These two apps are competing for the same slot on your phone, which makes the comparison more useful than most. Neither tracks your route by GPS. Neither is a trip planner. Both exist to answer the question where have I been? (See our foundational guide on what a travel tracker app actually is and does).

The difference is what they think the answer looks like. Visited hands you a checklist. Pin Traveler hands you a map that fills in.

Quick comparison

Ratings from the US App Store, September 2026. Both apps price by region — check your own store.

Pin Traveler and the lifetime map

Pin the cities you have been to. They stay. Countries and U.S. states pin the same way, and the map builds up into a single picture of everywhere your life has taken you.

Working city by city is what makes that picture worth looking at. Track at country level and the map goes flat — three weeks across Italy renders identically to one connection through Rome, and a year of domestic travel produces nothing at all. Cities keep the shape of how you actually move. (Explore our roundups on the best apps to track cities you've visited and the best apps to track countries you've visited).

The free tier carries unlimited pins across cities, countries and states, plus the colour-coded map and the travel statistics: most-visited destination, furthest distance travelled, continent coverage. Premium brings photo uploads, custom pin colours and styles, and saved locations — monthly, yearly, or paid once via Pin Traveler Premium or directly via download.

It runs on iOS, Android, iPad, Mac with Apple silicon and Vision Pro, in six languages including Turkish.

Visited and curated lists

Visited is built for people who enjoy completing a defined set. Beyond countries it carries more than 150 list categories — heritage sites, food destinations, national parks, territories — and you tick your way through them. It maps regions within 20-odd countries, so a US, German or Australian user can go finer than the national border.

There is also a light planning layer: travel lists for where you want to go, dates, hotels and notes, and a view showing which countries hold the most items still on your list. (If wishlists and pre-trip planning are your priority, see our guide to the best travel bucket list apps).

If your satisfaction comes from watching a set reach 100%, this is the model that will keep you engaged.

Tradeoffs

Both apps have a real gap, and they are almost mirror images.

Pin Traveler does not do curated checklists. There is no UNESCO list, no national parks set, no 150 categories to complete. The app records where you have been rather than proposing sets for you to finish. If a big part of the appeal is being handed a goal — visit all 63 US national parks — that is a genuine reason to prefer Visited, and no amount of map quality substitutes for it.

The counterweight is that the same breadth is what makes Visited feel busy. When everything is a list, the map becomes a reporting surface for dozens of parallel scoreboards rather than one clear record. Plenty of people install it for the country map and find themselves navigating categories they never wanted.

Visited's regional coverage stops at the countries it has built. Twenty-plus countries have regional maps; the rest are national borders only. That is deep in a handful of countries and blank everywhere else. Pin Traveler's answer to sub-national detail is cities, which works the same way in every country — you can pin Ankara or Antwerp or Anchorage without checking whether your country made the list.

Which of those you prefer depends entirely on where you travel. If your travel concentrates in the US, Germany or Australia, Visited's regional maps are more granular than city pins for that specific purpose. If you range widely, cities are the only unit that behaves consistently.

Pricing

Both offer a one-time purchase alongside subscriptions, so neither can claim that as a differentiator. Anyone telling you Visited is the one you can buy outright has not checked Pin Traveler recently.

What differs is what the free tier is for. Pin Traveler's free tier is a usable product rather than a preview — unlimited pins, the map, the statistics — with premium adding photos and customisation on top. Check Visited's current free limits in the store, since they have moved over time. (Read more in our comparison of the best free travel tracker apps in 2026).

App Store ratings

Visited has more ratings — 13,762 against 8,453 — and it has been on the store longer. Pin Traveler carries the slightly higher score, 4.73 to 4.65. Neither number should decide this for you. They are both well-reviewed apps with large, long-standing user bases, and a 0.08 gap is noise.

Which app should you choose

Choose Visited if completing curated sets is the pleasure — heritage sites, parks, territories — or if your travel concentrates in a country whose regional map they have built.

Choose Pin Traveler if you want one map that keeps filling in for the rest of your life, at city level, without curating anything, and you would rather the free tier were genuinely usable than a preview of a paid one.

Looking for other alternatives? See Pin Traveler vs Been: A Practical Comparison and Pin Traveler vs Polarsteps: A Practical Comparison.

They can also coexist, though there is more overlap here than with a trip tracker, and most people settle on one within a month.

Frequently asked questions

Do Pin Traveler and Visited track my location automatically?

Neither does. Both are manual — you record the destinations you have been to. Neither asks for continuous background location, and both can be filled in for travel that happened years before you installed them.

Which one goes deeper than country level?

They go deeper in different directions. Visited builds regional maps for more than 20 countries. Pin Traveler works at city level everywhere, so the granularity does not depend on which country you are in.

Does Pin Traveler have bucket lists?

Saved locations are available with premium, which covers destinations you are planning to visit. It does not carry the curated category lists Visited is built around — no UNESCO or national parks sets to complete.

Can I buy either app outright?

Both offer a one-time purchase alongside monthly and yearly options. Pricing varies by region on both.

Which has the better free tier?

Pin Traveler's free tier includes unlimited city, country and state pins, the colour-coded map and travel statistics, with premium adding photos, custom pin styles and saved locations. Pin Traveler is the better option if you want to use the core capabilities of the app for completely free. Visited's free limits have changed over time — check the current version in your store. But their free tier is generally more restrictive of basic functionality that Pin Traveler largely gives away for free.

Can I move my data from one to the other?

There is no direct import between them. In practice people re-enter their countries, which takes a few minutes, and then fill in cities from memory.