The best roommate apps in 2026: an honest comparison (including ours)

Most "best roommate app" lists on the internet are useless. They're either affiliate-driven (so every app is great, depending on which one pays the highest commission this quarter), or they're written by someone who has never lived in a share house and lists every app that exists with the same generic three sentences pasted under each one.

This isn't that. We make one of the apps on this list. We're going to tell you the honest story: where each one wins, where each one falls short, and which one actually fits your house. Including ours.

Up front, here are the cards. We make Flatmate Flow. We obviously think it's good for share houses. We're not going to pretend Splitwise doesn't have a hundred million more users than we do, that Tricount isn't cleaner for travel splits, or that a well-maintained spreadsheet hasn't carried plenty of households through years of share-house life.

What we're going to do is walk through the four real options in 2026, what they're each best at, and what to pick based on what your house actually needs.

How we're judging these#

Four criteria, applied consistently to all five tools (including us).

Bill-splitting depth. Can you do custom splits per bill? Recurring bills? Multi-currency? Or are you stuck with "divide by four"?

Breadth beyond bills. A real share house has chores, a shopping list, a calendar, the occasional poll, and a fridge full of notices nobody reads. Does the app cover that, or just the money?

Daily friction. Will three different housemates actually use it without anyone nagging? Or will it quietly become the spreadsheet that nobody touches after week three?

Cost. What's free, what's paywalled, and what changes the moment the company decides to add or expand a Pro tier?

Splitwise: the bill-splitting incumbent#

Splitwise is the default. If you've lived in a share house any time in the last ten years and split a bill on an app, there's a good chance it was Splitwise. The user base is the largest of any tool on this list by a wide margin, and that matters more than any feature list.

Where Splitwise wins. The split flow is genuinely good. Adding a friend, logging an expense, settling up: clean, fast, obvious. Their group view is intuitive. If you're in three different group chats (your roommates, your travel mates, your weekly dinner mates), Splitwise handles all of them in one place. The deciding advantage: the people you'd want to invite to use it are already using it.

Where it doesn't keep up. As of 2026, the free tier caps you at three expenses per day, with banner ads throughout the interface. Receipt scanning, payment reminders, and itemised expenses are all behind Splitwise Pro at $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year. The three-per-day cap hits real share houses fast. That isn't even a single grocery run for a five-person house.

It's also just a bill splitter. There's no chore roster. No household shopping list. No budget view. No calendar, no polls, no notice board. If you want any of those, you're stitching together three or four different apps.

Pick Splitwise if your house mostly just needs to split a few bills cleanly, everyone you'd invite already uses it, and either three expenses a day works for you or the Pro subscription does. (For the splitting-method tradeoffs themselves, see our guide to splitting bills with roommates.)

Tricount: built for trips, used by share houses#

Tricount comes from Europe. It was a popular travel-splitting app for years before bunq (the Dutch neobank) acquired it. In 2026 it's been folded into the bunq family, but the core app is still free and now genuinely so: the old Premium subscription has been dropped.

Where Tricount wins. It nails group-trip mechanics. You can start a "tricount" (their word for a group ledger), invite people via a link, and start adding expenses without anyone needing to sign up just to view the running total. Multi-currency is the cleanest on this list: it converts as you go, handles three currencies in one trip, and reconciles at the end. The 2026 interface refresh is nice. There's also a free bunq-powered virtual prepaid card baked in, which lets you tap-and-pay and have the expense auto-added to the group ledger.

Where it doesn't keep up. It's still a bill splitter at heart, with the rough edges of a tool optimised for transient travel groups. Recurring bills aren't a first-class concept, so monthly utilities take more manual work than they should. No chore roster, no shopping list, no calendar, no polls, no notice board. Some of the older Premium features were quietly removed during the bunq integration; the app is leaner now, not broader.

Pick Tricount if your house also travels together, multi-currency genuinely matters, or you're already a bunq customer and want the integration.

OurHome: built for families, sometimes used by share houses#

OurHome is a different shape. It's a chore-and-task app with shopping-list and calendar features, marketed mostly at families with children. In 2026 it's been refreshed under "OurHome by Elusios" and is still on iOS, Android and the web.

Where OurHome wins. The chore engine is solid. Tasks can be assigned with due dates, repeating schedules, reminders and late penalties. Kids earn points for completed tasks and redeem them for rewards (a thing parents set up). The shared shopping list works. The calendar covers family events. As a whole, it's a respectable household-organisation tool for its target audience.

Where it doesn't keep up. First, the tone. Everything about OurHome is family-with-children: point-based reward systems, "good behaviour" framing, kid-themed visuals. If your share house is four adults paying their own rent, the gamification feels infantilising rather than helpful. Second, the bill-splitting is weak. No custom splits per bill, no percentages, no multi-currency. Third, there's no receipt scanner. Fourth, the interface is dated and there's no offline mode. Fifth, the previously fully-free tier now has a Premium layer on top of it: shopping list sections, rewards management, calendar events and custom task messages have moved behind a paid subscription.

Pick OurHome if your household includes kids, you want chore gamification with points and rewards, and your bill-splitting needs are basic. For an adults-only share house, it's the wrong fit.

Google Sheets and the doomed spreadsheet#

The spreadsheet isn't really an app. It's the default. Almost every share house starts here.

Where the spreadsheet wins. It's free. It's infinitely flexible. You can build exactly the bill-split formula your house needs, with all the per-bill custom splits and recurring patterns you want. Anyone can edit it from anywhere. If your household has one person who is genuinely good at spreadsheets and willing to maintain it, the spreadsheet can actually be the best system in this list.

Where it doesn't keep up. That maintenance burden is the entire problem. Real share houses don't have one person who is good at spreadsheets and willing to maintain it indefinitely. They have four people, three of whom will eventually stop updating the sheet, and one of whom is silently doing all the data entry while building resentment. The sheet decays. Six weeks in, nobody trusts the numbers anymore, and the household quietly defaults back to "we'll sort it out later."

There's no automation. No recurring bill auto-generation. No push notifications. No receipt scanner. No mobile-friendly view (anyone who's tried to use a wide split-bill spreadsheet on a phone knows this).

Pick the spreadsheet if your house has one person who is genuinely going to maintain it for the full lease and beyond. That person knows who they are. If you can't name them, pick something else.

Flatmate Flow: what we built and what we're missing#

This is our app. Read this section with the usual scepticism reserved for self-assessments.

What Flatmate Flow does well. We built around the seven things real share houses actually do: bills, chores, shopping, budget, calendar, polls and a pinned notice board, all in one app. Bill-splitting is the deepest on this list. Custom per-person splits on every single bill, multi-currency, recurring bills that auto-generate each cycle. The shopping list has an AI receipt scanner powered by Anthropic's Claude that snaps any supermarket receipt, itemises every line, ticks off the open list, and feeds the totals straight into the household budget. The chore roster handles weekly, fortnightly and proper 28-day cycles, not just "weekly." The household budget is a live donut across bills and shopping, broken down per person using the actual splits you set on each bill. It's a Progressive Web App, so it installs to your homescreen on iOS and Android with push notifications. The whole thing is free. No credit card, nothing to cancel. (See every feature for the deeper rundown.)

Where competitors beat us. Splitwise has us comprehensively on user base and friend-graph; the person you want to invite to split a bill probably already has Splitwise installed. Tricount has the smoother multi-currency experience for one-off travel groups, and a slicker no-signup-needed invite flow. OurHome has more polished chore gamification if your house actually wants points and rewards. We don't process payments inside the app (no Venmo, PayID or bunq-style card integration yet), there's no native iOS or Android binary in the App Store yet (it's on the roadmap), and we're newer. The "everyone-I-want-to-invite-already-uses-it" advantage isn't ours.

Pick Flatmate Flow if you want bills, chores, shopping, budget, calendar, polls and notices in one app, you'd rather not pay five dollars a month for a bill splitter, and you don't already have an entrenched Splitwise habit you'd have to abandon.

How to pick the right one for your house#

A decision tree.

Just splits, nothing else, your friends already use Splitwise. Pick Splitwise. The friend-graph is the whole game. Pay the $5 a month if you'll hit the three-per-day cap, or live with it if you won't.

Your group is travel-focused, multi-currency, transient. Pick Tricount. It's built for exactly this case, and it's properly free now.

Your house includes kids and you want chore gamification. Pick OurHome. The points-and-rewards thing genuinely works on children. Pay for Premium if you want the extras.

Your house has one person who genuinely will maintain a spreadsheet forever. Use the spreadsheet. Don't change. But be honest about whether that person actually exists.

Your house wants everything in one place (bills, chores, shopping, budget, calendar, polls, notices) and you don't want to pay for a bill splitter. Pick Flatmate Flow. That's what we built it for.

Honest reality: most share houses end up using two or three of these in combination. Bills on Splitwise, shopping on a WhatsApp group, chores on a fridge magnet, the budget on a half-maintained spreadsheet. The argument for consolidating to one app is that the friction of running three drops the whole household's compliance rate. When everyone has one place to look, things actually happen.

The short version#

• Splitwise is the strongest bill splitter and has the largest community. Now paywalled for active use, and no household features beyond splits.
• Tricount is free, clean, best for travel groups. No household features beyond splits either.
• OurHome is good for families with kids. Wrong fit for an adults-only share house.
• Spreadsheets work if one person maintains them. They almost always decay.
• Flatmate Flow is the broadest free option for a share house, with the only AI receipt scanner in the category. Smaller user base than Splitwise, no payment processing yet.

If you want the broadest free option for your share house with bills, chores, shopping, budget, calendar, polls and notices in one app:

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