11 Mint Alternatives – Budgeting Apps to Get Control
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As Mint, the popular personal finance app, bids farewell, it's time to explore alternative tools that empower you to take control of your financial well-being. Managing your money effectively and gaining a holistic view of your finances is crucial for building a secure future. In this search for alternatives, we've uncovered 11 personal finance sites and apps that offer budgeting solutions and insights into your spending habits, helping you chart a clear financial path. While not all are free, some provide features beyond Mint's capabilities or excel in specific financial management tasks. Discover the best-suited option to continue your financial journey and stay on top of your financial goals.
In this article
11 Mint alternatives
1. Empower
Empower is a financial planning tool that allows users to link checking, savings, brokerage, bank accounts, and other accounts such as loans and credit cards. It provides an overall look at a user’s finances.
While Mint focused on day-to-day spending and saving, Empower excels in its focus on investing and long-term savings. Users can easily plan for retirement and use it as one of their investment tools to compare a portfolio’s allocation.
Empower is free, though it offers the help of an experienced financial advisor for a fee of up to 0.89%. That’s a high fee compared to online accounts that charge only 0.3% for professional advice.
2. YNAB
YNAB (You Need a Budget) was Mint's main competitor. While Mint covered a range of services, such as investment tracking and reviewing your credit score, YNAB only offers budgeting. So, if your monthly budget is in disarray, YNAB can be a good place to focus solely on it.
Instead of just doing expense tracking, it encourages users to make a monthly budget in advance and stick to it. Another thing it does well is help customers curb spending habits and be mindful of their money.
This dedication to your budget isn’t free. YNAB has a 34-day free trial, but to continue, you must pick a monthly plan at $15 per month or an annual plan at $99 per year. Paying for such help may make sense for a few months, but once you get your budget in order, you may want to drop it and find free budgeting software elsewhere.
3. Quicken
Quicken is one of the oldest budgeting software, which isn’t meant to be a slight. It can be a little overwhelming to pick the best Quicken product. Quicken programs offer to help with budgeting:
- Simplifi: Manage your finances in five minutes per week. $48 annually.
- Classic: The original Quicken with robust features and investment tools. $84 annually.
Quicken may be best for people who want to see every part of their financial life in one place. Its budgeting and investing information is detailed enough to keep any accountant happy.
4. EveryDollar
EveryDollar is a budgeting app from personal finance expert Dave Ramsey. It focuses solely on budgeting.
It uses a system called zero-based budgeting (ZBB) that Ramsey didn’t create but is a popular budgeting system where every dollar is given a job. Before you spend any of your money, you assign it to a specific expense or savings account. You’re planning how to spend your money ahead of time — or budgeting — to avoid impulse purchases and spending money you don’t have.
A free version of EveryDollar is available, but the features are limited, and users must manually enter transactions.
A paid version called Ramsey Plus offers more features, such as syncing with your bank accounts, so you don’t have to enter transactions manually. Paying also gets you access to other Dave Ramsey products.
The free tool will allow you to create monthly budgets, track transactions, customize categories, sync budget data across devices, set due dates, and more.
A premium version lets you connect bank accounts and stream transactions, see custom reports, download your budgets, join group financial coaching calls, and more. A 14-day free trial period is $17.99 per month or $79.99 for an annual subscription.
5. Excel
If you don’t mind entering the data, Microsoft Excel has templates and blank spreadsheets to create a monthly budget. They’re easy to use and only require filling in a few areas, called cells, to list your income and expenses, and then the rest is calculated automatically.
A monthly subscription to access premium templates is $7 per month for one person or $10 per month for a family of up to six, but more people download Microsoft 365 for a one-time fee of $149.99 for a full suite of Microsoft services.
If you have Microsoft Office on your computer, you can download a pre-made and free Excel template to create budgets. Apple also has free budget templates in its Numbers program.
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6. CountAbout
CountAbout is a personal finance app that imports data from Quicken and Mint and automatically downloads data from banking, credit card, and retirement accounts in real time. No personal finance software has to be installed. Only an internet connection is needed.
Automatically downloading your financial information, such as your investment accounts, can cause trepidation. Mint collects and sells the personal information of its users, a practice that CountAbout says it doesn’t do.
CountAbout may be the best budgeting app for online security. It doesn’t track your usage, your personal information is collected or sold, and your encrypted email address is the only personal data it stores. It also has a two-factor authentication login process.
You can try CountAbout for free for 45 days before selecting one of two plans. The Standard Plan costs $10 per year and provides access to all functions except automatic downloading of banking, credit card, and other financial transactions. The Premium version is $40 per year and adds automatic downloading of transactions. Small business owners can add business invoicing for $60 more per year.
7. PocketSmith
PocketSmith is another money management tool that doesn’t require sharing personally identifying information. Data can be imported from Mint or any other personal finance software.
One of PocketSmith’s best features is something Mint never had: the ability to create cash flow forecasts up to six months in advance. If you don’t like the forecast, you can change your behavior. This is part of its free Basic offering, which requires manual transactions and other data imports.
The free version allows for manual imports, two dashboards, 12 budgets, and two accounts and provides a six-month projection. The Foundation version is $10 monthly and includes automatic bank feeds, transaction importing, and categorization, so you don’t have to do those tasks manually across six dashboards with six connected banks. Projections of your cash flow can go as far out as 10 years. A monthly subscription to its Flourish service is $25 monthly and includes all of the Premium features for 18 connected banks and 18 dashboards with 30 years of projections. The Fortune account, $40 monthly, provides unlimited dashboards, accounts, and budgets with 60 years of projections.
8. Tiller
If you work in finance, accounting, or data science and know your way around spreadsheets, then Tiller could be the finance management tool you’re looking for.
Connect it to your financial institutions. Tiller will automatically import data to Excel or Google Sheets to categorize your expenses, income, investments, mortgage, and other finances in a spreadsheet. More than 21,000 financial institutions can be integrated. Templates are included.
Tiller offers a free 30-day trial, which costs $79 per year.
9. Banktivity
Banktivity, formerly iBank, offers budgeting software for macOS and iOS platforms only. It’s like Quicken for Mac lovers.
Like a few budgeting software on this list, Banktivity charges a fee to sync your credit cards, savings account, and checking account with the software. More than 14,000 banks and financial institutions can be connected for free by importing or downloading data, though it may not always work depending on the types of files your bank uses. You could also enter the data manually.
To sync the information automatically, you’ll have to pay. Its Direct Access plan costs $49.99 per year for a Bronze subscription, which creates budgets and reports, sets up goals to down debt, and can help you build an emergency fund, among other things.
The Silver subscription is $69.99 per year. Along with syncing with basic bank accounts, it can also sync with investment and retirement accounts and add real estate, mortgages, and loans so that you don’t have to enter the accounts manually in your budget.
The Gold subscription is $99.99 per year. It includes everything in the other two plans and adds global finances to track accounts in different currencies and download exchange rates and cryptocurrency prices.
Banktivity has unique features that Mint didn't have. They include assigning tax codes to transactions and online bill payment to automate how you pay bills.
10. Goodbudget
Beginners learning to set up a budget may want to try Goodbudget, an app that takes the envelope budget system and modernizes it in an app you can sync across your iPhones and Androids.
Envelope budgeting is similar to the EveryDollar app in assigning a specific expense or savings account to every transaction you want to make in the coming month. But instead of putting physical cash in real envelopes marked with categories such as groceries, eating out, and debt payoff, Goodbudget does this with virtual envelopes.
Because the envelopes are synced across your iOS and other devices, your spouse will know if you’ve spent all of that month’s budget for dining out, for example. No more miscommunication that causes you to go over budget.
The free version of Goodbudget comes with 20 envelopes on up to two devices, while the paid version of $8 per month offers unlimited envelopes on five devices.
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11. Moneydance
Like Banktivity, Moneydance is a helpful personal finance tool for Mac users who don’t like how Quicken works on Macs.
The site looks dated and isn’t as modern-looking as YNAB, but it has a simple look that gets the job done. It doesn’t have extras that other sites do, such as goal setting and retirement planning. One big plus is that Moneydance has online bill pay, which not many budgeting apps have.
Users can subscribe for $9 per month or $90 annually or elect to make a one-time purchase of $65, which includes a free upgrade to the next major release. Moneydance Plus is not included but is available as a monthly subscription for $4 or $40.
Related: Credit Karma vs. Empower vs. YNAB
Costs
Some budgeting apps like to point out that they don’t sell or share your personal information and may not even require anything more than an email address to have an account. Without such information, companies don’t have any personal identifying information to sell to advertisers or third parties.
To make up for that loss of revenue, they’ll either run advertisements on their sites or, more likely, charge subscription fees, as CountAbout, PocketSmith, Banktivity, and Tiller do.
That differs from what many financial software companies did in the past by selling their software as a one-time purchase. Now, many have changed to a subscription model. And these monthly or annual costs can go up. Some budgeting apps we reviewed only a few months ago have already raised their subscription prices.
The costs of each budgeting app we reviewed were listed above, so we won’t go over those again. But some stand out over others, for better or worse.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Budgeting apps can be a good way to plan where you’re going to spend your money in the coming month and can help you from spending more money than you have and going into debt.
- Free versions of many monthly budget apps are worth trying before deciding if you want to pay for a subscription.
- Organizing your finances with these apps is easy and fast, and can be automated for a price. You can see where your budget stands at a glance.
- A free Excel spreadsheet may do the same job but without the visual beauty of many apps.
Cons
- Some budgeting apps are expensive at $100 or more per year.
- If you don’t pay for automatic syncing of your financial accounts, you’ll usually have to manually enter information as it changes.
- Check the security levels of apps to see if they integrate with your bank and lenders and change passwords often to help avoid security breaches.
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- Transparent information on each offer for earnings and tasks.
- Money is deposited quickly and securely
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The bottom line
A budgeting app won’t get you out of debt, but it can help you organize your finances and plan where to spend and save so that you can get out of debt and reach other financial goals. If you’re not in debt, then they can be used to plan for long-term savings goals, such as an emergency fund, college, or home purchase.
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Writer
Aaron Crowe is a freelance journalist who specializes in personal finance writing and editing. He has worked at newspapers, where he won a Pulitzer Prize, and has written for numerous online publications. These include AOL, US News & World Report, WiseBread, Bankrate, AARP, and many websites focusing on housing, credit and insurance. He lives in California with his wife and daughter.
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