A side-by-side review of the three big expense splitters in 2026 - what each does well, where each falls short, and how to choose.
Three apps own the expense-splitting category in 2026. Splitwise is the household name. Tricount is the European alternative. Kittysplit is the minimal one. Each one made deliberate decisions, and each one has a different shape because of it.
We made a fourth one. Below is the honest comparison - what each does well, where each falls short, and where EvenRound loses.
Splitwise is the most full-featured but increasingly paywalled. Tricount is the no-signup European option, slightly stagnant since N26 acquired it. Kittysplit is the simplest by design - and sometimes too simple. EvenRound is closest to "Tricount with modern AI"; we lose to Splitwise on raw feature breadth and to Kittysplit on raw simplicity.
Splitwise has the most breadth. Every feature you might want for expense splitting exists somewhere in the app. The settle-up algorithm is solid. The category system is detailed. The recurring-bills feature is excellent. It integrates with Pay-friends, Venmo, and dozens of other rails.
It also has by far the largest network effect. If you're splitting with people who use any expense-splitter, the modal answer is "they have Splitwise installed". That matters - the app you don't have to convince anyone to install is the easy default.
The free-tier paywall, introduced in late 2024, caps casual users at 4 expenses per day. For a flatshare or a couple, that's plenty. For a 5-day group holiday, you'll hit the cap by day two and then start seeing nag screens.
Receipt scanning is paywalled. Currency conversion is paywalled. Save for later (offline expense entry) is paywalled. The free tier is functional but increasingly tricky.
Pro is £4/month or £40/year, which most people who split regularly happily pay. But the company's direction of travel is more paywalled features, not fewer.
The signup requirement is also non-trivial friction. To add someone to your group, they need a Splitwise account. For casual one-off groups (a wedding party, a single trip), that's a real barrier.
Anyone who splits with the same group of people often, where the whole group is happy to have accounts and pay for Pro. The feature breadth is genuinely the best in the category, and the £4/month is small relative to the time saved.
No signup. You create a group with a URL, share it, everyone joins. This single decision is a massive UX win for casual groups. It's also the model we adopted for EvenRound.
Tricount handles multi-currency well. It supports recurring expenses. The interface is clean and feels like a native app. It's by far the most popular expense-splitter in France-speaking Europe and parts of Germany.
Development effectively stopped after the N26 acquisition in 2022. The app still works, but it hasn't added meaningful new features since. Receipt scanning is OCR-based and from the pre-multimodal era; accuracy is in the 60-70% range.
The settle-up algorithm is fine but doesn't prioritise minimum transfers as aggressively as Splitwise.
Tricount is also ad-supported, and the ads are programmatic - so the placements are sometimes for products that feel out of place in a friend-money context (gambling, payday loans, etc).
European users (especially francophone) who want a no-signup splitter and don't need cutting-edge AI. The feature set is plenty for the typical group trip; the ads are tolerable for the no-cost no-signup trade.
We covered the post-acquisition state in more detail in Tricount after the N26 acquisition: what changed.
Kittysplit is the minimum viable expense splitter. A single page. A list of names. A list of expenses. A "calculate" button. No accounts, no apps, no ads, no upsells. It does not even have a mobile app - it's a website that works fine on a phone.
For a one-off group trip with friends who'll never use it again, Kittysplit is genuinely the right answer. It loads in under a second, you can be set up in 30 seconds, and there's nothing to remove from your phone afterwards.
It's also entirely free, run as a labour of love by a tiny team. No ads, no paywall, no data sales. We respect them enormously.
The minimalism is also the limit. No multi-currency conversion. No receipt scanning. No recurring expenses. No comments. No balance graphs. No category tagging.
For ongoing relationships - flatshares, couples, regular trip groups - Kittysplit is too thin. You'll outgrow it in a month.
One-off events. A weekend trip with friends you'll see again but not split with again. A wedding-week shared budget. Anything where the goal is to be done with the app in 7-14 days.
Three things, honestly.
No-signup model + modern AI.We took Tricount's no-signup approach (URL is a group, magic-link invites, no accounts) and combined it with 2024-era multimodal receipt scanning. Both work without making anyone create an account, and the receipt scanner uses Claude rather than rules-based OCR. We're the only one of these four with both.
Settle-up deep links.When the algorithm tells you to send Sam £42, you tap a button and Wise / PayPal / Revolut / Monzo opens with the amount and recipient pre-filled. Splitwise has this; Tricount doesn't; Kittysplit doesn't. It's the single biggest UX improvement over the manual "open another app, copy the amount, paste, send" flow.
Insights without paywalls. Spend-by-member, spend-over-time, and spend-by-category charts are free for every group, no Pro tier. We covered the algorithm side of this in the greedy debt-minimisation algorithm, explained for non-coders.
Network effect.Splitwise is the default. If you ask "do you have an expense splitter?" and they say yes, they have Splitwise. We're new and unknown. The cost of switching is the cost of getting your group onto a different app.
Feature breadth.Splitwise has more granular category management, more reporting options, more rails for settle-up, deeper integration with banks. We're newer and narrower.
Mobile native app.We don't have one yet. We're a PWA - which means we install to home screen and feel native, but we don't appear in the App Store. For some users, "is it on the App Store?" is a barrier we haven't crossed.
Maturity.We're a few months old. There will be edge cases we haven't hit. Splitwise has been battle-tested by 80 million users. We have not.
People who liked Tricount, miss the rate of development, and want AI to do the boring parts of bill-splitting (reading receipts, parsing "split £42 dinner with Sam"). Also: anyone tired of Splitwise's 4-expense-per-day cap who doesn't want to pay £40/year for the privilege of removing it.
If we were starting again, we'd ship a native mobile app sooner. PWAs are technically excellent and we love them, but a meaningful share of users genuinely won't use anything that isn't in the App Store. Crossing that bar is on the roadmap.
If after reading the above EvenRound sounds like the right fit, create a group. Free, no signup, instant. If it's not, the comparison hopefully helped you pick the one that is - we genuinely don't mind which.
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