I have tried Mint, Personal Capital, GNUCash, and probably a few others, and I seem to have settled on Tiller. Basically, I like the convenience of automatically pulling in transactions and balances, but I like retaining control of the budgeting process.
I know there are a ton of others out there, so let’s post our favorites and a short explanation of what makes them great.
I feel like I’ve tried just about everything - YNAB is still the best.
It’s frustrating to have to pay for a third-party service to pull in European bank transactions, though. YNAB is expensive enough on its own.
I’m going to put in a third vote for YNAB.
I wrote my own! https://budgetmyway.com
- Really wanted weekly “reserve” based budgeting. If I am under budget one week, that amount will get added to the reserve. And if I am over budget another week, that will take money away from the reserve. I also have the concept of “reserve expenses”, not regular weekly expenses but usually bigger/unplanned that pull directly from the reserve.
- Privacy: no ads, tracking, etc
- No actual banking connections/APIs. Manually enter expenses.
- A project I can improve over time. Been using it for over 10 years now.
I have had a subscription to YNAB (you need a budget) for years now. It’s simple and straight to the point for exactly what we need. It pulls everything from my bank accounts smoothly. My partner understands it and is able to easily use it, which is extremely important.
I tried Mint and have suggested it in the past as a free alternative to folks who need help budgeting, but it tends to be too complicated for most that I’ve suggested it to. And that’s even after setting it up for them and showing them basic usage.
I used the GNUCash for a while. As a manual option, it was good for when I was importing everything to Quicken.
I no longer use quicken or manually import anything.
There’s not a lot of products that I’ll recommend, but I can say that YNAB is worth every cent.
