Wanderlog vs TripIt: Pricing and Which to Buy

Wanderlog Pro costs $39.99 a year and TripIt Pro costs $49 a year, both verified on the vendors' own pricing pages in September 2026, and both have a permanently free tier that is more capable than most comparisons admit. The $9 difference is not the reason to pick one. These two apps sit on opposite sides of the booking: Wanderlog is where you decide the trip, and TripIt is where you monitor a trip you have already booked. TripIt says so itself in the first line of its own FAQ, "You handle the booking, we'll take it from there." So the question is not which app is better, it is which half of the problem is costing you time.

Below is the price of each, what the free tiers actually cover, the head to head on the things that differ, and an honest answer on when running both beats picking one.

Wanderlog vs TripIt: what is the actual difference?

Wanderlog is a planning canvas. You drop places onto a map, arrange them across days, see the itinerary and the map in one view, collaborate live with whoever you are travelling with, and let it optimize the driving order. It is built for the stage where nothing is booked yet and the trip is still an argument about whether Thursday works.

TripIt is an itinerary organizer with a travel day alert layer. You forward confirmation emails to [email protected] and it assembles them into a clean timeline. Pay for Pro and it starts watching that timeline: flight status, gate changes, a prompt telling you when to leave for the airport, walking directions inside the terminal, baggage claim location when you land.

Read the feature lists side by side and neither company is hiding this. Wanderlog's paid tier adds route optimization, offline access, Google Maps export and AI assistance. Every single one of TripIt Pro's paid features requires a reservation to already exist. Seat Tracker needs a seat you booked. Fare Tracker needs a fare you paid. That is a category difference, not a feature gap.

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 treat it as unknown rather than assuming it matches anyone else's.

The free Wanderlog tier is not a crippled demo. It includes unlimited places, live collaboration with friends, importing flights, hotels and cars, smart recommendations, and the itinerary and map in a single view. That is the core planning product, given away.

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 the ability to add places from anywhere on the web. Wanderlog is operated by Travelchime Inc. in San Francisco.

How much does TripIt Pro cost?

TripIt Pro is $49 per year, billed as one annual charge that renews automatically, after a 30 day free trial. There is no monthly option, so you cannot buy it for a single busy travel month and drop it afterwards. Our full breakdown of the plan, the 16 features it adds and the refund policy is on the TripIt Pro cost page.

One detail deserves flagging before you start that trial, because it is written down and rarely repeated. TripIt's billing help article states that "Subscription costs already charged to your credit card are non-refundable. This includes charges that were made due to not canceling your free trial prior to the end of the trial period." Forgetting to cancel costs the full $49 and TripIt tells you in advance it will not give it back. Set a reminder at day 25.

TripIt is owned by Concur Technologies, part of SAP, which the copyright line on every tripit.com page confirms. If your employer runs SAP Concur, ask whether Pro is already covered before you expense it yourself.

Wanderlog Pro vs TripIt Pro compared

Is Wanderlog free?

Yes, permanently. The free tier gives you unlimited places, live collaboration, reservation import, smart recommendations and the combined itinerary and map view. For a single well planned trip with a couple of friends, the free tier is genuinely enough, and plenty of people never upgrade.

The upgrade case is narrower than the marketing implies. Route optimization matters if you are driving between many stops. Offline access matters if you are going somewhere without reliable data. Google Maps export matters if your travel companions live in Maps and will not install another app. If none of those three describe your trip, the $39.99 is buying convenience rather than capability.

TripIt vs Wanderlog for business travel

For work trips the answer usually tips toward TripIt, for a specific reason: business travel is mostly booked for you, or booked fast against a fixed meeting, so the planning stage is short and the travel day is where things break. Flight alerts, a gate change caught early and an alternate flight surfaced before the desk queue forms are worth more on a Tuesday sales trip than a route optimizer is.

Wanderlog earns its place on the multi city trips where sequencing genuinely matters, a field team covering four cities in a week, or a conference plus two customer visits that could be ordered several ways. That is real planning work, and doing it in a spreadsheet costs more than $39.99 of anyone's time.

If you are self employed, both subscriptions and the trip itself are ordinary deductible business expenses, so keep the receipts with the rest of the year's paperwork and have them read straight off the documents when you file rather than reconstructing the trip from memory in April.

Can you use both Wanderlog and TripIt?

Yes, and it is the setup a lot of frequent travelers land on without planning to. Wanderlog does the deciding, you book from what it produces, then the confirmations flow into TripIt and it handles the travel day. Both free tiers cover that workflow at zero cost, which means the honest recommendation for most people is to run both on free and upgrade only the one that keeps hitting a wall.

The reason to consolidate is not price, it is attention. Two apps means two places to check, and on a travel morning that is a real cost. If you find yourself opening both before every flight, pick the one matching the half of the trip that actually goes wrong for you and drop the other.

What neither app does

Neither one decides anything for you. Wanderlog gives you a canvas and waits, which is why a blank Wanderlog trip and a blank spreadsheet feel similar at 11pm the night before a deadline. TripIt does not open until the decisions are already made and paid for. Between them there is a gap: nobody works out that Tuesday to Thursday beats Wednesday to Friday for the meetings you are flying out for, nobody sequences three cities sensibly, and nobody tells you the total before you commit.

That gap is the job TripAgent.ai does. You give it the destination, the dates, the budget and the pace, and it writes the day by day itinerary with real places, times and a cost on every line, then rebuilds any day you ask it to. It is not a replacement for TripIt on travel day, and it says so: there are no gate alerts and no baggage claim locator here. It works on the other side of the booking.

If you arrived at this comparison because one of these apps did not do what you hoped, the TripIt alternative and Wanderlog alternative pages each work through that in detail, and the road trip planner page covers the multi stop routing case that sends most people to Wanderlog in the first place. If that routing case is a drive rather than a flight, Roadtrippers vs Wanderlog is the comparison to read next, and Roadtrippers pricing lists what its three tiers cost before you start a trial.

Which one should you buy?

Buy Wanderlog Pro at $39.99 if your trips involve driving between multiple stops, if you plan with other people, or if you need the itinerary offline. Buy TripIt Pro at $49 if you fly often enough that a caught gate change or a fare drop refund happens more than once a year, because either one covers the subscription on its own.

Buy neither yet if you take two trips a year. Both free tiers will carry you, and you will know within one trip which side of the booking is actually costing you time. That is a better basis for a $40 or $50 decision than any comparison table, including this one.