Best Apps for Roommates in 2026: Chores, Bills and Groceries

Quick answer: a shared house needs three jobs covered and no single app does all three. Chores and the shared calendar: Homsy, free for two people, paid above that. Bills: Splitwise or Tricount, both purpose-built and free for normal use. Groceries: whichever list app the house will actually open — AnyList or OurGroceries if you want it dedicated, or the list inside the household app if you would rather run one tool. Cleaning standards, specifically: Tody or Sweepy.

Most of the roommate advice online is old. The lists that rank were written years ago, half the apps on them have shut down, and the ones that survive are pitched at families. Shared houses have a different problem set — the money is split rather than pooled, nobody has authority over anyone else, and people move out.

So this page is organized by the job rather than by the app. Three jobs cause almost all the friction in a shared house: who does the cleaning, who owes whom, and who is buying the dish soap. Cover those and most of the rest sorts itself out.

The Field at a Glance

Job 1: The Chores

This is the one that ends leases. The questions a shared house is actually asking are "whose turn is it" and "did it happen", and neither of them can be answered by a group chat or a whiteboard.

Homsy is the pick here. Chores get a named owner, a repeating schedule and a completion record, and rotation cycles a recurring job between housemates automatically — which matters more in a shared house than in a family, because there is nobody with the standing to reassign it by hand. Each member gets their own color, the shopping list syncs in real time, and the calendar shows who is away, who has people over, and who is working from home. It works offline and catches up when signal returns, and it runs on iOS, Android and the web.

Two honest caveats. It is branded and written for families, so the marketing will not look like it was made for a four-bedroom apartment share — the mechanics underneath are household mechanics and they transfer exactly, but you should know that going in. And there is no bill splitting, so the money stays in a second app. It is free for households of up to two members with every feature and no ads and no trial to expire; three or more housemates needs a paid plan.

Tody and Sweepy solve a narrower and sharper version of the problem: not who agreed to do the cleaning, but what counts as clean. Both track how long it has been since each room or task was last done and tell you what is due, which takes the argument off the people and puts it on the calendar. Neither does calendars, lists or bills, so they are an addition rather than an answer.

If you have not agreed a split yet, do that before you install anything — our chore splitter will divide a real task list between however many people live there, and how to split chores with roommates covers the conversation.

Job 2: The Money

Families pool money; shared houses do not, and that single difference is why family apps are the wrong tool for the bills.

Splitwise is purpose-built. Log a shared expense, say who it was for, and it keeps a running balance of who owes whom so nobody has to reconstruct the month from receipts. It handles uneven splits, which matters for the roommate in the smallest bedroom paying less rent.

Tricount does the same job with a simpler model and no account needed for everyone in the group, which is useful when one housemate refuses to install anything.

Before any of that, work out what the house actually costs. Our household bills calculator totals rent, electric, gas, water, internet and phone into a monthly and yearly figure and divides it by however many people live there — which is the number every rent-splitting argument is really about.

A shared pot is the low-tech option and works better than people expect: everyone puts a fixed amount in each month, all communal buying comes out of it, and it gets topped up when it runs low. No per-item tracking, no monthly settle-up, no arguments about whether toilet paper counts. Our expense split calculator will do the one-off arithmetic if you would rather not install anything at all.

The full set of approaches — including how to handle rent that is not split evenly — is in splitting household expenses with roommates.

Job 3: The Shopping

The two failures are duplication and gaps: two people buying the same coffee, or nobody buying the thing everyone assumed someone else had.

AnyList is the strongest dedicated option — automatic categorization into aisle order, fast item entry, recipe support, reliable sync. OurGroceries is plainer and handles multiple lists cleanly, which suits a house that shops in more than one place.

The list inside your household app is the better answer if you are already running one for chores. Fewer apps means more adoption, and the shopping list sitting next to the chore rotation means people see both when they open it.

Whichever you pick, the failure modes are the same ones every shared list hits, and why shared grocery lists stop working covers the four fixes. In a shared house, add one more rule: separate the communal items from the personal ones, or the list becomes a source of the exact argument it was supposed to prevent. Our grocery splitter handles the receipt at the end of it.

What About Cozi, FamilyWall and OurHome?

They come up in every roommate search, so it is worth being direct about them.

Cozi is a strong shared calendar with a shopping list, a recipe box and a meal planner, on every platform. It has no chore assignment at all — the to-do list is flat, so it cannot say whose turn it is or whether anything got done. For a shared house that is the wrong half of the problem. The free tier is ad-supported; Gold is $39.99 a year.

FamilyWall adds messaging and location sharing. Location sharing between housemates is a different proposition from location sharing between a parent and a fourteen-year-old, and most shared houses will not want it. Task management is basic.

OurHome is a points-and-rewards engine for children roughly five to eleven. Adults awarding each other points for taking the trash out is not a system, it is a bit. Skip it.

What No App Will Fix

Worth saying plainly, because the app is often bought as a substitute for a conversation.

If one housemate genuinely does not care about the state of the kitchen and another does, a shared system makes that gap more visible and more documented. It does not close it. What it does remove is the "I forgot" and "I didn't know that was mine" escape routes, which turns a vague grievance into a specific, answerable one — and specific is much easier to resolve than vague.

The same goes for money. An app that says someone owes $40 does not make them pay it. It just means the conversation starts from a number instead of from a feeling.

The thing that actually prevents most of this is agreeing the rules before anyone is annoyed. Write down who does what, how bills get split, what the rule is on guests and noise, and what happens when someone moves out. Our roommate agreement generator produces one in a few minutes, and household rules for roommates covers what to put in it.

The Setup That Holds

1. Agree the split before you install anything. House meeting, full list of recurring jobs, everyone claims what they would rather own, rotate whatever nobody wants.
2. One app for chores and the calendar. Everyone gets write access. A system one person maintains on behalf of the house is not a shared system.
3. One app for the money, or one pot. Do not try to run bills through the chore app; nothing does both well.
4. Start with the shopping list. It is the easiest sell, it pays off within a week, and housemates who have watched a list update in real time while they are at the store tend to accept the chore rotation afterward without a meeting.
5. Review it when someone moves out. The rotation that worked for four does not work for three, and the moment to redo it is the week of the change, not two months of resentment later.

FAQ

What are the best apps for roommates in 2026?

There is no single one, so split it by job. Homsy for chores, rotation and the shared calendar — free for two housemates, paid above that. Splitwise or Tricount for the bills, both free for ordinary use. AnyList or OurGroceries for the shopping if you want it dedicated, or the list inside your household app if you would rather run fewer tools. Tody or Sweepy if the argument is specifically about cleaning standards.

What is the best roommate app for chores?

Homsy, because of rotation. In a shared house nobody has the standing to reassign a job by hand, so a rotation that cycles automatically and records what was done removes the part people actually fall out over. Tody and Sweepy are better if your disagreement is about how clean is clean rather than about whose turn it was.

Is there a free app for roommates?

Yes, several. Splitwise and Tricount are free for normal expense splitting. AnyList, OurGroceries and Google Keep all have free shared lists. Homsy is free with every feature and no ads for households of up to two members, with no trial period — a three-person house needs the paid plan. Google Calendar is free for any number of housemates if you only want the schedule.

Can roommates use a family organizer app?

Yes. Family apps are built on household mechanics — assignment, rotation, a shared calendar, a shared list — and none of that assumes anyone is related. Homsy is family-branded and works for an apartment share unchanged. The two gaps are bill splitting, which family apps do not build because families pool money, and anything resembling a written house agreement. Both live in a second tool.

What is the best app for splitting bills with roommates?

Splitwise for a house that wants running balances and uneven splits tracked properly, Tricount for something simpler that not everyone has to install. If you would rather not track per-item at all, a shared monthly pot everyone tops up is less work and causes fewer arguments than either. The expense split calculator covers one-off sums without an app.

Do all my roommates have to use the same app for it to work?

For chores and the calendar, yes — a rotation only half the house can see is worse than a whiteboard, because the people not in it have a legitimate excuse. For bills you can get away with one person logging expenses and everyone settling up, though it puts the record-keeping on one person. Start with the shopping list, which is the easiest thing to get everyone into, and add the rest once they have seen it work.