Comparison

52 vs Been vs Visited: Stop Tapping Countries One by One

If you've looked for a way to track the countries you've visited, you've probably found Been and Visited. They're the two best-known travel-map apps, and they work the same way: they hand you a blank world map and you tap every country you've been to.

That works — until your memory doesn't. This is a look at how 52 builds the same map and the same country count a different way: automatically, from the photos already on your phone.

The core difference: manual vs automatic

Been and Visited are, at heart, manual trackers. According to their own marketing, Been is built to "track which countries you have visited," and Visited offers a scratch-style world map, a country tracker, and stats like the percentage of the world you've explored. All of it depends on you remembering and tapping each place.

52 starts from the opposite end. Instead of asking what you remember, it reads where your photos were actually taken and fills the map in for you.

*Competitor details are based on each app's public marketing at the time of writing and may change.*

Why "automatic" matters more than it sounds

The appeal of a manual tracker is control. The catch is that a map built from memory is only as complete as your memory — and almost nobody remembers every country. The afternoon you crossed a border, the layover city you actually explored, the trips from before you cared about tracking them: those are exactly the ones that never get tapped in.

Because 52 finds your trips in your camera roll automatically, those forgotten places show up on your map without you doing anything. You get a more honest picture of where you've actually been.

Where Been and Visited still shine

To be fair: if you love the ritual of manually filling in a scratch map, or you want to mark countries you visited long before phone cameras existed, a manual tracker does that directly. 52 builds from your photo library, so it's strongest for the travel that library covers.

The bottom line

• Choose Been or Visited if you want to hand-curate a map and enjoy tapping it in yourself.
• Choose 52 if you'd rather your countries-visited map and country count build themselves from photos you already took — and keep updating on their own.

You did the traveling. You shouldn't have to do the data entry too.

Keep reading

• Make a Map of Every Country You've Visited — Automatically
• How Many Countries Have You Visited? Count Them Automatically
• 52 vs Polarsteps: Automatic Trip Tracking Without the Battery Drain