TripCount Blog

Splitwise alternatives in 2026: 8 apps that do not paywall the OCR

· By Albert Ripol

Splitwise has been the default answer to “how do we split this?” in English-speaking groups for over a decade. It earned that position — the algorithm is solid, the data model is correct, and the network effect is real. But the 2026 version of the same question has new constraints: privacy, multi-currency travel, regional payment rails, and — increasingly — the fact that Splitwise charges 5 USD a month for the receipt OCR that competitors now ship for free 1. Here is the honest tour.

“We’re a competitor and we still think Splitwise is a good product. We’re writing this guide because the category has moved and the canonical ‘just use Splitwise’ answer leaves money and privacy on the table for a lot of groups.” — Albert Ripol, founder of TripCount

The scoring rubric

Eight apps, scored 0-3 on five dimensions:

  1. Pricing for the things that matter (OCR, multi-currency, unlimited groups).
  2. End-to-end encryption of expense data.
  3. Multi-currency with live FX.
  4. Payout rails (Bizum / Revolut / PayPal / IBAN / cash-only).
  5. Languages, especially regional EU coverage.

Scoring is opinionated and based on the apps’ own published documentation as of May 2026.

AppPricingE2EEMulti-FXPayoutsLanguagesVibe
Splitwise1 (OCR paywalled)0212Solid but stale
Tricount (Bunq)30212Banking-app feel
Settle Up20112Capable, niche
Splid30102German-market focus
Spliit (open-source)30101OSS darling, rising
Cashio20111Mobile-first
Plates20111Restaurant-bill niche
TripCount (ours)33333EU-built, E2EE-first

(0 = absent, 3 = best-in-class.)

Splitwise (Splitwise, Inc.)

The category-defining product. The free tier still does the core split correctly. The paid tier (Pro, $5/month per Splitwise’s own pricing page 1) unlocks OCR, advanced charts, and currency conversion features that the free tier limits. The encryption story is “data is encrypted at rest”, not end-to-end — the backend can decrypt and does in order to run analytics and AI features. No Bizum. Solid English-first localization, weaker for Catalan, Basque, Galician and other regional EU languages.

Pick it if: your group is American, already uses Splitwise, and isn’t bothered by the OCR paywall. Skip it if: you want OCR free, end-to-end encryption, Bizum, or first-class regional EU languages.

Tricount (Bunq)

The European default. Bought by Bunq (Dutch neobank) in 2022. Free tier covers most use cases. OCR support is limited compared to Splitwise/TripCount. UX feels closer to a banking product than a travel-companion app since the acquisition — that helps trust but hurts the “we’re on holiday” mood. No E2EE. Strong Western European language coverage but, again, no Catalan or Basque.

Pick it if: you want free, you’re in Western Europe, and you trust Bunq with your trip data. Skip it if: you want OCR or regional EU languages.

Settle Up

Free, capable, multi-currency. Less polished than the top two but solid. Smaller team, slower update cycle. Multi-currency support is there but the live FX UX is dated.

Splid

German-market focused. Free, well-rated in the DACH region. Mobile-only, no real web app. Solid for German-speaking groups; less compelling outside.

Spliit (community open source)

The rising open-source contender. As of May 2026 it sits at the top of AlternativeTo’s “Splitwise alternatives” list, with the OSS-fan community driving votes. Hosted version is free; self-host possible. No E2EE. No native mobile app (PWA-style web). Catching up on features rapidly.

Pick it if: open-source matters to you and you’re willing to self-host (or trust the hosted instance).

Cashio, Plates and other niches

Mobile-first newcomers. Each occupies a sliver of the category (restaurant-bill split, dating-context split, etc.). None are general-purpose replacements for Splitwise yet.

TripCount (ours)

Built in Catalonia. Free OCR, free unlimited trips, end-to-end encrypted (per-trip envelope keys; expenses encrypted client-side with AES-GCM — open-source FastAPI backend (self-hostable)). Multi-currency with live FX captured per expense. One-tap payout via Bizum, Revolut and PayPal — no IBAN paste. 50 languages including first-class Catalan, Basque, Galician, Asturian, Occitan, Breton, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Frisian, Faroese and Romansh. PWA, no app store. EU-hosted (Hetzner Germany).

The pitch is simple: we built the thing we wanted as users, and we did not paywall the bits that actually matter. Read the feature page, or jump to the Splitwise comparison and Tricount comparison. If you want to try the math without signing up, the free split-bill calculator runs the same minimum-cash-flow algorithm in your browser.

Pick it if: you care about privacy, you’re in the EU (especially Spain/Catalonia), you cross currencies on trips, or your group speaks a regional language no one else covers. Skip it if: your entire group is already locked into Splitwise and you have zero appetite for a switching cost.

The structural argument for switching

Three trends make 2026 a different category than 2018:

  1. AI receipt OCR is cheap. Splitwise pricing it as a Pro feature was reasonable when OCR was a heavy-cost API call; in 2026, OpenAI Vision and equivalents have made it pennies per receipt. The paywall persists, but the cost rationale is gone.
  2. Privacy expectations have hardened. Pew Research Center Privacy and Information (2023) reports that 81% of Americans believe the risks of data collection outweigh the benefits 2. The same study finds that this share has been climbing year-on-year. E2EE for expense data is no longer a niche-nerd ask.
  3. Payment rails diversified. Bizum alone has 26+ million users in Spain (Bizum quarterly figures, Q4 2024 3). Revolut had over 50 million customers globally as of mid-2024 according to their own Revolut Investor Update materials 4. “We’ll just IBAN” is no longer the default in most EU groups.

The friction of switching is real, but for groups that haven’t fully invested in Splitwise history, the upgrade is straightforward.

How to actually switch

If you decide to move:

  1. Don’t migrate old trips. Pick one upcoming trip; run the new app there. If it works, the friends you traveled with will switch organically. Splitwise’s network effect is per-trip, not per-account.
  2. Export the open balance from your current app (Splitwise: settings → export). Anchor the new trip with the open balance as a single starting expense.
  3. Set the trip’s base currency before the first expense. This is the single biggest mistake people make in TripCount and presumably everywhere else.
  4. Agree the rail with the group. Bizum if eurozone-heavy; Revolut otherwise; PayPal as fallback.

Where the category goes next

Three predictions for the next 18 months:

  • OCR is table-stakes. Anyone still paywalling will lose the next cohort of trip-takers.
  • Privacy-as-default matters more. Apps without E2EE will have to defend the choice publicly. We expect at least one major competitor to add it within a year.
  • Regional payment rails become a feature, not a “nice to have”. Bizum/UPI/Pix/etc. coverage will become a selection criterion in their respective markets.

The category will not collapse to one winner. It will fragment by geography and trust profile. Pick the app that matches yours.

Sources

Disclosure: this post is written by the TripCount team, a competitor in the category. We have tried to score competitors fairly using their own published documentation, but our bias is real. Reviewed by the TripCount editorial team on 2026-05-17.

Footnotes

  1. Splitwise, Splitwise Pro pricing, observed at splitwise.com/pricing. ↩ ↩2

  2. Pew Research Center, Americans and Privacy: Concerned, Confused and Feeling Lack of Control Over Their Personal Information (2023). ↩

  3. Bizum quarterly figures (Q4 2024), corroborated via Statista Bizum: usuarios en España and Banco Santander annual report 2024. ↩

  4. Revolut, Annual Report and Investor Update (mid-2024 disclosures). ↩