and free-tier limits change often, and this article reflects what was published at the time of writing. Always check the app's own pricing page before committing. We build Splitano, so treat our own entry with the appropriate scepticism — the comparison table sticks to verifiable facts.
What actually matters in a bill-splitting app
Before comparing names, it helps to know which features genuinely change day-to-day use. After watching a lot of groups use these tools, four things matter far more than the long feature lists on marketing pages.
Friction when adding an expense. This is the whole product. If logging a €14 lunch takes six taps and a loading spinner, people stop logging and the ledger drifts from reality. Any daily cap is fatal for the same reason — the one day you exceed it is the day the group's data becomes wrong.
Debt simplification. In a group of five, a weekend can produce fifteen separate IOUs. A good app collapses those into the minimum number of transfers. Without it, settling up is its own maths problem.
What happens with bad connectivity. Group expenses happen in exactly the places phones don't work: mountain huts, ferries, foreign countries before anyone has bought a SIM. An app that requires a round-trip to a server for every entry will fail you at the worst moment.
Whether everyone has to sign up. The single biggest source of friction is the group member who won't install an app or create an account for one ski trip. Tools that require universal signup quietly push the work back onto one person.
The alternatives, compared
| App | Free tier | Works offline | Account required | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Splitano | Unlimited expenses, 3 online groups + 1 offline group, ad-supported | Yes — fully offline groups | No — guest mode works without signup | Groups where not everyone wants an account |
| Settle Up | Generous free tier, ad-supported | Partial | Yes for sync | Long-running shared households |
| Tricount | Unlimited expenses, free | Partial | Not for joining | One-off holidays and simple trips |
| Splid | Free, no account | Yes | No | Quick trips, privacy-conscious groups |
| A spreadsheet | Free forever | Yes | No | People who genuinely enjoy spreadsheets |
Settle Up
The closest like-for-like replacement for long-term Splitwise users. Multi-currency, recurring expenses, a clean web app, and a free tier that doesn't cap how much you can log. If your use case is "my flatmates and I have tracked bills together for three years," this is the most natural landing spot.
The trade-off is that it's built around accounts and sync. Everyone in the group needs to be in the system for it to work well.
Tricount
Tricount is deliberately narrow: you create a "tricount" for a trip, add people by name, log expenses, and it tells you who owes whom at the end. People joining don't necessarily need an account, which removes a lot of friction.
It's excellent for a one-week holiday and less suited to an ongoing household ledger with recurring rent and utilities.
Splid
Splid's pitch is no account, no email, no tracking — you share a group code and everyone's device holds the data. Genuinely good for privacy-conscious groups and for trips abroad, since it doesn't lean on connectivity.
The flip side of "no accounts" is that there's no server-side backup tied to an identity. If everyone loses their phone, the group is gone.
Splitano (that's us)
We built Splitano around the two things that annoyed us most about the alternatives: daily limits, and the assumption that every participant will create an account.
- No daily expense caps on any tier. The free tier limits how many groups you can run, never how much you can log inside them. Capping entries makes the data wrong, which defeats the point of the app.
- Genuinely offline groups. Not "queues changes and syncs later" — a group that lives entirely on your device with no server involved. Create it on a plane, use it all week, never sign in.
- Guest mode. Use the app without an account at all. If you later decide you want cloud sync, you can upgrade a guest account and keep your existing data.
- Debt simplification turns a tangle of IOUs into the fewest transfers, and 200+ currencies can be mixed inside one group with balances shown in whichever currency you care about.
- Export to Excel, CSV or PDF, which matters more than it sounds when a landlord or an accountant asks for a breakdown.
Where we're honest about being behind: Splitano is Android-first, so there's no iOS release yet, and the free tier is ad-supported.
How to move off Splitwise without losing your history
The mistake is trying to recreate years of history in a new app. You don't need to — you need the balances, not every historical receipt.
- Settle up first, if you can. The cleanest migration is a zero balance. Everyone squares up, and the new app starts from a blank slate.
- If you can't settle, export. Splitwise offers a CSV export per group from the web app. Download it and keep it somewhere safe — that's your archive.
- Recreate only the opening balances. In the new app, create the group and add a single expense per person representing what they currently owe or are owed. Label it "Opening balance from Splitwise."
- Move recurring items over deliberately. Rent, utilities and subscriptions are the entries people forget. Set them up as recurring in the new app on day one so they don't quietly stop being tracked.
- Get everyone in before the next big spend. Migrations fail when half the group is still logging into the old app. Pick a date, tell everyone, and make it stick.
Which one should you pick?
- Ongoing household with flatmates who all want accounts → Settle Up.
- One-off holiday with a group that won't install anything → Tricount or Splid.
- Maximum privacy, no accounts, no servers → Splid, or Splitano's offline groups.
- You keep hitting the daily cap and just want it gone → any app on this list will fix that; pick on the other criteria.
- Mixed group where some people want sync and some refuse to sign up → Splitano's guest mode and offline groups were built for exactly this.
The genuinely good news is that this category got competitive. Splitwise's move upmarket created room for tools that don't ration how much you're allowed to use them, and switching costs are low — a group takes about two minutes to set up.
Whichever you land on, the important part is that everyone in the group actually uses it. The best expense app is the one nobody has an excuse to avoid.
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