We make one of these apps, so read this with that in mind. We have tried to be genuinely useful rather than flattering, including about where we lose.
All four do the core job: log a shared expense, split it, show who owes who. The differences show up in everything around that.
The quick answer
If you want the recommendation without the reasoning.
| If you want | Pick |
|---|---|
| The app your friends already have | Splitwise |
| One holiday, minimal setup, no accounts | Tricount |
| A simple ongoing group balance | Settle Up |
| Receipt scanning, subscriptions and analytics | EconoGlance |
| To leave Splitwise but keep your history | EconoGlance, via CSV import |
Splitwise
The default, and default is a real advantage in a multiplayer app.
Its genuine strength is that everyone already has it. When you say let us put it on Splitwise, nobody has to install anything. For a product where every group needs multiple people to participate, that is worth more than any feature.
- Strong: ubiquity, a mature core, well understood by everyone
- Strong: a web app, which the others largely lack
- Weak: free tier now caps expense entry
- Weak: receipt handling and analytics are limited
- Weak: development has been conservative for years
For the full breakdown see EconoGlance vs Splitwise, or read about the free tier caps.
Tricount
The holiday specialist, and it is genuinely good at that one thing.
Its best feature is how little it demands. You can share a tricount with people who never make an account, which removes the biggest source of friction in group expenses: the person who will not install the app.
- Strong: no account needed for participants
- Strong: excellent for a single trip with a clear start and end
- Weak: less suited to ongoing shared life like a household
- Weak: limited scanning, analytics and recurring costs
Settle Up
The minimalist. It does group balances and settle-up cleanly and does not pretend to be a finance app.
If your requirement really is just track who owes what in this group, it is a reasonable and uncluttered choice. The trade-off is that it stays minimal as your needs grow.
- Strong: simple, quick, low learning curve
- Strong: solid multi-currency handling
- Weak: no meaningful receipt scanning
- Weak: little in the way of budgets or analytics
EconoGlance
Ours. The bet is that shared expenses and personal finance belong in one app.
Most people splitting bills with roommates are also trying to track their own spending, watch subscriptions, and stick to a budget. Running two apps for that is friction, so we built one that does both.
- Strong: AI receipt scanning that reads line items, not just totals
- Strong: subscription tracking with renewals, price change alerts and itemised extra usage
- Strong: a private personal space with budgets, separate from shared groups
- Strong: imports Splitwise CSV, so switching keeps your history
- Strong: settlement records with destination account and payment proof
- Strong: 10 languages, and correct SAR and AED currency symbols
- Weak: no web app yet, mobile only
- Weak: newer, so a smaller network than Splitwise
That second weakness is the honest one. If none of your friends have it, you have to convince them, and that is a real cost Splitwise does not have.
Feature comparison
The things people actually ask about, side by side.
| EconoGlance | Splitwise | Tricount | Settle Up | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Receipt scanning | AI, line items | Limited | No | No |
| Subscription tracking | Yes | No | No | No |
| Personal budgets | Yes | No | No | No |
| Spending analytics | Yes | Limited | Limited | Limited |
| Web app | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Import from Splitwise | Yes, CSV | n/a | No | No |
| Ads on free tier | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Rotating savings groups | Yes | No | No | No |
Privacy and data ownership
Rarely compared, and arguably more important than any feature.
You are handing an app a detailed record of where you go, what you buy and who you spend time with. That is a meaningful amount of personal information sitting on someone else's servers.
- Can you export your full data whenever you want, without asking support?
- Are there ads, which usually means some data reaches advertisers?
- What happens to your data if you delete your account?
- Is the deletion policy actually written down anywhere?
EconoGlance shows no ads on any tier and supports full export. Account deletion anonymises your records rather than hard-deleting shared history, so other members of your groups do not lose their own balances when you leave. Whichever app you choose, read this section of its policy before you commit years of history to it.
How to actually choose
Ignore feature counts and answer three questions.
- Is this a one-off trip, or ongoing shared life? One-off favours Tricount. Ongoing favours Splitwise or EconoGlance.
- Do you want personal finance in the same app, or only group splitting? Only group splitting means the lighter apps are fine.
- Will your group install something new? If absolutely not, that decides it, and there is no shame in that.
That third question is the one people underestimate. The best app your group will not use is worse than the second-best app they already have.
What none of them do well
In fairness to all four, here is where the whole category is still weak.
- None reliably confirm that a real payment actually arrived, so settling is a trust step
- None handle a group member who simply stops participating
- Multi-currency support is workable everywhere but genuinely excellent nowhere
- All of them depend on people remembering to log expenses at all
That last point is the real limit of this category. The best app in the world does not help if nobody in the group opens it. Whichever you choose, the habit matters more than the software.
You can try more than one
Worth saying plainly: this is not a permanent decision.
Export your data from whichever app you use today and keep the file. If you want to test an alternative, import it and run both for a month. Our migration guide covers doing this without losing anything.
