OurTab vs Splitwise
Who's splitting the bill, and who's doing the shopping?
They solve different halves of the same evening
Splitwise answers "who owes whom". It's good at it, and its debt simplification — netting off chains of small debts so fewer payments need to happen — is genuinely clever and free.
But it begins once the money is already spent. Nothing in Splitwise knows what you need to buy, what's in the cupboard, or what you could cook tonight. Those live in other apps, or in your head, or in a text message thread.
OurTab closes the loop
In OurTab the shopping list becomes the inventory, the inventory feeds meal suggestions, and the shop posts itself to the ledger already split. You log the shop once and it does four jobs, rather than logging it in a list app, then again in a splitting app.
Where it matters day to day
- No daily cap. Splitwise's free tier limits how many expenses you can add per day, and shows ads between screens; Pro ran to around $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year on the US App Store when we checked in August 2026, and pricing varies by country. OurTab's ledger is free and unlimited, with no ads — only the AI costs money, at £2.99/month for the whole household.
- Paid vs consumed. OurTab records who paid and who the items were for as two separate things, so one person doing the big shop doesn't quietly become the household's bank.
- Frozen history. Each expense keeps the split agreed on the day, so the past can't shift if your household changes.
Where Splitwise is the better pick
If you're splitting a holiday between six friends, settling in multiple currencies, or you only ever need "who owes whom" and nothing else, Splitwise is built for exactly that and OurTab isn't. OurTab is for a household that shops, cooks and pays together week after week.
Prices and tiers change — check Splitwise's own pricing before deciding.