Best App to Track States Visited in 2026: 14 Tools Compared

If you want a map of the US states you have been to, and you want it in the next two minutes, open usa.tripprof.com, tap the states, and copy the link. It is free, there is no account, and it works in a phone browser. If you want that map to still be there in ten years, syncing across devices next to a record of countries too, a paid app is the better home and been at $9.99 once is the one we would buy. Everything below is why, including the three popular apps that rank for this search and do not track states at all.

We put a states map into fourteen tools this week, on a desktop and on a phone. Every price and feature was read off the product's own pages or its US App Store listing in September 2026, and every screenshot is of the live product.

The number every other article quotes is ten years old

Search for how many states the average American has visited and you will be told 12.5, on page after page. That figure is real. It is also from an Ipsos survey published in July 2016, which makes it a decade old, and almost everyone repeating it presents it as current.

The fresher number is higher. A YouGov poll published in June 2025, run among 1,125 US adult citizens, found that "the average American has visited 16 states besides the one where they currently live." The two are not measured the same way, which is the part the listicles miss: Ipsos counted the home state and YouGov excludes it. Compare like for like and the gap narrows, but the recent number is the one worth beating.

That poll also shows this is an age story more than an income story. YouGov found "32% of Americans 65 or older say they've visited at least 30 states, compared to just 5% of adults under 30." A states map is a slow-filling object. Which is the real reason the choice below matters: you are picking something you will still be opening in fifteen years, and half these tools will not survive that.

The comparison: 14 tools, 5 criteria

The most useful column is the second one. Three of these products rank for "states visited" searches and track countries only. The last column is the one most comparisons leave out, and it is where the free tools separate hardest.

Prices are what the product's own page or its US App Store listing showed in September 2026, and several of these change tiers often, so check before paying. Two things are true of every browser-based tool in the list and worth saying once instead of in a column: none of them needs an install, and none of them needs an account. Of the paid apps, all five do. The only ads among the fourteen are in Visited, which sells a $3.99 "Remove Ads" unlock alongside the $3.99 you already paid for regions.

Free in a browser, nothing to install

For most people the honest starting point is a tab. You want to see the shape of your own map, and installing an app to answer a five-minute curiosity is a lot of friction.

TripProf USA

We built usa.tripprof.com, so discount the enthusiasm and check it yourself, which takes about a minute because nothing is gated. You tap states on a satellite map or run down a searchable list by region, and each state you mark fills with its own flag rather than a flat color.

Two decisions here are worth naming because almost nobody else makes them. First, DC, Puerto Rico and the other four territories are drawn, selectable and counted, but counted separately: the tally reads "29 states, 1 district, 1 territory" rather than folding them into one number that different tools define three different ways. Second, counties are free. Tap into a state and its counties appear, 3,231 of them across all 56 states, districts and territories, which is the familiar Census figure of 3,143 for the 50 states and DC plus the territorial equivalents most county datasets quietly drop.

Where it goes past a map maker is the part after the map. It asks eight rounds of what you have actually done, drawn only from the states you marked: a Waffle House at 3am, Route 66, Greenwood in Tulsa, a game at Wrigley. There are 251 of these, and a round never offers something unreachable from your own map.

The output is a card in four sizes, a short vertical video of that card assembling itself, and a link anyone can open without an account. Instead of a score, the card names an archetype derived from your answers: Desert Wanderer, Deep Roots, Coast to Coast, Park Ranger, The Long Haul, eighteen in all.

All of it is adjustable before you post. There are six map styles, satellite and terrain plus four flat ones including a paper and a night palette, and the one you choose is baked into the exported image and the video rather than only the screen. The four sizes are the ones the platforms actually want: 9:16 story, 4:5 post, square, and 1.91:1 wide. You can change the name on the card, swap which archetype it shows, and mint a fresh link if you would rather the old one stopped working.

The video renders in your own browser and saves as a file you can post. One other tool here does video, and it does it differently, which is the next entry. Nothing on the page is gated: no install, no account, no paywall, no ads, and it is the same tool on a phone as on a laptop.

What it is bad at: no account, which is the whole appeal and the whole problem. The map lives in that browser's storage and in the link you copied. Clear your site data on a phone and it is gone unless you saved the link. There is no iOS or Android app for the states map, nothing to bring you back, and no dates. If you want a log of when you were somewhere, this is the wrong tool.

VisitedPlaces

This is the old amCharts "visited states" map, which now lives at visitedplaces.com; the amCharts URL redirects there. It is free, needs no login, and covers county-level maps. Its own team describes the redesign as "Pick a map, click some regions, and share it with the world, no login, no fuss."

It is also the only tool here that beats us on one thing worth being clear about: it records an animated video of your map filling in, at 1080x1920 for Stories, 1080x1080 square, and Pinterest's 1000x1500, at up to 60fps. If a posted video is your goal, this is a genuine contender and the animation is of the map itself rather than a card.

What it is bad at: no SVG export at all, only PNG, standalone HTML and an embed. And with no account there is no list of your maps: the whole state lives in the URL, so losing the link loses the map.

TripMemo

TripMemo's states map has the widest export menu of anything here: landscape, square and vertical story images, an editable SVG, a spreadsheet, and a printable letter-sized checklist. It also gets the DC question right, stating that "Washington, DC is available on the map but tracked separately. Your 50-state total includes the states only."

What it is bad at: states and nothing else, no counties, and its persistence is fragile by its own admission. The page warns that "clearing browser data removes locally saved progress" and offers the workaround of keeping a share link as the backup. That is the same weakness we have, stated just as plainly.

MapChart

MapChart is the general-purpose coloring tool a lot of the internet's election maps come from, and it does counties as well as states, exporting PNG, JPEG, SVG and PDF. It is the most flexible option and the least travel-shaped: you are picking hex values and legend labels, not answering "have you been here."

What it is bad at: the free tier's save is a .txt config file you download and re-upload later, and the thing most people actually want, a shareable link, is behind MapChart Plus at $49.99 a year. Its own page is direct about it: "Get MapChart Plus to save your map configurations online and share them with others." Free use also carries a condition most people miss, in the terms: you may use the image freely "by adding any kind of reference to the Website or Mobile App in your work."

www.mapchart.net · 2026-09-05

The rest of the free web tools, briefly

mapmaker.io has a states map and a counties map, no signup, and is refreshingly honest that "The URL is your save file for your travel history map." We could not find an image download on the states page. Maploco has been running since 2006 and offers a share link, an embed and an SVG download, but SVG is the only download, which is awkward if the plan was to post it. Road Trip Owl is the fastest of all and keeps nothing: "No, your states aren't saved anywhere. The map is for the moment." Its exported image also carries a "Make yours at roadtripowl.com" line burned into the map.

And the fully manual route: a public-domain blank states SVG from Wikimedia Commons, 959x593, every state its own path, opened in Figma or Inkscape. Highest ceiling, no watermark, no limits, and you redo it by hand every time you visit somewhere new.

The apps that genuinely track states

If the map is going to live for a decade, it wants somewhere that syncs and backs up and opens on a phone in a parking lot in Nebraska.

There are two different apps called "been"

This is the most confusing thing in the category, so plainly: been.app is made by REBR AS. been.travel is made by Prostachki Ltd. Unrelated companies, both apps named "been", both tracking countries, both advertising US states. Reviews and Reddit threads about "been" routinely mean the other one. Check the developer name before you buy.

been by REBR is the one we would pay for. Its site says it will "Track states, provinces and counties, drill into the US, Germany, the UK and more," and that the unlock is "a single one-time purchase, yours forever," which is $9.99 on the US App Store. The free tier covers countries, stats and sharing, and the site is explicit that it is "Free to download, no account needed to start." It shipped version 2.6.7 the day we checked.

been.app · 2026-09-05

What it is bad at: it is smaller than its marketing suggests. The US App Store listing shows 14 ratings, a thin base for a product whose site talks in millions, and a one-star review from January 2025 reports "Lots of overlap in the text on an iPhone 15 pro max." States sit behind the paywall, so the free tier does not answer this article's question at all.

been by Prostachki covers "US states, European regions, and more" and says "All core features of Been are completely free." That sits alongside ten separate in-app purchase tiers including a $19.99 lifetime, a $29.99 yearly, a $6.99 monthly and a weekly subscription. Read the tier list before believing the free line.

been.travel · 2026-09-05

Visited

Visited has been around longer than most of this list and does regional maps for over twenty countries including the US. An account is required by design: "Signing up ensures your data is securely saved on our servers and can be accessed through any of your devices."

What it is bad at: the pricing is a maze and is not published where you would look. Its own premium page says only "We offer three payment options" with no amounts. The App Store shows what that means: Regions $3.99, cities $9.99, itineraries $7.99, remove ads $3.99, and a $59.99 lifetime above all of it. A states-only user pays $3.99 and then keeps meeting the next wall.

Stampie

Stampie builds a passport of stamps instead of a filled map, with a collection its site calls "All 50 U.S. states. The ultimate American roadtrip." Pro is "a one-time $19.99 purchase," there is a web version alongside the apps, and it gives you a real public profile at stampie.app/@username rather than only an image.

What it is bad at: the states collection is Pro-only, sign-in is required before anything happens, and it is new enough to have no independent review base. It also publishes tracker-comparison articles on its own domain that rank itself against rivals, so read those as marketing.

Skratch

Skratch sells a scratch-map aesthetic and its listing promises you can "Mark countries, cities, states, regions and attractions you've visited in the world." Regions are a $9.99 unlock, and it has the largest genuine review base of the paid apps here.

What it is bad at: the automatic detection over-credits you. A reviewer notes "it marks me as having visited China, even though just having a long layover doesn't really count as a trip." On a states map, where a drive-through is already a debated case, an app that guesses generously is a real problem. Its own site publishes no pricing.

The two US-only apps

USA Travel: I've Been in US is the only iOS app we found doing states and counties together, rated 4.8 from around 2,200 reviews with a December 2025 update. Counties are sold per state at $0.99 each, so Texas at 254 counties and California at 58 cost the same dollar. What it is bad at: a reviewer sums up the free tier as "The only thing free is a map of the states and whether or not you have visited it."

US States Visited looks like the obvious free pick and should be avoided. Its last update was December 2023, and a review describes creating a second map as freezing "the app on a blank page that only allows you to do absolutely nothing." An abandoned app is a worse home for fifteen years of data than a browser tab.

Three popular apps that do not track states

This is the section that saves money, because all three rank for these searches and none answers the question.

Polarsteps is an excellent trip tracker and a bad states tracker. Its own travel tracker page describes the stats it keeps as "Distance, countries, and steps stack up as you move from place to place." States, regions and subdivisions appear nowhere in its documentation. Plus costs EUR 8.99 a month or EUR 29.99 a year. For an automatic diary of a road trip with the actual route drawn, it is the best thing on this page. It will not tell you that you have been to 31 states.

Travelog tracks countries, cities, landmarks and airlines. No states. It is also very new, rated 3.8 from five reviews, and its listed developer website is an unbranded Framer subdomain.

TravelGram tracks countries only, holds a 1.0 star rating on the US App Store, its own domain does not resolve, and it lists a $59.99 in-app purchase beside a $29.99 "lifetime" one and a $2.99 weekly subscription. It is named here because it ranks, not because you should consider it.

When 50 states stops being enough

Americans travel domestically by road far more than by air. The US Travel Association's spring 2026 forecast puts 2025 at 2.40 billion domestic person-trips, of which 2.20 billion were by auto against 198.9 million by air. Roughly eleven car trips for every flight. With that much driving behind you, the states run out long before the country does. (If the driving is the point, our breakdown of what an RV road trip actually costs in the USA versus Europe runs the numbers.)

Counties

There are 3,143 counties and county-equivalents across the 50 states and DC. County counting is a real hobby with a real community, and its canonical tool is Mob-Rule, still generating its leaderboards this month, whose rule is refreshingly unambiguous: "you visit a county, then you count it. To visit a county, just cross the plane of the county line."

It is also a warning. Personal accounts are granted by emailing the owner, and its own signup page states that "Passwords are stored in plaintext on the server and are sometimes visible in URLs." Use a throwaway password, or use the guest login. That this is the state of the art tells you how underserved county tracking is. The alternatives are USA Travel's per-state purchases and the free county layers in TripProf USA, MapChart, VisitedPlaces and mapmaker.io.

National parks, and the myth about the official app

This one catches people. The official National Park Service app is free, on both platforms, and genuinely good for maps, tours and offline downloads. It does not track which parks you have visited. Its feature list offers "Personalized Lists: Create lists, save park sites, places, and add notes" and nothing that stamps a passport. If you installed it expecting a checklist, that is why you could not find one.

www.nps.gov · 2026-09-05

Know the numbers before counting. The National Park System has 433 units, of which 63 carry the "National Park" designation, as of July 2026, and those units drew 323,014,305 recreation visits in 2025, down 2.7% from the 2024 record. For a park checklist, Park'd covers all 63 with visit dates and is iOS-only by its own statement, and Chimani has check-ins and a visit history at $35.99 a year, its free tier dropping from 500-plus park guides to about 70. Worth knowing before you plan the trip: park entry pricing changed for non-residents, which we covered in the guide to the national park surcharge.

What about Google My Maps?

People reach for it and then give up, for two reasons worth knowing in advance. It has no built-in state polygons, so you either draw fifty shapes by hand or import boundaries, and the importer refuses files over 2,000 rows, which rules out a counties file in one layer. Then, having built it, there is no image export at all: KML, KMZ, per-layer CSV, or print. Your only picture is a PDF with Google's roads and labels showing through your fills.

Which one should you actually use

By what you are trying to do, not by score.

If you are counting countries rather than states, that is a different tool and a different comparison. Our world map is at world.tripprof.com, works the same way across 195 countries, and we put it up against the country trackers in the best app to track countries visited. One number from it that nobody else can publish: across 472 world maps filled in on tripprof.com, the median person had been to 20 countries, as of September 2026.

What we tested and how

Every product claim above comes from that product's own website or its US App Store listing, read in September 2026, not from memory. Where a price appears it is the price shown on that page that day, and several of these change tiers often enough that this will drift. We re-verify comparisons like this at six months.

In the free web tools we built the map by hand. The TripProf USA screenshots are all one profile: 29 states, two marked as lived in, six Texas counties and 24 experiences, which is the profile the card and the video in this article were generated from.

Five things we could not verify, and are therefore not claiming. ExplorersMap's site returns nothing readable, so we make no claim about it. Google Play listings would not return readable content, so every Android fact here comes from a vendor site or the iOS listing. Polarsteps' own support article on visit statistics returns a 403, so its granularity is sourced from marketing pages. We did not run a MapChart export, so we take no position on whether its free PNG carries a visible watermark, only that its terms ask for attribution. And we found no image-download control on Randy Majors' map builder, so we have left it out rather than guess.

We publish this blog and one of the fourteen tools is ours, so our weaknesses are written into the same paragraphs as everyone else's. The cleared-browser problem is real, VisitedPlaces genuinely beats us on video export options, and the paid apps genuinely beat us on lasting a decade.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best app to track states visited in 2026?

For a free map in two minutes with no account, usa.tripprof.com in a browser. For an app that keeps the map for years and syncs across devices, been by REBR at $9.99 as a one-time purchase. Both do counties, which most alternatives do not.

Is there a free app to track US states visited?

Yes, several, though the good free ones are websites rather than apps: TripProf USA, VisitedPlaces, TripMemo, MapChart, mapmaker.io and Maploco all work in a browser with no install. Among installable apps the free tiers are thin, with been, Visited, Stampie and Skratch all putting states behind a $3.99 to $19.99 unlock.

How many states has the average American visited?

Sixteen, not counting their home state, according to a YouGov poll published in June 2025 among 1,125 US adults. The widely repeated 12.5 figure comes from a 2016 Ipsos survey that counted the home state, so the two are not directly comparable.

Does driving through a state count as visiting it?

There is no official rule, so pick one and apply it consistently. The common conventions are setting foot outside the vehicle, spending a night, or doing one thing you would tell someone about. Most trackers leave this to you, which is right. Be aware that apps with automatic detection tend to count generously.

Can I track US counties, not just states?

Yes, though the options are narrow. TripProf USA, MapChart, VisitedPlaces and mapmaker.io all do counties free in a browser. On mobile, been includes counties in its paid unlock and USA Travel sells them state by state at $0.99. Mob-Rule is the long-running community tool, but it is web-only and its accounts are granted by email.

Does the official National Park Service app track which parks I have visited?

No. The NPS app is free and useful for maps, tours and offline downloads, but its features stop at saving places and adding notes. There is no visit log and no passport stamp. For a checklist of the 63 National Parks you need something else, such as Park'd or Chimani.

How many US states, counties and national parks are there?

Fifty states, plus DC and five inhabited territories, which is why tools show totals of 50, 51 and 56. There are 3,143 counties and county-equivalents in the 50 states and DC per the Census Bureau, or about 3,231 once territorial equivalents are included. The National Park System has 433 units, of which 63 are designated National Parks.

Key Takeaways

Whichever you pick, the useful move is the same: fill it in tonight from memory, then let it correct itself over the next few years. The gaps are the interesting part.

Sources

• YouGov, "Which states have Americans visited?", June 2025
• Ipsos, "The average American has visited just 12 states", July 2016
• US Travel Association, Travel Forecast, Spring 2026
• US Census Bureau, National Geographic Tallies
• National Park Service, The National Park System, updated July 2026
• National Park Service, 2025 visitation statistics, March 2026
• National Park Service, NPS Apps, updated May 2026
• Google My Maps, import limits