You can start with one of their free templates or build your own, but after the initial work, you'll have a fully automated spreadsheet tailored to what you need. You can use this to track your net worth, set a budget, or anything else you can imagine. Why it is better than Quicken: Quicken is now cloud-based so if you want to avoid putting your data into the cloud, going with a spreadsheet is your best option. Tiller makes it possible for you to get automation AND keep your data locally.
You Need a Budget is a powerful budgeting software but it also can help you build a budget that you can grow into — it does more than track your money. Those four pillars form the foundation for a budgeting app that has helped many people transform their financial lives and improve their spending habits. If you're looking to transition to a financial tool that will help you as in help you make the change, not just record expenses , you should take a look at YNAB.
Sometimes you need something more than an app that connects to your bank account. If you want to change the way you budget, while still tracking it, YNAB is your solution.
YNAB is not an entire personal finance management suite — it focuses on budgeting and only budgeting. You won't get investment tools, retirement planning , or wealth management. It's strictly about building, maintaining, and transitioning into the budget you want.
The founders built CountAbout to be a Quicken alternative. Founded in mid, it is one of the only personal finance apps that will import data from Quicken and Mint! If you're looking to transition away from Quicken but worry about losing all your data, you can feed it your Quicken file and it'll populate itself.
That'll make the transition far less painful! The Premium subscription includes automatic transaction downloads. A subscription model means you have complete data privacy and you won't get annoying ads like with Mint. Why is it a good alternative to Quicken? CountAbout is web-based, with multi-factor account security, so you don't have to download a program onto your computer, and there's no need to deal with unwieldy syncing issues — all you need is a web browser.
Imports data from Quicken and Mint Thousands of financial institutions Multi-factor login protection Android and iOS apps Category customization add, delete, rename Tags add, delete, rename Reporting for Account balances Reporting for Category activity Reporting for Tag activity Report exporting Attachments. This helps inform you about your spending and one of the more visual ways, when compared to others on this list.
It's freemium with the Basic option giving you 12 budgets, 2 accounts, and the ability to project 6 months into the future. You also get unlimited accounts and projection out to ten years. Check out our comprehensive review of Pocketsmith to learn more. You might have heard of these guys since they're now owned by the same company that once made Quicken. Intuit acquired them in and that's the reason why they shuttered Quicken Online shortly thereafter. Why it is a good alternative to Quicken: Mint is free and very powerful on the budgeting and expense tracking side.
They do not have much to help you with investment and retirement savings, which I think you'll find is a huge limitation as you get older. The goal of Mint was always to be a budgeting app and with that in mind, they do a very good job. If you are sick of Quicken and focus entirely on expense tracking, Mint is a good Quicken alternative. It is cloud-based so there's no software to download, patch, or update.
If you have investments and want to manage those, Mint will not be able to adequately fulfill your needs. Built specifically for MacOS, Banktivity is a personal finance money manager that will import data from Quicken so you don't lose anything in the transition process.
It'll do everything you want in a personal finance app, including budgeting, track spending, schedule and pay bills, monitor your investments including real estate , and pull data from financial institutions.
It also has some powerful reporting options that, if you're a report junkie, you will probably really enjoy building, tweaking, and rebuilding.
All this is also possible across iOS devices too with seamless mobile app synchronization. MoneyDance is not as well known as some of the other alternatives I've listed but I wanted to mention them because they're one of the few money apps that don't rely on the cloud.
If you are concerned about your data being stored online, this solution is an alternative that keeps your data local to your computer. You can still link your accounts online, so they pull your transactions automatically, but they only store them on your computer. You can enter transactions manually if you didn't want to link your accounts. MoneyDance looks and feels like a checkbook, with the check register for transactions, but has charts and tables for reporting.
It does budgeting but can also track your investments as well, albeit not as feature-rich as others. The free version has all the features as the paid version. The free version's limitation is that you can only enter manual transactions. Many folks swear by his approach and EveryDollar is built with that in mind. His approach takes into account human psychology, rather than relying solely on math, and explains why it is so effective.
It also explains why ideas like the debt snowball work so well, we need to work with our biases and tendencies if we hope to succeed. In zero-based budgeting, you assign every dollar to a category or job, in YNAB parlance. As Quicken revenue declined, Intuit sold the company in to H. Some people thought the acquisition spelled the end of the software. But fast forward 5 years and Quicken is still kicking.
Quicken has been in the business for nearly 40 years. Naturally, it's been through a few transformations. But some users feel these could be signs of Quicken going downhill. In its early days, one Quicken purchase would give you access to the program forever.
Just pop in the floppy disk remember those? This eventually changed as Quicken started to discontinue their products after three years. If you had a copy of Quicken , for example, you would no longer get updates or support after Since , Quicken has switched to a yearly subscription model.
Instead of upgrading once every 3 years, users now have to renew every year to use the program. Quicken has Mac and Windows versions, but they aren't compatible with each other. There's no easy way to transfer your data from one version to the other. The two versions are also quite different. Quicken for Windows looks more outdated but has more functionality. Quicken for Mac looks modern, but lacks robust planning and reporting tools.
Quicken has discontinued several versions of its software. With their subscription product, this won't be an issue—as long as you're willing to pay. You'll get the latest features and tools each time you renew your subscription. Of all the options out there to replace Quicken and Mint for that matter , three stand out among the rest:. Personal Capital is the clear winner when it comes to finding a substitute for Quicken.
With Personal Capital, you can link just about every financial account you have—checking, savings, credit cards, retirement accounts, investments accounts, HSAs, and even your home via Zillow. As an example, the tool enables you to—. From there you can create budgets, categorize spending and generate reports.
I will caution you that setting up Tiller can be a bit intimidating. The good news is that they have videos to walk you through each step.
If I can do it, you can do it. One thing to keep in mind is that you must manually categorize each transaction. For some, this is a show-stopper. They want the convenience of tools like Personal Capital that automate this process. For others, they would prefer to categorize transactions themselves. It forces them to look at each entry, understand how they spent money, and then properly categorize the expense. There is no right or wrong here.
It comes down to preference. You get a day free trial. YNAB is ideal for those looking just for a budgeting tool. In my view, there is no better app when it comes to creating a budget. The tool makes it easy to budget by category based on the money you actually have in the bank. As with other tools, you can connect your bank accounts and credit cards to YNAB. This allows for real-time updates so that you can track your spending throughout the month. You can try it free for 34 days.
The cost is the biggest downside to YNAB. PocketSmith started out as a calendar to plan upcoming income and expenses. You can synch your accounts with PocketSmith. You can also see your income and spending in a handy calendar view. It can create a budget for you based on past spending. It also has a cash flow feature that maps income and spending by date range.
While there is a free version of PocketSmith, it requires manual data entry. If you have a lot of data in Quicken or Mint , CountAbout may be the budgeting tool for you.
I am looking for apps like Foreceipt where you can photo receipts or screenshot email receipts and it ocr s major details and stores the photo. Lately have had some problems with Foreceipt. When I first got it and it worked well it was outstanding.
EveryDollar DOES link to online accounts and in my opinion is the best budgeting software out there since its updates. Please revisit this one…. I have used Quicken for years. I bought the newer version and it choked on one of my accounts on downloading. I called for support. A support contact number was not readily available on line but my bank had a contact number for support and I got through.
They understood the problem and said it was an easy fix. Goodbye Quicken. I am leaving them. I have tried Every Dollar. It does down load from all of my accounts and credit cards which is nice and works well It is an easy program to use but they do not offer downloading of reports.
I have used report generating for years to help with taxes at the end of the year. So, I am still looking for a program. I basically got spoiled. I noted you did not mention this in any of the reviews. Somehow you missed that Every Dollar has the capability to Sync up to the Bank accounts and services.
Do you have any update on this and the report generating capabilities of the others? An informative article and the comments offer great questions too. I nolonger use BillPay because using banks bill paying functions. I do download transactions in order to reconcile as well as downloading investment performance data. Bob White asked about tax reports and a major reason that I used Quicken in the past was the ease of producing tax reports or even exporting data to tax preparation soft ware.
I would consider looking at Tiller. They can generate reports for itemized deductions, annual spending by category, and more. Hi Greg, the only reason I use any personal software is to generate reports at the end of the year for my accountant to use at tax time. Or any of the other options also report writers? Thank you in advance, Betty. The query about cloud-based or non cloud-based has not been addressed. This is pretty critical for lots of folks. Quicken is moving to a subscription-only program.
It is NOT cloud-based. So, my understanding is that in order to continue downloading from financial institutions you are forced to pay an annual subscription fee. I am very disappointed with this decision. At the least, we should be able to continue using older versions of Quicken, with all of the features it came with. I bank at Capital One, and the sync is now delayed hours. That means no more near-real-time views into my spending. I moved to Moneydance when quicken moved to a subscription model — love it, a few bugs but good support helped me fix them.
BUT no Canadian version, yet. I am trying to use Moneydance. I may have a bad setup, but I balance my accounts several times a month. I balance to the bank, come back next week, import from the bank and I am thousand of dollars off. Nice looking program and seems to technically work ok, but the banking has to be right. Is Personal Capital web based? Is it available as a desktop app, or just a mobile app. Some of the screenshots look to be from a desktop app, but they only picture phones on their website.
I want a desktop stand-alone app. Does that put Personal Capital out of the running? From what I can see, it has all the basic functions of Quicken. I just want to categorize all my expenses for end of year reports for taxes and to be able to enter transactions like in Quicken.
The free calculators and other tools may be of interest to you, however. Go ahead, sign up with Personal Capital and find out for yourself. PC appears to only for America….. How is MoneyWiz cheaper than MoneyDance? I have used Qucken ever since the demise of Microsoft Money. I have needs that seem to me very uncomplicated: I need a product that will download my bank transactions, will track and project my monthly expenditures, and generate a report showing cleared and anticipated banking transactions for the current month.
Is there an alternative that will do what I need at lower cost? I really need quicken for my personal banking. Please help! Long-time Quicken user even though I changed platforms to Mac in and put up with its woefully crude version for Apple users. I need to know which of these alternatives will generate for me an annual summary by category of both Income and Expenses for tax purposes…..
I also download banking and investment transactions through Quicken. Can you help? Hey Susan, You might want to look into Tiller. It can generate reports, including itemized deductions, annual spending by category, etc. STOP the incessant altering and revamping. It does not work as well for the end users.
It seems there are no alternatives which do everything Quicken could, if it worked well. Just started a 30day trial with Banktivity. So far although I have Capital One accounts I have been repeatedly unable to have the Banktivity account get online despite, correct credentials, etc. With no results to show for it. I am having trouble finding a Quicken replacement.
While many of these noted here are fine check register and money management, I do not see one that includes online bill payment integration. Online bill payment is a key Quicken feature, schedule a payment, see it immediately in the check register. I do not use it at all for budgeting, only for investments.
I am looking for an alternative that will give me my cost basis and current value. Anything out their worth trying? Give MoneyDance a try. I am experimenting with MD now. I imported everything even though MD says there is no qif option in Q I did it and it worked amazingly well. Lot of clean up and deleting of defunct accounts, but much better results than when I tried a couple of years ago. I may have run into a problem with investment transaction classification but think I can figure out a workaround.
MD hiccuped on the return of capital and has not recorded change in basis correctly. I plan on keeping my old Q data for reference only once I actually make the switch.
The only thing that had been holding me back was the import issue. MD seems to have everything I need; local files, no cloud, portfolio management, bank import, reasonable cost and no dicking around with silly passwords and accounts and such. How were you so lucky? The option to export a qif file is right there in the Q export menu. I first exported my entire data file and imported into MD.
Then, as I cleaned up, I found I had to re-import so I picked the specific account I needed and exported the qif file and re-imported into MD. It is there! Have had no end of issues with Quicken and frankly detest the software. Complete waste of my time! Really annoying! Then, providing I have categorized thousands of transactions correctly throughout the year, I simply print out a report, and hand to it my CPA as the basis of my tax returns. Given the choice between cloud and downloaded desktop apps, I trust cloud more.
It PAINS me to still be using Quicken, hopefully tax year will be the last and I would love to find that online solution asap to start taxes with a clean slate.
It started out mainly as a budgeting app, but it also runs reports on your annual spending by category and itemized deductions. The program automatically downloads your transactions and runs through Google Sheets, so it is cloud-based. One of the knocks against Quicken is that it changed its model to a yearly subscription service. That certainly is one knock against it, but most pay-to-play services have moved toward that model.
The one big negative I see with Tiller that stands out to me is the inability to reconcile transactions. Is there any software that you can manually load checking acct tranactions via CSV or similar file and still track other accts online? I have checking and savings at a small credit union that does not have capabilities of allowing online linking and downloading like what seems to be almost every other financial establishment offers.
I want mac based not cloud based software and need to be able to port my data from Quicken. My needs are simple reports, and a checkbook type interface for tax purposes. All my devices are Apple. What do you recommend? Quicken has never developed a way to effectively export its data to a standardized format so it can be used by another program. They promised it literally for decades and never came through.
What I did and worked well for me is to consider everything on Quicken as legacy and begin anew with a new program like Moneydance. Back in when I did this, I doubled entry for three months, putting data into both programs, then kissed Quicken good-bye and have Quicken on my computer just to look at that data if absolutely necessary.
I tried it a year or so ago, and it was a disaster. This time after seeing an article stating Q had stopped supporting the qfx format, i gave it a try for the hell of it, planning on complaining to Q. Waste of time I know, but it does make me feel better for a little bit. There is tons of stuff to clean up but there will be with any conversion.
I am now convinced I will be able to leave Q, once and for all. Donald, I would be very careful and not throw away Q any time soon. But it all depends on what you were using it for. Most of those would be with investment accounts. See my other post. Thank you, quickdraw, for the caution. Five years ago, I made an archive file of Q to reduce the size of the data file and still have to pop it open so I assume the same thing will happen once I make the move.
Portfolio does have some complex transactions and I think some will be a problem with MD. I know how to make adjustments to keep portfolio in balance with statements and I retain cost documentation.
I only have 12 stocks that would be affected by complexities, balance is mutual funds and preferred stocks. Less of a problem than Q dropping transactions and losing three months of reconciliations on banks and credit cards. I just gave Tiller a day test run. However, it was my experience that one really needs a PhD in spreadsheets in order to do much of the analysis and report running. However, my time is much better spent with a simpler solution.
My current solution is to use Mint to manage and run analysis on my spending accounts bank accounts, credit cards, mortgage, car loans, etc.
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