Free Trip Planner Apps: Which Ones Are Actually Free

Type "free trip planner" into an app store and you'll get a dozen apps that all say free at the top of the page and then hit you with a paywall the moment you try to add a second stop, invite a friend, or see anything useful offline. The word "free" on a pricing page rarely means the same thing twice. So here's what five of the more popular trip planning and expense apps actually let you do without paying, as of September 2026, based only on what each one states on its own site.

Tripperama

Tripperama's free plan includes every core tab: Calendar, Transport, Stays, Activities and Travelers. That means flights, trains, ferries and rentals; hotel and rental stays with check-in dates; a shared activity wishlist with priorities and votes; inviting travelers with owner/editor/viewer roles; and the Docs and Expenses tabs for tracking passports, tickets and who owes whom. Push notifications (new stays, flight changes, ticked-off documents, a trip countdown, departure and rental-return reminders) work on any plan too. Offline viewing of pages you've already opened is free, and a trip starting soon saves its own snapshot automatically.

The two AI-powered features — the reservation scanner that reads a forwarded booking e-mail or PDF, and the trip assistant you can ask questions of — are on the free plan too, just capped to a handful of uses per trip plus a small monthly account-wide allowance. Pro (one trip for $9.99, or $39 a year for everything) removes those AI caps and adds four things: activity suggestions for your destination, automatic flight/transit status alerts, weather and tide conditions for every day, and calendar sync. Flight status without Pro is still there, just on-demand rather than pushed to you automatically.

Wanderlog

Wanderlog has a free version and a paid Pro subscription, with Pro billed monthly or annually (the App Store lists several annual price points between $31.99 and $59.99). Its own pages describe real-time collaboration on a shared itinerary, expense tracking and bill-splitting with a group, importing reservations by forwarding e-mails or connecting Gmail, and a map view with route optimization and travel times. It also lists an AI assistant and offline access to trip plans, but Wanderlog's own pages don't say which of these sit behind Pro — third-party reviews report offline access and route optimization as Pro-only, though that isn't confirmed on Wanderlog's own site.

TripIt

TripIt's free plan lets you forward confirmation e-mails to build an itinerary, view trip details on the go, and send your plans to a calendar or to other people. That's a real, working free tier for one traveler organizing their own trip. TripIt Pro costs $49 a year after a 30-day free trial and adds real-time flight alerts, seat and fare trackers, a 24-hour flight check-in reminder, storage for up to 25 documents per trip, interactive maps for 103 airports, and "Inner Circle" so chosen people automatically see every trip you take. TripIt's pages are built around one person's itinerary — they don't describe group co-planning or splitting costs.

Roadtrippers

Roadtrippers is aimed squarely at road trips, with an option to let its Autopilot feature build a route or to plan stops yourself. The free plan gives you one saved trip with three stops, and no collaboration, export or navigation. Paid tiers scale up by year: Basic at $35.99 (3 trips, 20 stops), Pro at $49.99 (5 trips, 50 stops, plus collaboration, export and navigation), and Premium at $59.99 (unlimited trips, 150 stops, plus RV tools, live traffic and offline maps). If you want to share a route with travel companions or use it without signal, that's a paid tier, not the free one.

Splitwise

Splitwise does one job — splitting expenses with friends — and its free plan works, with ads and a cap on how many expenses you can add per day. Pro removes the ads and the daily cap, and adds receipt scanning, currency conversion, spending charts by category, itemizing a bill across people, expense search and custom default splits. It doesn't attempt itineraries, flights or documents at all, free or paid, so it's not really a competitor to the other four — more a companion tool people use alongside one.

Side by side

What to actually check before you commit

• Does the free tier let more than one person add things, or just view them?
• Is there a cap on trips, stops or expenses per day — and does it fit how you actually travel?
• Does offline access require the paid tier, which matters if you're relying on it abroad?
• Are flight alerts pushed to you automatically, or do you have to check manually?
• If you only need one feature — like splitting costs — does a single-purpose free app already cover it?

None of these apps is lying when it says "free" — but free plans are built to cover different amounts of ground. Tripperama's free plan is the only one of the five here where every core tab works without paying anything: transport, stays, activities, travelers, documents and expenses are all included, with the AI scanning and assistant available in limited amounts. What's held back for Pro are the automatic, always-on pieces — flight alerts that push themselves, weather and tide for every day, calendar sync and activity suggestions — rather than any of the core planning tabs.

Which one fits which trip

• Tripperama suits a group or solo trip where you want flights, stays, activities, documents and expenses together without paying for the basics.
• Wanderlog fits a trip built around a shared, collaborative itinerary with a map view and route optimization.
• TripIt fits a frequent flyer who wants one traveler's itinerary built from forwarded e-mails and shared with others.
• Roadtrippers fits a road trip where route planning and stop-by-stop mapping are the main job.
• Splitwise fits any trip, or non-trip situation, where the only thing you need is a fair way to split costs.