Tricount alternatives: an honest comparison.
· 6 min read
Tricount earned its reputation honestly. It is one of the fastest ways to keep a holiday tally: make a group, add expenses, see who owes what, settle at the end. No account needed to get going, and it works well across a group where half the people will never open the app again.
The question most people arrive at isn't "is Tricount good?" — it's "why am I still using three other apps alongside it?"
What Tricount does well
- Low friction. A group can be running in under a minute.
- Trips. Its core model — one shared tally, settle at the end — matches how holidays actually work.
- Multi-currency. Useful the moment a trip crosses a border.
- Simple settling. It nets balances down to a short list of payments.
Where it runs out
Tricount is a tally, not a money app. It knows what your friends owe you. It knows nothing about your rent, your card balance, your salary date, or whether the $240 you're about to be paid back actually matters this month.
It also has one shape of group. Couples with a joint pot, roommates settling monthly, and a two-week trip are genuinely different situations, and forcing all three into one IOU ledger is why people end up with a second app for the couple stuff.
The alternatives, briefly
- Splitwise. Same category, bigger network, more paywalled features. Better for long-running debts between friends, still no view of your own money.
- A spreadsheet. Infinitely flexible, and abandoned by week two on every trip in history.
- A budgeting app (YNAB, Monarch). Strong personal finance, weak or missing group splitting.
- Junto. Both sides in one ledger — see below.
Tricount vs Junto
| Feature | Tricount | Junto |
|---|---|---|
| Trip and group tallies | Yes | Yes |
| Minimum-transfer settling | Yes | Yes |
| Multiple group modes | One model | Three modes |
| Your personal accounts and bills | No | Yes |
| Projected balance after bills | No | Yes |
| Bank linking | No | Not yet |
Which one should you use
If all you ever need is a two-week holiday tally with people you rarely share money with, Tricount is fine and you should keep it.
If your money touches other people's money regularly — a partner, a flat, a recurring group — a tally on its own isn't enough. You end up reconciling it against your bank app by hand, which is the work you were trying to avoid.
How Junto is different
Junto puts group splitting and personal finance in the same ledger. Three group modes cover the real situations: Shared Pool for couples and families, Expense Tracking for roommates, and Track Only for trips — the closest match to how Tricount works. Settlement uses a minimum-transaction engine, so squaring up is one or two payments.
Underneath, Junto also tracks your own accounts, cards, bills, and recurring income, so you can see the projected balance after your bills clear — with your share of the group included, not sitting in another app.
Junto launches 1 October. No bank linking yet — you enter transactions yourself. The free plan includes personal finance and up to 3 groups.