Splitwise alternatives — the honest list

Most "Splitwise alternative" pages are a list of ten apps written by someone who has used none of them. This one covers four options, says plainly when you should stay where you are, and spends most of its length on the part nobody writes about: which parts of your history actually survive the move. We build one of the four (Splitpond), so weigh that section accordingly — the rest is as fair as we can make it.

The short list

• Spliit — free, open source, self-hostable, link-based. The pick if you want to own the infrastructure.
• Tricount — free and polished, strong in Europe. Check what v8.0 removed before you commit.
• Splitpond — free and link-based, and the only one that reads a Splitwise export directly.
• A spreadsheet — genuinely the right answer for a one-off trip. Don't dismiss it.

Why people actually leave

Worth being specific, because the reason determines whether switching helps. The four complaints that come up again and again:

• The daily expense cap. Splitwise's free plan limits how many expenses you can add per day — widely reported as three or four. It's fine until the one week a year you're travelling and adding nine things a day, which is exactly when you need it most.
• Full-screen ads on the free tier, at the moment you're trying to type in a number.
• Receipt scanning behind Pro, at roughly $40 a year.
• Getting data out is harder than getting it in — which is the one that turns irritation into leaving.

Splitwise plan details reflect their published free and Pro tiers as of July 2026 and may change — check splitwise.com for current terms.

The alternatives, honestly

Spliit

Open source, free, link-based, no expense cap, no ads. Spliit pioneered the "a group is a URL" model, and because the code is public you can run your own copy on your own server — which means no company can change the terms underneath you. Nothing else here can offer that, ours included.

Skip it if you want your Splitwise history to come with you (there's no importer — you'd re-type it), or if "self-hosted" sounds like a chore rather than a feature. Development is community-paced, so features arrive when someone has time.

Tricount

Owned by bunq, genuinely free, no expense cap, and a polished mobile app with a long track record — especially strong in Europe, where settle-up can run through bunq bank transfers.

Check the version first. With v8.0, bunq ended Tricount Premium, and rather than making those features free our reading of the change (July 2026) is that CSV and PDF export, custom splits, expense sorting and personal mode were removed. If you're leaving Splitwise partly because of data lock-in, moving to an app that just deleted its export button is worth a pause. See our notes for Tricount users.

Splitpond

Ours. Free and unlimited with that written down as a promise, link-based so nobody signs up, receipt scanning included free at five per group per month, and a reviewed importer that reads a one-currency Splitwise CSV and rebuilds supported totals and balances to the cent.

Skip it if you need a native app, multi-currency groups, recurring expenses, or comment threads on expenses — none of which exist yet. We're the newest of these and deliberately the narrowest.

A spreadsheet

For a single trip with four people and fifteen expenses, a shared sheet genuinely beats all of the above: everyone can already use it, nothing to install, and the maths is one SUM away. Apps earn their keep when the group is ongoing, when splits get uneven, or when you want the settle-up worked out for you. If you just want the numbers today, our free split calculator does it without creating anything.

What actually survives the move

This is the part that decides whether switching is painless or a lost evening, and it's almost never written down. What follows comes from building a parser for Splitwise's export format — these are the things that surprised us.

Splitwise exports a group as a CSV with one row per expense and a signed column for each person: positive if the group owes them for that row, negative if they owe. That structure carries more than you'd expect, and drops a few things silently.

Three details that quietly break naive imports, and are worth knowing even if you migrate by hand:

• The last row isn't an expense. Splitwise appends a Total balance row summarising each person's net. Anything that treats it as another expense double-counts the entire group.
• A single row can have more than one payer. When two people chip in on one expense, several columns are positive at once. That row has to be decomposed into separate debts, or the balances drift by a few cents — or a few dollars.
• People who left still have columns. Anyone with history in the group keeps their column even after being removed, so an importer that builds the member list from the header will resurrect them.

None of this is a reason to stay. It's a reason to check the balances against the old app once after importing anywhere. Splitpond now previews warnings before it writes the group and blocks formats it cannot represent safely. For where the export button actually is and how to open the file without Excel mangling accented names, see the step-by-step export guide.

When you shouldn't switch

Genuinely: if your group is already on Splitwise, everyone has the app, and nobody is hitting the daily cap, stay. The hard part of switching has never been the software — it's getting four people to move at once, and a half-migrated group where two people log expenses in the old app is worse than either app alone.

Switching is worth it when one of these is true:

• You're hitting the cap often enough to notice, or someone is about to pay for Pro.
• The group is new — nothing invested, so there's nothing to migrate.
• Someone in the group refuses to make an account, which link-based apps solve outright.
• You want your data somewhere you can leave from later.

Moving, if you decide to

In Splitwise on the web: open the group → Settings → Export as spreadsheet. Keep that CSV regardless of where you land — it's your history, and it's the only copy you'll get if you later delete the account (see deleting your Splitwise account, which has no undo).

To land it in Splitpond, drop the file on the homepage, review the entries and warnings, then confirm. You get a group link with supported history, combined totals, and balances rebuilt to the cent. Send that link to the group; nobody registers. If you'd rather compare all four side by side first, we keep an honest comparison table.

Common questions