Best packing list apps in 2026
· By Mitja Ahlin, founder
Packing list apps are a category where the simplest tool is often the right one - right up until the trip is complicated enough that a generic checklist starts missing things. Here's what's available, and the honest answer about when you need more than a note.
Generic checklist apps
Apple Reminders, Google Keep, Todoist, or a plain notes app will all hold a packing list, and for a straightforward trip that is genuinely enough. Free, already installed, nothing to learn.
Where they break down is repetition. On the second trip you either rebuild the list from scratch or reuse an old one that's subtly wrong for this trip's weather, length, or activities. The list also has no idea what the trip is, so it can't tell you that you've forgotten the thing you always forget.
PackPoint
The best-known dedicated packing app. You enter destination, dates, and planned activities, and it generates a list using the destination's weather forecast. Free with a paid tier for custom lists and templates.
Best for: frequent travellers who want a sensible list generated rather than written. Weakest at: anything that isn't a trip. It's built around destinations and weather, so a day hike or a birthday party doesn't fit the model.
Packr
Similar idea to PackPoint with a cleaner interface and good handling of multi-destination trips and different traveller types. Paid, with a free tier.
Best for: complex trips with several stops. Weakest at: the same thing - it's a travel tool, and it lives separately from whatever else you're using to plan.
TripIt
Not a packing app, but worth naming because people use it as one. It builds an itinerary automatically from confirmation emails, and packing is a manual list bolted onto that. Strong for flights and hotels, irrelevant for anything you drive to.
The gap all of them share
Every app above treats packing as its own separate activity, in its own separate app. That works when the trip is a flight and a hotel. It works much less well for the things families actually forget gear for: a day hike, a camping weekend, a ski day, a via ferrata route, a birthday scavenger hunt. Those aren't "trips" in the sense these apps mean, and the packing list isn't the plan - it's one part of a plan that also has a date, some tasks, and other people involved.
So the list ends up somewhere else: a note, a chat message, or nowhere. And a packing list you have to remember to open in a different app is a packing list you check after you've already left.
Adventure Book
Adventure Book attaches the prep checklist to the activity itself. The hike has its date, its plan, and its gear list in one place, and when you do the same route next year you duplicate the whole thing rather than rebuilding the list. Once it's done you add a short recap, which is also where "we should have brought more water" ends up - so next year's list starts smarter.
Best for: activities where packing is one part of a bigger plan. Weakest at: automatic weather-based generation - PackPoint does that better, and if that's the feature you want, use PackPoint.
A family packing list that carries over to the next trip
Most of the apps above are built around one trip at a time: you make the list, you pack, the list's job is done. A family packing list has a different problem - the same trips repeat. The same camping weekend, the same ski week, the same week at the grandparents', year after year, and every year someone forgets the thing that got forgotten last time too, because nobody wrote it down anywhere that survives past the trip itself.
What actually fixes that isn't a smarter generator, it's the list surviving in a form you can reuse. When the packing list lives with the activity itself - the same camping trip, duplicated from last year's - the list starts from what you actually needed last time instead of a blank page. If last year's recap said "forgot the bike pump," you add it to the list once and it's there every year after. That's the difference between a family packing list you rebuild every single trip and one that quietly gets better each time you use it.
It also solves the part every dedicated packing app skips: who's bringing what. A family packing list isn't one person's job, even though it usually ends up that way by default. Splitting items by person, and letting each person see and check off their own share, is a small thing that stops one adult from silently carrying the whole checklist in their head every single trip.
Which one to use
- One simple trip: your notes app is fine, don't overthink it
- Frequent flying where forgetting something is expensive: PackPoint or Packr
- Complex multi-stop itineraries: Packr, or TripIt for the flights
- Outdoor days and family activities where the gear list belongs with the plan: Adventure Book
The best packing list is the one you actually check before walking out the door, which usually means wherever the rest of the plan already lives - not a separate app you only remember once you're annoyed you forgot something.
For the record of what happened afterward, see the best travel journal apps.
