Best travel planning apps › Wanderlog vs TripIt

Checked against both apps' own pages on November 14, 2026

Wanderlog vs TripIt

Choose Wanderlog to decide what you'll do each day, and TripIt to keep the bookings you've already made. Wanderlog puts places on a map, day by day, and friends edit with you for free. TripIt turns forwarded confirmation emails into one itinerary and, with Pro at $49 a year, watches your flights. You can use both.

The difference in one trip

Say four friends are going to Lisbon for five days. Two flights and an apartment are booked, and nothing else is decided.

In Wanderlog, one person makes the trip and invites the others by email or a link. Everyone adds the places they want to see, and the app pins each one on a Google Maps-based map, with times and distances between stops so you can tell whether a day fits. Someone sets a budget, logs the dinner bill, and the app works out who owes whom. All of that is on the free plan, according to Wanderlog's App Store description.

In TripIt, each person forwards their flight confirmation to plans@tripit.com, or lets TripIt pick it up from their inbox, and gets a tidy itinerary with times and confirmation numbers they can read offline. What it doesn't do is help the four of you agree on Tuesday. Nothing on TripIt's how-it-works or pricing pages is about choosing what to do.

Pick by which half is harder: deciding, or keeping track.

Wanderlog and TripIt, side by side

From each company's pricing page and US App Store listing, read November 14, 2026.

Importing bookings

Both apps read a confirmation email you forward, at no charge. The difference is the automatic version. TripIt's free plan "adds plans from your inbox for you", in the words of its pricing page. Wanderlog keeps "Auto Gmail scanning" for Pro, and its privacy policy says it parses those emails with OpenAI's help to spot travel receipts.

If you book a lot and never want to think about forwarding, TripIt does it free. For a couple of trips a year, forwarding a few emails to either app takes a minute.

Planning the days

Wanderlog is built around a list of days next to a map. You drag places between days, add start and end times, and see the travel time between stops. Road trips get unlimited stops on the free plan, and Pro adds a route optimizer that reorders a day for you. A November 4 update added "Import from anywhere": paste a link or share a reel and Wanderlog drafts an itinerary from it.

TripIt's itinerary is your bookings in time order. You can see them on a map and look up what's near your hotel, but the gaps between a flight and a check-in are yours to fill somewhere else.

Watching flights

TripIt Pro's $49 pays for flight watching. It sends real-time flight alerts, finds alternate flights when one goes wrong, reminds you to check in, tells you when to leave for the airport, guides you to a connecting gate, and checks whether a fare dropped enough for a refund. Wanderlog's Pro page lists none of that. If your company uses SAP Concur, check before paying: the App Store listing says some Concur users get TripIt Pro free.

Using them offline

TripIt's App Store listing says you can find your reservation details "even when you're offline", with no mention of Pro. Wanderlog's answer depends on which page you read. Its Pro page lists offline access as a paid feature, while its App Store description says plans are "automatically stored offline". A separate page sets out every page Wanderlog wrote about offline and what Pro costs. Before a trip with patchy signal, open your plan in airplane mode and find out.

What each costs for one trip, and for a year

For a single trip, both free plans cover the basics. If you want Wanderlog's offline or route optimizer for one trip, a month at $16.99 is cheaper than the year at $39.99, provided you cancel before it renews. TripIt has no monthly plan, so Pro is $49 whether you fly once or forty times, after a free trial.

For someone who flies every month, TripIt Pro is about $4 a month for flight alerts across every trip. For a family that takes two holidays a year, Wanderlog's free plan probably covers everything.

Using them together

If you use both, split the work. Plan the days in Wanderlog with whoever's coming. Let TripIt collect the flights and hotel from your inbox and watch the flights on the travel day.

If you want only one app, choose by your biggest worry: a missed connection points to TripIt, and arriving with no plan points to Wanderlog.

When neither fits

TripIt starts from what you've booked, and Wanderlog mostly from places you add, though its new import can draft days from a link or reel. If what you want is a whole trip drafted for you to edit, a planner such as Highlights works the other way round: you describe the trip in a sentence, or paste a TikTok, Instagram or YouTube video, and Sally, its balloon guide, lays out each day on a map with real places. For a group like the four in Lisbon, friends open one link and tap Going, Maybe or Can't go, with no app or account. It plans 3 new trips every 30 days for free, and Highlights Pro is $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year. It imports no bookings, friends can't edit the plan, and it doesn't split costs, so it doesn't replace either app here.

If a spreadsheet already works for your group, see an itinerary app against a spreadsheet.

Questions people ask

Where this came from

Published by Winding AI, Inc., the company that makes Highlights. Highlights is a trip planner, so it competes with Wanderlog for some trips. Winding AI makes money from Highlights Pro and paid plans, and from commissions when someone books a hotel or flight through a link inside Highlights. Nobody paid for this page, and there are no affiliate links.

We read Wanderlog's Pro page, TripIt's pricing page and both US App Store listings on November 14, 2026, signed out and without installing either app. That makes this a comparison of what each company says its app does. If something here is wrong, write to support@winding.ai.

Wanderlog and TripIt are two of the nine travel planning apps compared on this site by the way people plan. Their sites: wanderlog.com and tripit.com.