Globe vs Wanderlog vs TripIt (+Splitwise) for group trip planning
A side-by-side look at Globe, Wanderlog, TripIt and Splitwise for group trip planning: what each one is good at, what it costs, and where it falls short.
For years, group trip planning with my friends meant having five or six apps open before we'd even agreed on a destination. Google Maps for the map. A shared spreadsheet for the budget, until whoever made it stopped updating it. Splitwise once the trip was over and the receipts started piling up. A group chat holding everything else, which meant the one message with the actual flight dates got buried under somebody's meme within an hour.
None of those apps were bad. The problem was that not one of them was built for the actual job: helping a group of people agree on something, and then keep track of what they agreed on. That gap is basically why group chats quietly kill trip plans more often than people admit, and it's the same gap behind most of the apps people reach for by default.
This is a straight comparison of Globe, Wanderlog, and TripIt, plus Splitwise for the money side of things: what each one is genuinely good at, and where the gaps show up once you're the one holding six tabs open trying to keep everyone on the same page.
✦Comparisons and pricing below reflect what's publicly listed as of August 2026. This category moves fast enough that some of this may already be slightly out of date by the time you're reading it.
What to look for in a 'group' trip planning app
Most travel apps are built around a single user building the itinerary. That works well if you're a solo traveler, or if one person in the group is willing to take on the organizing for everyone else. Trip planning apps are generally useful for building an itinerary and gathering booking information, but they weren't designed around the specific problem of getting a group of people to agree on something.
For a group trip specifically, four things matter more than anything else:
- Whether everyone can actually add ideas, not just the person who set the whole thing up
- Whether decisions get made, not just floated in a chat and left hanging
- Whether the plan, the money, and the photos afterward all live in one place instead of scattered across five different apps
- Whether the work gets shared out, so booking the flights and sorting the visas doesn't quietly end up being one person's job
These four aren't about trip planning in general. They're what separates a group planning something together from one person planning it for everyone else. I'll be upfront that they're also the four things we built Globe around, so factor that in when you get to the table below. But they hold up as a filter for whatever you end up using, and if an app covers all four, it honestly doesn't matter much which one it is.
The options: Wanderlog, TripIt, Splitwise, and Globe
Wanderlog, TripIt, and Splitwise are here because they're the ones mentioned the most: Wanderlog and TripIt whenever someone asks for a trip planning app, Splitwise whenever the question is how to split the costs afterward. Globe is the newest of the four, and none of them gets everything right: each one is strong somewhere and thin somewhere else. Here's how they compare, one at a time.
Wanderlog
Wanderlog is strong at what it's built for: a visual, map-based itinerary that a group can edit together in something like a shared document. It also has a built-in space to explore destination recommendations and add them straight into your itinerary. The free tier is generous, and even Pro is reasonably priced, around $39.99 a year.
That said, there are enough features, including hotel booking (through affiliate links) and a deals tab, that it can feel a little overwhelming at first. And when it comes to actually making a decision as a group, there's no voting, no way to propose an idea and have everyone weigh in. If your group has one dedicated trip organizer, or already knows where it's going and what it'll do, Wanderlog handles the logistics well. If you're still figuring that part out, it doesn't do much for you.
TripIt
TripIt is really a trip organizer, not a trip planner. You forward your booking confirmations by email, or connect your inbox and let it pull them in for you, and both work on the free plan. The app is straightforward, and makes it easy to attach documents like boarding passes or rental confirmations to each item. But other than booking confirmations, everything else has to be added manually, and that's more work than the simple interface first suggests. Building out a full itinerary by hand takes real effort.
It doesn't feel very collaborative either. You can invite people with edit access for free, but in practice that still means one person's forwarded bookings being shared out, rather than everyone actually building the plan together. If all you need is a single, shared timeline, TripIt handles that well. If you want the group actually building it together, it's not the best fit.
Splitwise
Splitwise is the app for splitting expenses with friends, and it does its one job cleanly: it logs what everyone paid and works out who owes what. What has changed is that the free tier now caps you at four expenses a day, and only the first two are straightforward: the other two each need you to sit through an ad first. Things like receipt scanning have moved behind Splitwise Pro, around €29.99 a year per person, so a longer trip with a lot of small shared costs will likely push you toward upgrading partway through.
Either way, Splitwise only ever does the money. For a longer breakdown of how to split costs on a group trip without it turning into an awkward conversation, that's worth a separate read.
Globe
Worth saying plainly: this is the one my team and I built, so read this section as the biased one and the table below as the part you can check for yourself.
Globe starts a step earlier than the others. Before there's an itinerary to organize, there's a group that hasn't agreed on anything yet, so ideas go in as proposals, everyone votes, and whatever wins becomes an actual item in the shared plan. The conversation happens in the app's own group chat, sitting next to the plan instead of getting buried under everything else going on in your WhatsApp or Messenger group. From there it covers the same ground as the rest of this list: a shared itinerary anyone can edit, to-dos assigned to specific people, expense tracking that settles up at the end, and documents, photos, and notes that stay put once you're home.
Where it's thinner: it's the newest app here, so there's no email-forwarding trick to pull in booking confirmations automatically the way TripIt and Wanderlog both do, and no hotel booking or deals tab like Wanderlog's. Every planning feature is free, but on the free plan you can only have one trip of your own in progress at a time, though trips other people invite you to don't count toward that. And if you're travelling alone, the parts that make it worth using, the voting and the split expenses, don't really apply. Globe is built for the messier part of deciding something as a group, and then for holding all of it once it's decided: tickets, confirmations, documents, and the details that would otherwise be sitting in five separate inboxes.
Quick comparison: the best app for group travel planning
| Globe | Wanderlog | TripIt | Splitwise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Group decisions (proposals/voting) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Shared itinerary | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| In-app group chat | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| To-do assignment | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Expense tracking | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Documents in one place | ✓ (50MB free/trip) | Partial (per place, Pro only) | Partial (per place, 3 free/trip) | ✗ |
| Notes space | ✓ (2 free/trip) | ✓ | Partial (per item) | ✗ |
| Shared album with friends | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Trip memory (post-trip journal) | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Auto-import from booking emails | ✗ | ✓ (inbox scan Pro only) | ✓ | ✗ |
| Hotel booking & deals | ✗ | ✓ (Pro only) | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free tier | All planning features free (1 active trip of your own; joining is unlimited) | No trip limit; offline & AI behind paywall | Documents capped | 4 expenses a day, 2 of them after ads |
| Built for groups specifically | ✓ | Partial | ✗ | ✗ |
The honest answer
I tried all three of the others on their free plans before writing this, and each one is genuinely good at one piece of it. Wanderlog is good at the map and routes, and its explore tab is a genuinely nice way to come across a place you hadn't thought of and drop it straight into the plan. TripIt's real strength is just its simplicity once things are booked. Splitwise is good at the money. However, none of them is built to help a group actually get from "we should do this" to an agreed plan everyone can see, talk through, and look back on later.
That gap is the part Globe is built around, so rather than run the feature list again: it isn't better than each of these apps at the thing that app does best. Wanderlog still draws the better map, and TripIt still pulls your bookings in from your inbox without anyone typing them out. What Globe replaces isn't any single app on this list, it's the need to run all of them at once.
Globe
Ready to stop juggling five apps for one trip?
Globe brings proposals, planning, and expenses into one shared space for the whole group.
FAQ
Is Globe free to use?
Yes, all core planning features are free: proposals, voting, the shared itinerary, group chat, to-dos, and expense tracking. On the free plan you can have one active trip of your own at a time, and there's no limit on trips you're invited to join.
What do Trip Pass and Globe Pro cost?
Trip Pass is €9.99, paid once for a single trip, and it lifts that trip's limits for everyone on it: 500 group photos instead of 50, 250MB of documents instead of 50MB, unlimited expenses instead of 5 a day, 10 notes instead of 2, and the trip is kept permanently rather than for 90 days.
Globe Pro is €4.99 a month, or about €20 less over a year if you pay annually. It's personal rather than per-trip: it raises the limits on every trip you're part of, and adds custom Travel List categories. Neither is needed to plan a trip together, since the planning tools are all on the free plan.
How is Globe different from Wanderlog or TripIt?
Wanderlog and TripIt are both strong at building and organizing an itinerary, but neither has a way for the group to actually vote on ideas and turn them into decisions. Globe covers that piece too, plus a shared itinerary, chat, to-dos, and expense tracking. Each one has its own dedicated space in the app, rather than everything scattered across the same screen, which keeps it straightforward to use even with all of it in one place.
Is there a free alternative to TripIt?
TripIt's own free plan covers the basics, with booking imports and a shared timeline, and caps you at 3 documents per trip. If what you're missing is the group side, Globe is free for planning: proposals, voting, a shared itinerary anyone can edit, chat, to-dos, and expenses. What it doesn't do is TripIt's email import, so bookings go in by hand.
What's a good Splitwise alternative for group trips?
If you only need to split costs, Splitwise still does that one job well. The case for switching is when the money is tangled up with the rest of the trip. Globe tracks expenses inside the trip itself, next to the itinerary and the plan, and settles up automatically, so the costs sit with the thing they were spent on rather than in a separate app.
Can Globe replace Splitwise for expense tracking?
Yes. Globe includes built-in expense tracking with automatic settlement, so a group doesn't need a separate app just for splitting costs.
Is Globe available on both web and mobile?
Yes, Globe works on the web app as well as iOS and Android, so everyone in the group can use whichever they already have.
Does Globe work for family or work trips, not just friend groups?
Yes. The core tools — proposals, voting, the shared itinerary, expense tracking — work the same way whoever the group is: friends, family, colleagues on a work trip or offsite, a club or sports team, or a mix of all of them. Anywhere more than a couple of people need to agree on something and then keep track of it, it works the same.
Globe
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