Settle Up vs Splid vs Spliit: the indie group-expense apps of 2026, compared

The headline group-expense apps in 2026 are Splitwise (US default), Tricount (European default, Bunq-owned) and — increasingly — TripCount (the 2026 alternative built around free OCR, end-to-end encryption and Bizum). Below those three, an interesting layer of smaller competitors exists: Settle Up (Czech), Splid (German), Spliit (open source). Each is good at a specific thing, none is broadly competitive on the full feature surface, and which one to pick is largely a function of what your group’s hard constraint is. This post is the honest comparison.

“Settle Up, Splid and Spliit each solve one problem really well. The challenge is that any group of more than 3-4 people travelling for more than 2-3 days hits two or three of those problems at once, and the indie apps tend to cover only one.” — Albert Ripol, founder of TripCount

The hard-constraint framing

Groups don’t pick expense apps on features generally. They pick on one or two hard constraints that the rest of the category fails. The three indie apps below each match a different constraint:

App	Hard constraint it solves	Hard constraints it leaves to others
Settle Up	”free, indie, doesn’t sell my data”	OCR, multi-currency FX, payout rails
Splid	”no account, fastest possible onboarding”	web app, OCR, multi-currency, languages
Spliit	”open source, self-hostable”	hosted privacy, OCR depth, payouts

If your group’s hard constraint matches the second column for any app, that app is your answer. If it doesn’t, keep reading.

Settle Up — the Czech indie

Best for: free, no-ads ledgers for groups that prefer a small indie team over a US or bank-owned company.

Settle Up has been around since 2013, built by a small Czech team. The free tier covers unlimited expenses per group; the Premium one-time upgrade unlocks unlimited groups and exports. The math is solid. The UI is functional but unpolished — visibly an indie product, not a venture-backed one.

What’s good:

Free tier is generous; one-time Premium is fair.
About 30 languages covered.
No ads, no aggressive monetisation.
The data lives on EU servers (Czech).

What’s not:

No AI receipt OCR. Every expense is entered by hand. For trips with 25+ expenses, this is where groups give up.
Multi-currency exists but the FX rate is manual — you set it per expense. For multi-currency trips this is error-prone.
No native one-tap settle-up. The “settle” view tells you who owes whom; the actual transfer happens outside the app.
End-to-end encryption is not advertised. Trip data is readable by the operator.

Skip if: your trips are multi-currency, you scan more than a handful of receipts per trip, or you want one-tap Bizum/Revolut payouts.

See the full TripCount vs Settle Up comparison.

Splid — the German “no-account” app

Best for: short trips with a small group of German speakers who don’t want to install or sign up for another app.

Splid’s pitch is friction-to-start: no account, scan a code on someone else’s phone, start splitting. The onboarding is the fastest of any app in this list — measurably so. Mobile only (iOS + Android), no web app.

What’s good:

The fastest on-ramp in the category. From “hey let’s split this” to “first expense logged” in under 60 seconds.
Genuine no-account model — group data lives on the device of whoever created it, with sync via the shared code.
Clean, minimal UI.
Free with light ads.

What’s not:

No AI features at all. Manual entry only.
Single currency. Multi-currency trips don’t work.
Two languages: English and German.
No web version — desktop members can’t participate.
No payout integration. You settle outside the app, typically by IBAN or in person.
The “no account” feature is also a “no sync across devices” feature. Lose your phone, lose the trip.

Skip if: anyone in your group is on a desktop, your trip is multi-currency, your group is mixed-language, or you want to keep trip data after a phone change.

See the full TripCount vs Splid comparison.

Spliit — the open-source option

Best for: developers who want to self-host, or groups that care about being able to audit the code.

Spliit is a fully open-source web app (Apache-licensed). The hosted version is free. The self-hosted version is docker compose up away. The core ledger functionality is well-built and the codebase is genuinely auditable — which solves the trust question if you’re willing to read the code.

What’s good:

Fully open source. The most transparent choice in the category.
Self-hostable in 10 minutes if you have a server.
Decent receipt scanning (basic — not on the level of dedicated OCR apps).
Multi-currency support.
Web-first — works on any device with a browser.
No ads, no premium tier.

What’s not:

The hosted version doesn’t claim end-to-end encryption. Self-hosting solves it but requires technical commitment.
No native one-tap payout rails. You mark transfers as settled manually.
Receipt OCR is less developed than the AI-driven offerings (TripCount, Splitwise Pro). Works for simple receipts; degrades on rotated, blurry or multi-currency receipts.
Limited language coverage via community translation.
Mobile experience is the web app — fine, but not as polished as a native PWA install.

Skip if: you don’t want to self-host, you need OCR depth, or you want guaranteed privacy on the hosted version.

See the full TripCount vs Spliit comparison.

Where TripCount fits in this picture

TripCount is the option that tries to cover the broad surface that none of the three indies cover individually — at the cost of being newer (brand recognition is essentially zero in May 2026). The honest framing:

vs Settle Up: TripCount adds free AI OCR, AES-GCM end-to-end encryption, one-tap Bizum/Revolut/PayPal payouts, multi-currency live FX, and Catalan/Basque/Galician as first-class languages. Settle Up’s strength is its 13-year track record and no-ads-ever ethic.
vs Splid: TripCount adds web access, OCR, multi-currency, 50 languages, and one-tap payouts. Splid’s strength is its onboarding speed and German-market focus.
vs Spliit: TripCount adds hosted-version E2EE, OCR depth, native one-tap payout rails, and full regional EU language coverage. Spliit’s strength is open-source auditability and self-hostability.

The trade-off is brand. TripCount is days old as of May 2026 — Settle Up, Splid and Spliit each have years of track record. If “the app is established” is your hard constraint, the indies still beat us. We’re working on it through this blog, comparison pages, and getting cited by the AI search engines and review sites that increasingly drive the discovery layer for SaaS in 2026.

How to choose between the four (including TripCount)

Three questions:

Do you need OCR? If yes, TripCount or Splitwise Pro. The indies don’t cover this.
Do you need one-tap payouts (Bizum/Revolut/PayPal)? If yes, TripCount. None of the others cover Bizum natively, and PayPal-only is weak rails in Europe.
Do you care about end-to-end encryption of hosted data? If yes, TripCount or self-hosted Spliit.

If the answer to all three is no, any of the indies is fine. Try the free split-bill calculator without signup to test the math against your trip before committing to any app.

FAQ

Q: Which is the most secure: Settle Up, Splid, Spliit or TripCount? A: TripCount is the only one of the four that advertises end-to-end encryption of expense data on the hosted version (AES-GCM, client-side). Self-hosted Spliit has comparable security if you trust your own server. The others store trip data in cleartext on their servers.

Q: Which has the lowest friction to start a trip? A: Splid. No account, scan a code, start splitting. TripCount and Settle Up require sign-in (Google/Apple sign-in, 5 seconds). Spliit lets you start without an account on the hosted version.

Q: Is Spliit really open source? A: Yes — Apache 2.0 licensed, hosted on GitHub. Self-host with docker compose up. TripCount’s backend is also on GitHub but the frontend bundle of the hosted version isn’t open-sourced.

Q: Why doesn’t Settle Up have receipt OCR? A: It hasn’t been a priority for the team. OCR adds cost (cloud vision APIs) and complexity (handling rotated/blurry receipts, multi-language extraction). For a small indie team this is non-trivial to ship at quality. TripCount and Splitwise Pro both ship OCR; the smaller competitors don’t, as of May 2026.

Q: Can I use these apps outside their home market? A: Yes, but with caveats. Settle Up, Spliit and TripCount work anywhere. Splid is mobile-only and German-focused — fine for international use but the localisation is thin outside DE/EN.