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Wanderlog and TripIt alternatives for travelling with friends

Wanderlog's free tier already does the thing most people believe they are paying for: real-time co-editing of one itinerary with everyone on the trip. Forward TripIt a booking confirmation and it hands back one ordered trip, also free. If you want off both, three replacements hold up. Pilot (free outright, no paid tier), Lambus (German, and one person's PRO purchase covers everyone on that trip), and a shared Google Maps list, which costs nothing and holds places instead of dates. All of them start after you and your friends have agreed on the dates. Working out whose separate trip lands in your city on your days is still a group chat and a screenshot.

Prices below come from App Store and Google Play listings and the companies' own pages, opened on 6 September 2026, rather than from other people's blog posts. One of those blog posts, weplanify.com, prices Wanderlog Pro at $8 a month. The App Store says $5.99.

What Pro actually costs, and what it buys

TripIt Pro renews at $48.99 a year. That figure is in TripIt's own App Store description, in these words: "Your TripIt Pro subscription will be good for 1 year, and automatically renew each year at $48.99 unless you turn off auto-renew at least 24 hours before your term ends." Third-party pages round it to $49. What the money buys is flight-status alerts, fare refund monitoring, reward-point tracking, airport maps and disruption alerts, all of it aimed at somebody who flies constantly and alone. TripIt has been shipping since 10 April 2009, its current build is 20.7.1 from 24 July 2026, Google Play shows over five million installs, and the app's own copy claims nearly 20 million travellers. If you fly most weeks, $48.99 for disruption alerts is money well spent. Nobody in a group of five going to Lisbon for a long weekend opens a single one of those features.

The free tier is already useful. Forward a confirmation to plans@tripit.com and TripIt gives you the itinerary, offline reservation details, maps and directions, calendar sync and sharing.

Wanderlog Pro is $5.99 a month. Annual is where the comparison pages stop checking. The US App Store lists four separate annual tiers between $31.99 and $59.99, one of them labelled "Annual Plan with 20% discount" at $39.99. So "about $40 a year" is the honest way to write it. Google Play shows in-app purchases running from $1.99 to $79.99 and over a million installs. The two Pro features Wanderlog's description names sit in one sentence: "With Pro, you can also export your trip to Google Maps and link your Gmail account." The group feature stays free, described on the same listing as "Planning group travel? Invite friends and collaborate in real-time just (like Google Docs)".

The alternatives, side by side

Pilot is free in the way people mean when they say free

Pilot: Group Trip Planner comes from Happyhour Services Inc., landed on the App Store on 4 April 2024, and was last updated on 28 August 2026. Web, iPhone and Android. Its pricing page says "Pilot is free" and then, in case that was ambiguous, "No strings attached, zero dollars." The FAQ repeats it: "Yes, Pilot is completely free to use with no hidden fees."

The money comes from somewhere else. Pilot sources group hotel rates once you are booking eight rooms or more, and it sells full-service retreat planning at $49 per attendee per night. Neither of those touches five people going to Vienna, which makes it the cleanest swap for a group that does not want a paid tier hanging over the trip.

Lambus, and the pricing question nobody answers

Lambus GmbH shipped its app on 9 March 2019 and pushed version 13.0.0 on 15 August 2026. Google Play shows over 100,000 installs and in-app purchases between $3.99 and $99.99.

Lambus does not publish a price. Its support page, last updated the same day I read it on 6 September 2026, says "The price of Lambus PRO always depends on your local currency and selected PRO package." There are monthly and yearly plans plus a one-time lifetime upgrade, and the detail that makes Lambus interesting for a group is this line from the same page: "All PRO upgrades allow your whole trip to benefit from your upgrade." One person pays, everybody on that trip gets the paid features. I dislike unpublished pricing on principle and this is the one implementation of it I would still recommend a group try.

One correction while I am here. The domain is lambus.com. Older write-ups link to lambus.io, which does not resolve.

Searching for Sygic Travel in 2026 means searching for a name that is gone

On 11 November 2024 the app rebranded: "On November 11, 2024, Sygic Travel mobile and web apps rebranded to Tripomatic and separated from the Sygic brand." Existing users had to migrate by signing in again. The App Store listing is the same one it always was, id 519058033, first released 24 April 2012, now published by Tripomatic s.r.o., version 26.5.5 from 26 August 2026, free.

Any comparison page still telling you to download Sygic Travel has not opened that listing in about twenty-two months.

Troupe has no website left to open

JetBlue Travel Products launched Troupe on 21 September 2022, a free app for suggesting, voting and commenting on dates and destinations as a group. The press release called it "a collaborative trip planning app that takes the stress out of group travel." A reasonable idea, with an airline subsidiary paying for it.

On 6 September 2026 troupe.com has no A record for the apex or for www. Cloudflare nameservers are still configured and nothing serves a website. A fetch fails with ENOTFOUND, no Troupe group-trip app shows up in a US App Store search, and the last Wayback capture of the homepage is 27 March 2025. I found no shutdown announcement, so I am not going to print a date or the word closed. It did not answer this week, and weplanify.com's roundup, updated 5 May 2026, still lists it as a live recommendation.

Google Maps lists cost nothing and do a third of the job

A list in Google Maps can be Private or Shared by link, and Google's own help page tells you how to make it collaborative: "If you want others to collaborate on the list, tap Invite collaborators instead." Everyone with view access sees who else joined, because "Anyone who can view your lists can also view the names and profile pictures of people who have joined the list." Worth knowing before you invite a work colleague to the bachelor party list.

A list holds no dates. For a weekend where the plan is "these eight places, whichever ones we get to", it beats installing anything, and I would use it over Wanderlog for a two-day city break with one other person.

The gap that every page on this query shares

Search "wanderlog vs tripit" and the first page is seven blogs belonging to rival planners, with no major travel brand among them. monkeyeatingmango.com, updated on 17 August 2026, runs a clean feature table and then pitches its own AI itinerary generator. weplanify.com, updated 5 May 2026, concludes that the best group trip planner of 2026 is the company publishing the page.

Every one of those pages defines group travel as several people editing one document. Which leaves a request from r/travel in January 2021 unanswered five years later: "an app that helps you coordinate dates amongst the group... selecting all of the dates you CAN travel and then the app tells you what overlapped?"

From r/digitalnomad in December 2024: "Got many moments where I found out a friend was nearby but left already." Six years earlier, on r/AppIdeas in June 2018, somebody had already filed the same complaint: "Just random found out from an Instagram post but would have been cool to know ahead of time." I read the store listings and marketing pages of Wanderlog, TripIt, Pilot and Lambus on 6 September 2026. Date matching against somebody else's separate trip appears on none of them.

Look at what people recommend. The r/TravelHacks thread "What are your must have travel apps?" from April 2025 pulled 441 upvotes and 214 comments, and the names in it are Google My Maps, Splitwise, TripIt, Wanderlog, Citymapper, AllTrails and Google Translate. That is a complete itinerary stack, and none of those seven names answers who else will be in town.

Where Will U Be There fits in this list

Will U Be There takes a city and two dates, and that is the whole of what you give it. A friend files theirs the same way. When the two land within 100 km of each other on days that touch, both of you get a push notification. Miss each other by up to about a week and it flags the near miss, which is when the flight is still cheap to move. Your friend sees the overlapping city and those dates. Nothing else in your trip list is visible to anyone.

The app never receives your location, because a city name and two dates is the entire input. There is no GPS permission to grant. It cannot show a friend where you are standing, since it does not have that. Friends who are not on it yet get a link instead of a pitch: make a group for the ski week or the conference, send that one link, and anybody who joins shows up in your matches without friend requests going back and forth, up to 200 people to a group. It runs on iPhone and Android, free, no ads, no in-app purchases, in 17 languages, with data hosted in the EU. What gets stored is listed on the privacy first page.

It builds no itinerary at all. There is nothing in it for bookings, route maps, packing lists, expense splitting or offline maps. Keep Wanderlog or Pilot for the itinerary. Splitwise still does the money. Will U Be There vs TripIt puts the two jobs in one table, and the wider field of planners, pollers and expense apps is in group trip planning apps compared.

What it adds on top of the matching is events. Concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of where you are staying and inside your dates, drawn from more than 200,000 upcoming events across 57 countries and over 360 hand-picked sources, many of them free. Coverage is uneven and some cities are thin.

The near-miss flag only reaches about a week either side, so a trip added the night before you fly matches nothing. The case I have not solved is the friend who books in October and mentions it in December, since nothing in the app reads an inbox the way TripIt does.