The best travel expense apps in 2026
There is no single best travel expense app, because the category splits into three different jobs. If you are splitting costs with other people, use Splitwise. If you are tracking one trip against a daily budget, use TravelSpend. If you are living across currencies rather than taking a holiday — and need a running day count per country for visas or tax residency — use Stang. Trail Wallet, for years the default recommendation in this category, has been discontinued and is no longer available.
Most “best travel expense app” lists rank ten apps that do roughly the same thing. That is not the useful shape of this question, because the apps in this category are not competing for the same job. Pick the wrong category and the best app in it will still be wrong for you.
So this page is organised by job, not by rank.
What are you actually trying to do?
Three distinct problems hide behind “track my travel spending”:
Splitting costs with other people. Four of you rent a car, one person pays, and you need to work out who owes what at the end. This is a bookkeeping problem between people, and it has almost nothing to do with currencies or budgets.
Staying inside a budget on one trip. You have three weeks and a number. You want to know, today, whether you are ahead or behind, with foreign prices converted into money you understand.
Tracking money continuously while living across borders. There is no trip. You live between currencies, your “home” currency is a choice rather than a fact, and the day count matters because visas and tax residency both turn on it.
Almost every disappointment with an app in this category comes from using one built for a different one of those three.
Splitwise — best for splitting costs with other people
Splitwise exists to answer “who owes whom”. You log a shared expense, say how it splits, and it keeps a running balance between people until somebody settles up. It does that one job better than any general expense tracker, and it does it across groups that persist beyond a single trip — flatmates, families, a recurring group of friends.
Where it falls short: it is not a budgeting app. It tells you what you owe, not whether you are overspending. Its help centre states free users can add up to four expenses each day, and currency conversion, receipt scanning, search and charts all sit behind Pro. Splitwise also does not publish a price — its terms say the cost “may vary due to date of subscription, country, local taxes and regulations, and promotions”.
Use it if the hard part of your trip is the arithmetic between people rather than the total.
TravelSpend — best for one trip on a budget
TravelSpend is built around exactly the shape of a holiday: a trip with a start, an end, and a budget. You log expenses in the local currency, it converts them into your home currency automatically, and it shows you the burn against a daily or total target. It works offline, which matters more than it sounds when you are logging a taxi with no signal. It is on both iPhone and Android, and a trip can be shared with the people you are travelling with.
Where it falls short: it is organised around trips. If you are not on one — if you simply live abroad — the model fits awkwardly. And a fair amount sits behind Premium, including CSV export, custom exchange rates, income entry, search and filtering, unlimited active trips, and settling up debts within a group — so if splitting is the reason you are here, budget for the paid tier.
Use it if you are taking a trip, especially with other people, and want one app to cover both the budget and the splitting.
Stang — best for living across currencies
Stang is the app we make, so treat this section with the scepticism it deserves and check the claims against the pricing page.
It is built for people who do not go home at the end: a home currency plus up to four secondaries, converted at live rates, with budgets and per-category limits that run monthly rather than per trip. You can log in a sentence — “lunch 350 THB” — and it parses the name, amount, currency, category and date. Stays turns that ordinary spending log into a running day count per country, worked out from where your expenses happen rather than from GPS or check-ins, which is the number that matters for a 90-day visa or the 183-day tax residency rule.
The free tier is not a trial: unlimited expenses, no history limit, multi-currency, budgets, category limits, budget alerts and CSV export, with 30 AI-parsed messages a month. Pro is $3.99/month, $19.99/year, or $49.99 once, and adds receipt scanning, unlimited AI logging, bank statement import, Ask Stang and Stays.
Where it falls short, plainly:
- There is no bill splitting. None. If you need to track what your travel companions owe you, Stang will not do it and Splitwise will.
- Stays and the Weekly Brief are iPhone-only right now. The web app covers the rest, but if you are on Android and the day count is why you came, it is not there yet.
- It is not a trip planner. No itineraries, no bookings, no maps.
Use it if the currencies are permanent rather than temporary, or if you need the day count.
Wanderlog — best if planning and budget belong together
Wanderlog is a trip planner first: itineraries, places, routes, reservations, with expense tracking attached. If the appeal is having the plan and the spending in one place — and being able to share that with the people you are travelling with — it covers ground no dedicated expense tracker does. It runs on iPhone, Android and the web, and the free tier is genuinely usable rather than a teaser.
Where it falls short: the expense side is a component of a planner rather than the point of the product, and multi-currency handling is the weakest part of it.
Use it if you want one app for the whole trip and the budget is a secondary concern.
A spreadsheet — still the right answer for some people
This belongs on the list honestly. If you already keep a spreadsheet, travel a few times a year, and do not mind typing an exchange rate, a spreadsheet is free, private, exportable by definition, and cannot be discontinued by somebody else’s business decision — which, as the next section covers, is not a hypothetical risk in this category.
Apps earn their keep when entry has to take five seconds at a counter, when conversion has to be automatic and correct, or when you need something a spreadsheet genuinely cannot do, like a day count per country.
What happened to Trail Wallet?
For most of the last decade, Trail Wallet was the answer to this question. It was an iPhone app built by two travellers, it did one thing well — a daily budget you could actually stick to — and it charged once rather than monthly.
It is gone. The developers retired it, and their own page now states that it “is no longer available and this page is for archival purposes only”. Lists that still recommend it have not been updated.
If you are here because Trail Wallet stopped working, the mapping from what you liked about it to what to use now is its own page: Trail Wallet alternatives.
The short version
| If your problem is… | Use |
|---|---|
| Who owes whom | Splitwise |
| One trip, one budget | TravelSpend |
| Living across currencies; days per country | Stang |
| Planning and spending in one place | Wanderlog |
| Occasional trips, and you like spreadsheets | A spreadsheet |
Prices and free-tier limits in this category change often. Everything above was checked in September 2026; where a figure matters to your decision, confirm it on the app’s own site before paying.
