Tricount vs Lumela: Which App Should Run Your Group Trip?

Two apps, two different jobs#

Search "how to split costs on a trip" and Tricount comes up almost every time — it has been the default expense-splitting app for a decade, and its 2026 relaunch under bunq made it fully free again after a rocky stretch. If your group's only problem is "who owes who," it's a perfectly reasonable pick.

But a group trip is rarely only a money problem. There's also "where is everyone right now," "what day are we doing the hike," and "who has the tickets." Lumela was built to hold all of that in one place, expenses included. Here's an honest look at where each app actually stands today, not from memory — checked against Tricount's own help center and site, and against Lumela's shipped features.

What Tricount does well#

Tricount's core loop is genuinely good: create a "tricount," share one link, and anyone can join and log expenses in equal, percentage, or custom splits — no account required to participate. Multi-currency is handled properly, expenses can be logged offline, and the balance screen shows a clean "who owes what." As of its 2026 relaunch it's free for everyone: Tricount Premium was discontinued, and the app is now positioned as free-with-no-hidden-costs rather than freemium.

That relaunch has a catch worth knowing before you commit a trip's finances to it: several features that used to sit behind Premium — CSV/PDF export, personal mode, saved custom splits — were removed outright rather than unlocked for free users, with statistics and custom-split saving listed as "coming later." Former Premium subscribers were compensated with a few months of bunq's banking product, which tells you where the company's business actually is. It's also worth flagging, fairly: multiple recent App Store and Play Store reviews report sync problems when two or more people edit the same trip at once, including a few reports of expenses disappearing mid-trip. That's not universal — plenty of trips run through Tricount without incident — but if your group edits heavily and simultaneously, it's worth a short test run before you lean on it during the actual trip.

Where Tricount stops#

Tricount's own site doesn't claim, and doesn't do: live location sharing, a day-by-day itinerary, document or ticket storage, or checklists. That's not a criticism — it was never trying to be a trip-planning app, just an expense-splitting one. But it means a group that also wants to know where everyone is at a festival, keep the flight itinerary straight across time zones, or find the hostel booking without digging through email ends up running a second app alongside it, with its own group chat, its own invite, and its own place for things to go out of sync.

Feature-by-feature#

When Tricount is the right call#

If a trip's only shared logistics problem is the money — a weekend where everyone's already booked their own flights and just needs to settle a few dinners and an Airbnb — Tricount's one-link, no-signup flow is hard to beat for speed. It's also a reasonable pick for non-travel shared expenses (a flat, a recurring group purchase) where location and itinerary features would just be clutter.

When Lumela is the right call#

If the trip has more moving parts than a single expense pool — multiple days, a group spread across a city or a festival site, tickets and bookings that need to survive a dead phone signal — Lumela keeps expenses, the schedule, live location, and documents in the same group instead of splitting them across apps. It's also free today, with no Premium tier to discontinue out from under you: the current features aren't a trial for a paywall that hasn't shipped yet.

Can you just use both?#

Some groups try running Tricount for money and a group chat for everything else, and that's the status quo Lumela is actually competing with — not Tricount alone. The problem isn't Tricount itself, it's the seam between two tools: the itinerary lives in one thread, the tickets in an email, the balance in an app nobody else opens until the last night. Consolidating expenses, schedule, and location into one group doesn't just save an app download — it means one invite link gets everyone into everything, instead of onboarding a group of ten into two separate tools before the trip even starts.

The bottom line#

Neither app is wrong. Tricount is a mature, focused tool for splitting a bill, and its 2026 relaunch made it free again after a confusing Premium phase — that's worth crediting. Lumela starts from the same free expense-splitting job and adds the rest of what a group trip actually needs: knowing where people are, what's happening today, and where the tickets went. For a trip that's genuinely just about the money, Tricount will do the job in under a minute. For everything a trip usually turns into, one app tends to hold up better than two.