Unlocked vs been: Landmark Passport or Country Tracker?

been and Unlocked both turn travel into a map you fill in—but they disagree about what should put a mark on it. been is a country tracker: tap a country, watch it fill in, and build up passport-style counts of countries, continents, and regions. Unlocked is a landmark passport: an entry appears only when you physically arrive at one of its named Landmarks and the app verifies you are there.

If you are choosing today: use been for the breadth—every country you have ever set foot in, marked in seconds, including past trips you took before any app existed. Use Unlocked for the depth—an earned record of specific places, each with a verified date, city progress, and Memories you can generate from the Experiences your arrival unlocked. The two fit together better than they compete.

What you are choosing between

	been	Unlocked
What gets recorded	Countries you tap as visited; regions with premium	Landmarks you physically arrive at in 30 supported cities
Effort per entry	One tap, anywhere, anytime	Actually going there
Verification	None—self-declared	Presence checked at unlock: time, coordinates, accuracy, radius
Backfill of past trips	Yes—mark anything from any year	No—unlocks require live presence
What entries become	Counts, a filled map, a shareable passport image	Dated unlocks, badges, city progress, and generated Memories
Photos	None	Photographic Memories from your unlocked Experiences
Price model	Free tier for countries; premium is a one-time purchase	Free to unlock and share; optional Memory credits; no subscription

Tap to claim vs prove you came

been’s honesty is its charm. Nothing pretends the map is evidence; it is a self-declared list with excellent ergonomics. That is exactly what many travelers want—a living scratch map for the pocket, one that can absorb an entire travel life retroactively in a spare half hour. Its premium tier deepens the same idea: more than a thousand regions and subdivisions, from US states to Japanese prefectures, for people whose count needs finer grain.

The limitation is the same as its strength: a tap is a claim. The map cannot distinguish a decade of returning to Lisbon from a two-hour layover, and it never sees the difference.

Unlocked draws its line on the other side. A Landmark enters your record at the moment of arrival, and the presence check is what makes the record worth anything: timestamp, coordinates, reported accuracy, distance, and radius are validated at unlock. You cannot tap your way to a full map from your sofa—and you also cannot lose an afternoon of tapping to a backlog of half-remembered trips, because there is no backlog. Every entry was a day you actually went. That is also why the record can be shared with confidence: a Public Passport rests on server-confirmed unlocks, not self-reporting. This is the same distinction drawn at length in landmark passport vs country counter.

Every country vs a small set of landmarks per city

Geographically, the products point in opposite directions. been covers the whole world at the country level—and deeper with premium—so your 40 or 80 or 120 countries all count equally, wherever they are.

Unlocked covers 30 cities so far, from Barcelona, Lisbon, and Paris to Tokyo, Marrakech, and Baku, each with a small curated set of Landmarks. Within those cities the record is far richer than a country tally: each unlock counts toward that city’s progress, each carries its date, and each unlocks that landmark’s curated Experiences—editorial presets like Empty Park and Golden Hour—permanently. Any of them can later produce a Memory: a photographic image of you at the landmark, built from your private reference photos, clearly disclosed as generative.

So the shape of your record is the real choice: a whole-world list with clean borders, or a shorter list where every line has a date, a place, and eventually an image. Neither shape is wrong; they serve different ideas of what a travel record is for. For the broader argument, the digital travel passport guide is the long version.

Which should you install?

Install been if:

• you want your entire travel history—decades of it—on one map today;
• country and region counts are the numbers that motivate you;
• you want the simplest possible interface: tap, fill, share.

Install Unlocked if:

• you want entries you had to earn by standing somewhere;
• your record should carry unlock dates, city progress, and badges;
• you want the option of Memories—photographic images from your verified arrivals;
• you want to share a passport that rests on checked presence.

And the honest overlap: been answers “how many countries?”; Unlocked answers “where exactly, and when?”. Many travelers keep both open—been for the lifetime map, Unlocked for the arrivals still to come.

Your first unlock takes about ten minutes

1. Install Unlocked free on the App Store or Google Play.
2. Choose a Landmark near you, or plan one into your next trip—30 cities are live and growing.
3. Arrive, unlock, and watch the entry appear with its date and your city progress ticking forward.
4. Your first verified unlock includes a welcome credit, so your first Memory is already paid for. Everything after that shows its credit cost upfront—no subscription, and unlocking never costs anything.

When the next trip is booked, start with Unlocked and let been keep the country map honest in parallel.

Product names are the property of their respective owners; features and prices are as described by each product as of publication.