Tricount or Splitwise is the question people ask before a trip, a flatshare or a wedding weekend, and most of the answers online are written by apps that would like you to pick them. So is this one: we make Banana Split, a third expense-splitting app. What we can offer instead of neutrality is method. Every claim below about Tricount or Splitwise links to the page where the app says it itself, and every number about how groups actually spend comes from 183,000 real groups tracked in our app.
The short answer. Tricount is the better free app for a trip or a one-off event: no daily limit, no sign-up, several currencies converted for free. Splitwise is the more complete app for a flatshare or a couple, provided you pay for Pro: recurring expenses, web access, several people paying one bill. Its free plan stops at four expenses a day, and in our data one expense in four is the fifth of its day. If you want recurring expenses and multiple payers without paying, neither fits, and that is the case we built for.
Tricount and Splitwise: what each app is
Splitwise is the older and the larger of the two. Founded in the United States in 2011, it runs on the web and on mobile, and it asks you to create an account before anything else. Its free plan is now a limited version of the product rather than the product itself: free users can add up to 4 expenses each day, and the rest sits in a subscription called Splitwise Pro.
Tricount is Belgian, and has belonged to the Dutch neobank bunq since 2022. The old Premium tier is gone: the help centre states that Premium “has been deprecated” and that the app runs “without any monthly fees”. It works without creating an account, tracks expenses offline, and its home page claims 21 million users. bunq earns its money elsewhere, notably by adding expenses automatically when you pay with a bunq card, so the app itself can stay free.
The two agree on the essentials. Both work out who owes whom, both reduce the debts to the minimum number of transfers, both split unevenly and sort expenses into categories. The differences are in what the free version holds back, and in three features that one has and the other does not.
What each free plan really includes, side by side
The table only contains what each app says about itself, on pages we read on 2 September 2026. Where a Splitwise feature exists but sits behind Pro, the column says so.
| Tricount | Splitwise free | Splitwise Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expenses per day | No limit | 4 | Unlimited |
| Account required | No | Yes | Yes |
| Several currencies in one group, converted | Yes, free | Logged, not converted | Yes |
| Several people paying one expense | No | Yes | Yes |
| Recurring expenses | No | Yes | Yes |
| Web access | No | Yes | Yes |
| Receipt scanning | No, photo attachments only | No | Yes |
| Spending charts | Yes | No | Yes |
| Ads | No | Yes | No |
Sources: Tricount’s own comparison page for the “no ads, no limits”, no sign-up, currency, attachment and charts rows; Splitwise’s Pro page for the “totally ad-free experience”, charts, scanning and currency conversion; our own check of the Tricount app this week for the recurring and web rows, which its pages do not mention.
One row deserves a note, because the internet cannot agree on it. Most blog posts say Splitwise’s free plan allows three expenses a day. Tricount’s comparison page, updated on 31 August 2026, says five. Splitwise’s own help centre, the only source that counts, says four. If you read another number elsewhere, it was copied from another article, not from Splitwise.
How often the four-a-day limit actually bites
This is where we can add something the other comparisons cannot: real usage. Banana Split has logged shared expenses since 2012. We took 183,000 groups with at least two members and five expenses, 3.8 million expenses in total, and simply counted how many expenses each group logs per day.
- 73% of groups have at least one day with five or more expenses. Not power users: ordinary groups, most of them a few days long.
- One expense in four is the fifth or later of its day. On a free Splitwise account where one person does the logging, it waits until tomorrow.
- On trips of two to seven days, one active day in three has five or more expenses. In groups that run for more than six months, a flatshare or a couple, it drops to one day in twenty.
Splitwise counts the limit per account, across all your groups, so a group where everyone logs their own expenses spreads the load. Even in that best case, 34% of groups have at least one day where a single member paid for five or more things. Coffee, tickets, lunch, a museum, dinner: that is a normal Tuesday on holiday.
The conclusion is not that Splitwise is unusable for free. It is that the free plan fits a flatshare, where expenses arrive a few at a time, and does not fit a trip, which is where most groups start. We went through what the daily limit covers and the ways around it in detail.
In our data, what share of groups have at least one day with five or more expenses?
73% of the 183,000 groups we measured have at least one day with five or more expenses. A single busy day on holiday is enough, and most groups have one.
Which groups need recurring expenses, multiple payers and web access
The three features Splitwise has and Tricount lacks are not for everyone, and our data says who they are for.
Recurring expenses. They only matter for groups that last. In our data, 13% of groups run for more than a month, and two thirds of those are two-person groups: couples mostly, and flatshares of two. Groups older than six months log a median of 43 expenses, rent and bills among them, and that is where re-entering the same line every month becomes a chore. For the other 87%, a trip or a weekend, the feature is irrelevant. If you are setting up a shared flat, we covered how to organise expenses in a new flatshare separately.
Several people paying one bill. More common than it looks: 11% of groups have at least one expense fronted by two or more people, and 22% of groups that last more than six months. Without the feature you enter two half-expenses, and the balance survives, but the history gets confusing. Splitwise does it, so do we, Tricount does not.
Web access. Useful for the group treasurer who does the bookkeeping on a laptop after the trip. Tricount no longer offers a web version; Splitwise has always had one.
And one feature that gets more attention than it deserves: multi-currency. It is Tricount’s big free advantage over Splitwise, since Splitwise only converts currencies in Pro. But in our data, only 2% of groups created since 2024 mix more than one currency. If you are that group, it decides the choice, and we wrote a full guide to splitting expenses in several currencies. If you are not, do not pick an app for it.
When Tricount is the right choice
Pick Tricount for anything short, shared with people who will not sign up for anything. A weekend, a week away, a stag do, a dinner with the bill split at the end. Six groups in ten in our data are finished within a week, and that is exactly Tricount’s ground: no cap, no account, offline, currencies converted for free. It even imports a Splitwise group if you are moving over.
Do not pick it for a flatshare that will run for a year with rent and bills coming back every month, or for a group where two people regularly pay one bill together. Both will work, but you will be doing by hand what other apps do for you.
When Splitwise is the right choice
Pick Splitwise for a flatshare, a couple or any group that will still exist in six months, and accept from the start that you will either pay for Pro or live within four expenses a day. For a flatshare the second option is realistic: in our long-running groups, only 5% of active days go past four expenses. For a couple who log every coffee, it is not.
Splitwise Pro also brings things nobody else in this comparison has: card transaction import in some countries, receipt scanning with itemisation, and a search across old expenses. If your group has three years of history, those are worth money. If it has a week, they are not.
When neither one fits
There is a profile that falls between the two: a group that wants Splitwise’s features, recurring expenses, multiple payers, web access, without the daily cap, without the subscription, and without asking everyone to create an account. A flatshare that also travels together. A couple who split the rent and also go on holiday with friends, which is the group where one person always ends up paying.
That is the gap we built Banana Split for. It is free, with no daily limit and no account required. Several people can pay one expense, expenses can recur, currencies can be mixed inside one group, and a debt in euros can be repaid in pounds with the balance still closing correctly. There is a web version too.
We keep an honest side-by-side table of Banana Split, Splitwise and Tricount, including the rows where a competitor does something we do not, and we corrected two Tricount rows there this week after checking the app. If you recognise your group in the paragraph above, download Banana Split and set it up before the next trip. If you recognise it in one of the two sections before, use that app. The point of this article was the choice, not the pitch.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure in this article comes from 183,000 groups tracked in Banana Split between 2012 and August 2026, each with at least two members and five expenses, 3.8 million expenses in total. Repayments between members are excluded from the counts. The data is aggregated and anonymous. Our users chose an app to track shared money, so they probably log more carefully than the average group: the figures describe them, not everyone. Everything about Tricount and Splitwise comes from the pages linked in the text, read on 2 September 2026, and we will correct the table if either app changes.