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The 5 Best Apps for Living with Roommates improves the roommate experience. Roommates help save money on rent and other expenses, but the situation can be stressful. Friction can enter the picture when someone is late paying their share of rent or not keeping the apartment clean. In order to make the roommate experience better, the 5 best apps for living with roommates are listed below.

Venmo

@Venmo is a popular general payment app. While it is not tailored to roommates, it is very helpful for quick payments. If one roommates goes to the grocery store and picks something up for someone else, they can easily be reimbursed. Venmo isn’t ideal for recurring bills, such as monthly rent, but it is an easy one-and-done payment system. In addition, their basic service is free to use.

Price: Free for basic service

Splitwise

As its name hints, @Splitwise is a bill splitting app. It is great for managing recurring payments, such as monthly rent, that are shared between roommates. When someone sets-up an account, they create a group, such as “roommates” or “123 South St”, and adds the individuals. Once this step is complete, they add a bill as a single entry or a recurring charge and assign how much each person in the group needs to pay and when the money is due. Each person can see how much they owe at anytime and settle their account with a single payment using @PayPal or @Venmo. A service like Splitwise is appealing because a roommate can pay with one payment, and they can make the payment from anywhere. If someone is out of town at the beginning of the month, there are no excuses to not get the rent paid.

Price: Free for basic service

Simplebills

@Simplebills addresses a problem that users of Splitwise may run into when paying utility bills. Unlike rent, utility bills change every month. With roommates, some lucky person gets to figure out how much each roommate owes. In some situations, roommates split utilities evenly, but in others the person that take 2 showers a day is required to pay more of the bill. Simplebills solves this problem.

When an account is created with Simplebills, the roommates and their allocation of utilities is listed. Once an account is created with Simplebills, all of the utility bills for a property are sent to Simplebills. The company collects the bills from the providers and assigns each roommate the portion that they owe. Each roommate then receives one bill from Simplebills showing only their portion. Each roommate pays Simplebills, and Simplebills pays the utility providers.

An additional benefit of Simplebills is that payments can be reported to credit bureaus to improve someone’s credit score. There is an additional fee for this service of $2.99/month on top of Simplebills basic monthly fee of $5/user.

Price: $5/month per user, $2.99/month per user for credit reporting

Tody

@Todyapp is a chore scheduling and tracking app. While chore scheduling and tracking is not an important issue for some people, it is worth a try if it can help keep the peace among roommates. Tody allows tasks to be assigned to individuals and includes reminders if necessary. Tasks are assigned by room and the activities within each room. Users can get very detailed such as changing/cleaning the bath mat in the master bathroom.

Price: $7

TimeTree

@TimeTree is a shared calendar app that can be thought of as a refrigerator calendar. For roommates with different schedules, it is a helpful tool to keep track of everyone. In addition, it syncs with Outlook, Exchange and Google so everyone is kept in the loop.

Price: Free