Roadtrippers vs Wanderlog Pricing: Which to Buy

Roadtrippers Premium costs $59.99 a year and Wanderlog Pro costs $39.99 a year, both read off the vendors' own pricing pages in September 2026, and the $20 gap is the least useful fact in this comparison. The real difference is what each free tier still lets you do and what each paid tier is for. Roadtrippers is a road and RV tool whose free version now holds one trip with three stops. Wanderlog is a general trip planner whose free version holds the entire planning canvas. If you drive an RV, Roadtrippers Premium is the one worth paying for. If you plan any other kind of trip, Wanderlog's free tier will usually do, and Pro is a convenience upgrade rather than a necessity. Neither one prices the trip, which is the part most people were hoping to buy back.

Below is what each one costs, what the free versions cover after Roadtrippers changed its limits, a head to head on the things that differ, and a straight answer on which to buy for the trip you are actually planning.

Roadtrippers vs Wanderlog: what is the actual difference?

Roadtrippers is a route builder for driving. You set a start and an end, it draws the road, and you add stops from a database of 5 million points of interest that leans hard on the roadside: state parks, diners, giant fiberglass animals, overlooks, campgrounds. Its top tier adds RV specific routing that avoids low bridges and propane restricted roads, 50,000 plus campgrounds you can browse and book, 16,000 plus free overnight RV parking spots, live traffic and offline maps. Roadtrippers itself notes the RV routing warnings are US only.

Wanderlog is a planning canvas for any trip. You drop places onto a map, arrange them across days, see the itinerary and the map in a single view, collaborate live with whoever is coming, and import flight, hotel and car confirmations so the bookings sit inside the plan. It has a road trip mode, but it is not built around a vehicle, and it does not know or care whether you are towing anything.

That is the split. Roadtrippers is about the road between the places. Wanderlog is about the places and the days. A cross country RV trip lives in one, a week in Portugal lives in the other, and a four day drive through Utah in a rental car could reasonably live in either, which is where the pricing starts to matter.

How much does Roadtrippers cost?

Roadtrippers sells three paid tiers in 2026. Basic is $35.99 a year or $11.99 a month and holds 3 trips with 20 stops each, plus custom map styles and trip export. Pro is $49.99 a year or $16.99 a month, holds 5 trips with 50 stops each, and adds trip collaboration and navigation. Premium is $59.99 a year or $19.99 a month, holds unlimited trips with 150 stops each, and is the only tier with RV GPS, overnight RV parking, member deals, live traffic and offline maps.

The free tier is $0 and holds one saved trip with three stops. Every review that describes a free Roadtrippers plan with several trips in it is describing a limit that no longer exists, and if you last used the app on that older allowance, the plan you had in it is the reason you are now looking at prices.

The trial rules are worth knowing before you tap anything. A 7 day free trial exists on annual plans only, once per person, requires a card and converts to the full annual charge unless you cancel at least 24 hours before it ends. Monthly plans have no trial and bill immediately. Refunds are possible within 3 days of a new annual charge or 7 days of a renewal, once, and never on monthly plans. The full tier table and the refund policy in Roadtrippers' own words are on the Roadtrippers pricing page.

How much does Wanderlog Pro cost?

Wanderlog Pro is $39.99 per year, listed as "Pro Annual" on wanderlog.com/pro with a free trial offered before the charge. Wanderlog does not publish the trial length on that page, so do not assume it matches Roadtrippers' 7 days. Wanderlog is operated by Travelchime Inc. in San Francisco.

The free tier is the core product. It includes unlimited places, live collaboration with friends, importing flights, hotels and cars, smart recommendations, and the itinerary and map in one view. There is no trip count and no stop count to run into, which is the single biggest practical difference from Roadtrippers today.

Pro adds offline access on mobile, flight and car rental deals, unlimited attachments, export to Google Maps, route optimization, automatic Gmail scanning for reservations, dark mode, unlimited AI assistance, and adding places from anywhere on the web. Of those, route optimization and offline access are the two that a road tripper will actually notice. The rest are conveniences.

Roadtrippers Premium vs Wanderlog Pro compared

Is Roadtrippers or Wanderlog better for a road trip?

It depends on the vehicle more than the route. In an RV, a trailer or anything tall, Roadtrippers Premium is the better buy and it is not close. Low clearance routing, campground booking and free overnight parking are things Wanderlog does not attempt, and one avoided bridge pays for the year. Add the offline maps for the stretches with no signal and $59.99 is a reasonable line item for a rig that cost tens of thousands.

In a car, the answer flips more often than people expect. Wanderlog's free tier holds the whole trip, orders the days, shows the drive times between stops and lets a passenger edit the plan live. The thing it lacks is Roadtrippers' stop database, which is genuinely better at surfacing the odd roadside detour. A common and cheap setup is to use free Wanderlog for the plan and free Roadtrippers, with its three stop limit, purely as a place to look up what is worth a detour on tomorrow's leg.

If you want one paid app for a car road trip, Wanderlog Pro at $39.99 with route optimization and offline access covers more of the job than Roadtrippers Basic at $35.99, because Basic has no navigation, no collaboration and no offline maps. Roadtrippers only pulls ahead once you are in Premium, and Premium is priced for the RV features you would not use.

Is Wanderlog free?

Yes, and usably so. The free Wanderlog tier is not a trial and not a demo. It includes the planning canvas, unlimited places, the map and itinerary view, live collaboration and reservation import, which is the product most people are looking for. Pro exists for offline use, route optimization and the AI assistant, and you can plan and drive an entire trip without touching it.

Roadtrippers cannot honestly claim the same any more. One trip and three stops is a look at the map, not a plan. If "free" is the deciding factor, Wanderlog wins outright, and that is the wrong reason to pick a trip planner, because the hours you lose deciding the trip cost more than either subscription.

Roadtrippers vs Wanderlog for a working trip

A growing share of road trips are partly work: a photographer chasing fall color through Vermont, a consultant driving between client sites, a couple filming the van build for a channel that pays for the diesel. For that reader the comparison shifts slightly. Wanderlog's collaboration and reservation import make it easier to keep a shared, dated record of where you were and what was booked, which is what an accountant asks for in April. Roadtrippers' trip export on Basic and above does a similar job for the route itself.

If the trip is content, the sponsorship money and platform payouts that fund it are income you will need to report alongside the mileage you deduct, and keeping every payout in one income tracker for creators saves an ugly afternoon reconstructing it from six dashboards later. Neither trip app tracks what you earned or what you spent, which brings us to the thing they have in common.

What neither app does

Neither Roadtrippers nor Wanderlog prices the trip. There is no budget on a Wanderlog plan and no cost on a Roadtrippers stop. Neither will tell you what Tuesday costs, whether the three hikes and the brewery fit before check in, or that taking the scenic route adds a night of lodging you had not budgeted. Both tools assume you arrive already knowing what the days contain and only need help laying them out. For a lot of trips that assumption is wrong, and the deciding is the part that eats the evenings.

That planning and pricing half is what TripAgent.ai does. You give it the destination, the dates, the party, the total budget and the kind of trip, and it writes a day by day itinerary with morning, afternoon and evening blocks, a cost on every line, travel times between stops, and a total for each day and the trip. When something changes, you ask for that day to be rewritten and it is redrafted and repriced. It does not book anything and it does not route an RV, so it sits before Roadtrippers or Wanderlog in the workflow rather than replacing either. The road trip planner page shows what a priced driving itinerary looks like, and if you were already leaning toward Wanderlog and want the priced plan alongside it, the Wanderlog alternative page covers that pairing.

Which one should you buy?

Buy Roadtrippers Premium if you travel in an RV or tow anything, and cancel the idea of Basic, because the features that justify Roadtrippers over a free map are all in the top tier. Set a calendar reminder for day 5 of the trial, since it converts on its own and the refund window after that is three days.

Buy Wanderlog Pro if you road trip in a car and want offline maps and route optimization, or stay on free Wanderlog if you do not, because the free tier already holds the whole plan. Either way, use free Roadtrippers as a stop finder if you like its database, since three stops is enough for looking things up even if it is not enough for planning.

And if the reason you were comparing these two is that the trip still is not decided, neither app is where that gets solved. Draft and price the days first, then load the stops into whichever of these you drive with. For the other big comparison in this category, Wanderlog vs TripIt covers the post booking side, and TripIt Pro cost breaks down the third subscription road trippers tend to end up paying for.