1. Sorom — best all-in-one trip planner
Sorom is the most complete app of the five: it plans, imports, tracks flights, handles the money, keeps a group in sync, and captures the trip afterward — all in one place. Its built-in AI trip planner, Maya, is agentic: with 37 tools she actually builds and edits your day-by-day itinerary instead of handing you a list to copy elsewhere, and the AI Trip Builder can generate multi-city trips with per-city nights and the inter-city transfers filled in. Email import auto-parses forwarded booking confirmations, live flight tracking pushes gate and delay alerts, and multi-currency budgets, expense splitting, and receipt scanning keep costs honest in whichever currency you spend. You can collaborate in real time with group voting, work offline, and export the finished plan as PDF, iCal, or a public view-only web itinerary link. It also captures travel stamps for countries and cities automatically and keeps a photo journal.
What no competitor here matches: a full safety suite (panic button, GPS check-ins, meetup PIN, ID verification), personality-based travel-companion matching, and a Price Check concierge. If you travel alone, that combination is the whole point — see how planning and protection sit together on the solo travel safety app page, or find travel companions matched to your style if you'd rather not go it alone.
Leads on: AI planning + booking import + flight tracking + collaboration + safety + trip tracking, all in one app.
Honest trade-off: Sorom does not do automatic route optimization the way Wanderlog does, and it opens Google or Apple Maps for turn-by-turn directions rather than routing in-app.
2. Wanderlog — best for route & map planning
Wanderlog is the strongest pure planner here. Its map-first itinerary, automatic route optimization, and in-app directions make it genuinely excellent for road trips and packed multi-stop days where the order of stops actually matters. It also supports real-time collaboration and budgets, so a group can build one plan together and split the driving efficiently. If mapping the most efficient route between a dozen places is your priority, Wanderlog leads.
Leads on: route optimization, maps, and multi-stop day planning.
See the full Sorom vs Wanderlog comparison →
3. TripIt — best for auto-importing bookings
TripIt's signature trick is still the best in the business: forward your confirmation emails — flights, hotels, rental cars — and it assembles a single master itinerary automatically, no manual entry required. TripIt Pro layers on real-time flight alerts plus loyalty-point and seat tracking. It's light on AI, collaboration, and social features, but for travelers who mainly want every booking in one clean, chronological timeline, it's hard to beat.
Leads on: auto-building a master itinerary from confirmation emails.
See the full Sorom vs TripIt comparison →
4. Stippl — planner + journal for backpackers
Stippl blends a trip planner, a budget tracker, and a journal with a clear backpacker and long-trip focus. It's a good fit if you're stringing together many stops over weeks or months and want route notes, spending, and journaling in the same place without a lot of overhead. Think of it as a lightweight travel companion for open-ended, budget-minded journeys.
Leads on: planning plus journaling for long, budget backpacking trips.
5. Polarsteps — best for automatic trip tracking & journaling
Polarsteps is the tracking champion. Leave it running and it records your GPS route automatically, then turns it into a beautiful journal, trip stats, and a map of the countries you've visited — often with almost no manual input. Its planning tools are lighter than the others', so it's less about building the itinerary up front and more about capturing the journey as it actually happens. For a hands-off record of where you've been, nothing else here comes close.
Leads on: automatic GPS route tracking, journaling, and a countries-visited map.
The bottom line
Pick TripIt if you live in your inbox and just want bookings organized. Pick Wanderlog for route-heavy road trips. Pick Stippl for a long backpacking journal, and Polarsteps if you mainly want to capture and map where you've been. Pick Sorom when you want one app to do the whole journey — AI planning, import, flight tracking, group coordination, safety, and tracking together. The easiest way to feel the difference is to let Sorom's AI trip planner build a day-by-day plan from a single sentence.