The Best Family Travel Planning App: Travel Keeper vs TripIt vs Wanderlog

Last updated: September 2026. Competitor features and pricing change often, so I’ll keep this post current to the best of my knowledge.

The short version

TripIt is really good at organizing plans you’ve already booked. Forward it a confirmation and it builds you a clean, reliable itinerary. It’s been around forever and it does that job well.

Wanderlog is really good at planning and discovery. Maps, places, route optimization, figuring out where to go and how to get between things. If you’re building an itinerary from scratch and want the map view, it’s excellent.

Travel Keeper is built for something neither of them really does: keeping a whole family’s trip together, tracking what it cost (including points), and keeping all of it private.

They’re not really the same product. Which one you want depends on what you’re actually trying to solve.

	Travel Keeper	TripIt	Wanderlog
Built for	Families planning together	The individual traveler	Trip discovery and routing
Family profiles	Yes, whole household	Individual only	No
Passport expirations	Yes	No	No
Points and award value	Yes + totals what you saved	No	No
Multi-currency	Yes	No	No
Email forwarding	On the roadmap	Yes	Yes, plus Gmail scan
Flight status alerts	On the roadmap	Yes, with Pro	Limited
Maps and route planning	No	No	Yes, best of the three
Free tier	Yes, no login required	Yes	Yes
Paid	$39/year	$49/year	$39.99/year

Comparison based on 2026 list of publicly available features.

A reader emailed me with a question I get a lot:

“I got TripIt Pro this year and it had some benefits, but also some ‘I wish it did this’ moments. Everyone recommends Wanderlog, which I haven’t tried. Have you done a comparison between your app and those? I don’t think I want to renew TripIt, so I’m deciding between paid Wanderlog or maybe yours.”

Fair question. And yes, I’m obviously biased, I built one of these. So let me be as honest as I can, including about where the other two are genuinely better.

She’s right that many recommend Wanderlog. It’s been around longer, is better known, and it earned that. But popularity tells you a lot of people use an app. It doesn’t tell you it was built for your situation. Wanderlog doesn’t have family profiles, doesn’t track what a trip cost in points or what you saved using them, and doesn’t have the same privacy story Travel Keeper does. It also wasn’t built for a parent planning for five people. I built mine for exactly that, and skipped the rest.

Is Travel Keeper better than Wanderlog or TripIt for families?

For most families, yes, because it’s the only one of the three built around a household instead of one traveler. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Who’s actually building it (and why that changes things)

TripIt is owned by Concur, which is owned by SAP, one of the largest software companies in the world.

Wanderlog is venture-backed.

Travel Keeper is built by me, a mom of three and a family travel advisor who taught herself to code, after bedtime and in the car between games.

That’s not just a nice story, it changes the product. When you message me that you wish the app did something, there’s no ticket, no sprint, no roadmap set by investors that I have to follow. There’s just me deciding it’s a good idea and building it. Most of the features in the app right now came directly from user DMs and emails.

It’s built for families, not solo travelers

This is the big one. Most travel apps are designed for one person’s trip or friends traveling together.

Travel Keeper holds the entire family’s passport expirations, loyalty numbers, and travel documents in one place. It knows you’re planning for five people, not one. It tracks multi-leg flights with layovers and multi-day activities, because that’s what family trips actually look like.

TripIt has profiles, but they’re built around the individual traveler. Wanderlog doesn’t do family profiles or passport tracking at all.

What’s the best app for tracking points on family trips?

If you travel on points, this is the difference that will really matter.

Travel Keeper adds up a trip across cash, points, miles, free-night certificates, and credits, with real multi-currency conversion. So a family trip booked partly on points, across a couple of currencies, finally totals up correctly. Then it turns that into a shareable savings card.

Here’s what the other two do:

• TripIt Pro has point/expense tracking, but no multi-currency conversion and no way to value award travel.
• Wanderlog has an expense tracker, but it’s single-currency and cash-only. It won’t total a trip booked partly on points or across currencies.

Neither one converts currencies. Neither one puts a value on award travel. If your family travel runs mostly on points (like ours does), that gap is the whole ballgame.

Which travel planning app is the most private?

Travel Keeper. It’s local-first, has no ads, tracking, or analytics, and if you turn on sync, your data is end-to-end encrypted so not even I can read it.

On the free tier, your trips live on your device.

If you upgrade to Pro and turn on sync (it’s optional, and off unless you choose it), your data is end-to-end encrypted before it even leaves your device. Only you hold a 12-word recovery phrase, and that phrase is the only key. Not even I can read your trips. That’s the point of zero-knowledge encryption, and it’s also why I can’t recover your synced data if you lose that phrase.

Travel Keeper also has no ads, no tracking, and not even analytics. I don’t collect passport numbers or credit card numbers. Loyalty numbers are masked by default, and sign-in is an email code, so there are no passwords to remember or get hacked.

Where are TripIt and Wanderlog better?

Email forwarding. TripIt and Wanderlog both let you forward a confirmation email (Wanderlog can also scan your Gmail account) and have it land in your itinerary automatically. Travel Keeper currently uses paste-to-import and screenshot import (which parse on your device, not on a server). Email forwarding is coming later this year.

Flight status alerts. TripIt Pro does real-time gate and delay alerts, and it does them well. Travel Keeper’s version is coming later this year, at no extra cost for Pro members.

Maps and route planning. Wanderlog is genuinely great here with route optimization and travel-time estimates. Travel Keeper doesn’t do map-based route planning. If discovery and mapping is your main need, Wanderlog is the better tool.

So which family trip planning app should you actually pick?

Pick TripIt if what you want is a rock-solid organizer for plans you’ve already booked, and real-time flight alerts matter most to you right now.

Pick Wanderlog if you’re planning trips from scratch and you want maps, discovery, and route optimization.

Pick Travel Keeper if you’re the person planning trips for a whole family, you want to know what a trip really cost you (especially with points in the mix), and you’d rather your family’s travel details not sit readable on someone else’s server.

And truthfully, if you’re a solo business traveler, I’m probably not your app. I built this for the parent running family travel like a multi-year operation, because that’s who I am.

Travel Keeper is free to start, no account needed. Pro is $39/year. You can try the free version and decide from there.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free family travel planner app?

Yes. Travel Keeper’s free tier includes unlimited trips, family profiles, passport tracking, the planning timeline, packing lists, and points tracking, with no account required. Pro is $39/year.

What app tracks points and miles for family trips?

Travel Keeper tracks points, miles, free night certificates, and card credits alongside cash, then shows you what you saved compared with paying cash.

Can my spouse and I share a trip?

Yes. Travel Keeper Pro covers your household, so you and your partner can both see and edit the same trips.

Does Travel Keeper work for worldschooling families?

Yes. A lot of Travel Keeper users are worldschooling families. Multi-currency tracking, passport expiration reminders, and long multi-leg trips are all built in.

Do I need to create an account?

No. The free version works without an account. You only sign in (with an email code, no password) if you upgrade to Pro and want to sync between devices.

Travel Keeper is free to start, no account needed. Pro is $39/year. Try the free version and decide from there.