Written by a developer in the category

The best apps to track the countries you've visited

Prices checked on the US App Store, 20 August 2026 · by Aki Takashima, Shiori Studio

Disclosure first, so you can weigh the rest. I make Driftlog, one of the apps on this page. I have tried to write the comparison I wanted to read before I started, which means saying plainly where the other apps are better. If you only want the short answer: if you already remember every country you have been to, a manual tracker is cheaper and simpler and you should use one of those.

Four different things get called "a travel tracker"

Most comparison lists mix these together, which is why they are confusing. They are not competing products. They answer different questions.

1 · Tick the country yourself

Manual trackers — been, Visited, Pin Traveler, Stampie

You open a list of countries and tap the ones you have been to. The map fills in instantly and looks great. These are the most popular apps in the category by a wide margin, and they are genuinely good at what they do.

The catch is in the premise: the map is only as accurate as your memory. That is fine for countries. It falls apart at city level, and it falls apart for the layover you forgot and the town you passed through on a train.

2 · Write up the trip

Trip journals with a feed — Polarsteps, FindPenguins, Journi

These are for sharing. You write entries, add photos, and friends follow along. Polarsteps in particular does trip planning and route drawing well and has years of polish behind it.

If what you want is an audience, or a book at the end, stop reading this page and use one of these. Nothing below competes with them on that.

3 · Record the whole route

Route recorders — Google Maps Timeline, Dawarich, Arc

These log where you were minute by minute, at street level, so you can see the exact road you drove. Google's Timeline moved on-device in 2024–2025 and, by default, only the most recent months were migrated — which is why a lot of people went looking for a replacement and found their old history gone.

If you want the route, you want one of these. Be aware of the trade: continuous fine-grained location costs battery, and self-hosted options like Dawarich cost setup time instead of money.

4 · Record the places, by itself

Passive place loggers — Driftlog

This is the one I work in, so treat it accordingly. The app is closed. It uses iOS significant-location-change monitoring, which is a coarse, low-power signal the phone is already computing, and records which country, region and city you were in and on which dates. Not the route. The places.

It is the only one of the four that produces a record of trips you did not think to record.

What they actually cost

All of these are free to download; the number that matters is what unlocking them costs. These are the in-app purchases listed on the US App Store on 20 August 2026. Prices change — check the store page before you decide.

App	Model	Listed in-app purchases (US, Aug 2026)
Visited	Subscription + tiers	Monthly $3.99 · Yearly $34.99 · Pro $59.99 · Unlock Cities $9.99 · Remove Ads $3.99
been	Subscription	Weekly $4.99 · Yearly $19.99 · Premium Features $2.29
Pin Traveler	Subscription + lifetime	Weekly $2.99 · Monthly $2.49–$3.99 · Yearly $24.99–$34.99 · Lifetime $39.99
Polarsteps	Subscription	Plus Monthly $9.99 · Plus Yearly $34.99
Stampie	One-time	Stampie Pro $19.99
FindPenguins	Free tier	No in-app purchases were listed on its US store page when I checked
Google Maps Timeline	Free	Free, and on-device since the 2024–25 change
Driftlog (mine)	One-time	$6.99, once, unlocks everything

The reason I am showing this table is not that cheap is better. It is that the category has quietly moved to subscriptions, and a lot of people do not notice until the renewal. If you are going to keep an app like this for a decade — and that is the whole point of a travel map — the subscription is the number that matters, not the first month.

Which one to pick, honestly

You remember your countries and just want a nice map. A manual tracker. been or Visited. Cheaper, simpler, prettier, and it will do everything you need in ten minutes of tapping.
You want friends to follow the trip. Polarsteps. Nothing here beats it at that, including mine.
You want the exact route you drove or walked. Google Maps Timeline if you accept Google having it, Dawarich if you would rather self-host. Not a places logger — you will be disappointed.
You want city-level detail and you know your memory is not reliable. This is the narrow case a passive logger is actually for.
You want to recover trips you never logged anywhere. Look for photo-library backfill. It is the only way to reconstruct the past, because the location is already sitting in the EXIF of photos you took.
You are on Android. Most of the above have Android builds. Mine does not, yet. Do not wait for it.

What Driftlog does, and what it doesn't

Since I have spent this page recommending other people's apps, here is the honest version of mine.

What it does

Records the countries, regions and cities you pass through, with dates, while the app is closed. No check-ins, no typing.
Uses significant-location-change monitoring at kilometre accuracy, so the battery cost is very small.
Backfills trips from before you installed it by reading the GPS EXIF already in your photo library.
In December it produces a year summary — countries, regions, cities, days — as one shareable image.
No account, no server, no analytics SDK. Your history is on the phone.

What it doesn't

No routes. It records places, not paths. It will never show you the road you drove.
iOS 17 or later only. An Android build exists but is not published.
No trip planning, no social feed, no web version.
It is not "nothing ever leaves your phone." A coordinate goes out to be turned into a place name — that is reverse geocoding, and it is the one outbound request the app makes. I would rather say that than make a privacy claim I cannot keep.
The free version fully unlocks one country and shows the rest as names only. One purchase of $6.99 unlocks everything, permanently.
It needs "Always" location permission. That is a real thing to ask for, and if you are not comfortable granting it, this app cannot work for you and you should use a manual tracker instead.

See Driftlog on the App Store

How this page was made. Prices come from each app's own US App Store listing on 20 August 2026, read directly from the store, not from another comparison article. Nobody paid to be on this page and nobody paid to be left off it. If something here is wrong or out of date, email me at shiori.sutudio@gmail.com and I will fix it.