There was previously a really good thread on personal budgeting software, but it’s over a year old and I’m still not sure on our etiquette for necroing old threads (or what counts as old!). Plus I figure, the personal finance landscape might have changed a lot since 2022 so a new round up would be useful!
YNAB have put their prices up AGAIN, and I am still struggling to switch. I’ve managed to be more specific about what I need in a budgeting app, but I’m struggling to work out what fits my requirements.
My requirements:
iPad and iOS first ideally (I rarely use my budgeting software on Mac)
zero-based envelope budgeting (a lot of apps seem to not implement this well, or at all?)
we should be able to say “I need £60 by July 2025” and the app work out the monthly payment needed. A lot of my charges are annual. (Banktivity looked like a good contender but doesn’t do this??)
I don’t care about automated syncs with bank accounts. I’ve never been able to use them anyway.
Do you know of an app that meets my requirements? What are you using and why? Are you a YNAB refugee who has found a safe home somewhere else?
I moved onto Actual Budget (.org) hosted on PikaPods. I was an YNAB customer for a decade but it became overpriced and their business goals didn’t align with my needs. Actual Is great but doesn’t have a designated iOS app, but the PWA web app is “good enough”.
@jmanko16 it looks like a good app and I think I checked it out back in 2022 when I was wanting to move away from YNAB, but the self-hosting set-up scares me, I don’t know how to do that and it seems like it’s a bit overkill for my tech abilities.
I’m still a YNAB user, going on 14 years. The price is worth it to me and my wife. I have not found anything else that works the same. (I have not looked in a year)
Your length of usage and conclusions match my own. My 19 year old has adopted YNAB as part of our family plan and it’s cured his impulsive spending. He’s much more aware now of his monthly responsibilities. I tried Actual Budget but YNAB just fits with my brain.
Same here. I’ve tried them all in the last few years (name the app I’ve given it at least a 3 to 6 month try) and YNAB is the only app that consistently keeps my wife and I from having budget fights.
Will be a YNAB lifer just to keep my marriage sane, no matter how much they raise the price!
Pupsino that is a relatively niche budgeting approach that YNAB unfortunately fills very well. No one does zero based budgeting like YNAB quite as seamlessly with mobile sync and targets like you’ve asked. Moneywiz comes close to it at less than half price, but its a little less polished.
I’ve gone down this rabbit hole and spent a lot of time (and Money) on both Banktivity and Pocketsmith whilst trialing a few others. Banktivity is not built for the targeting style envelope method, and its implementation is secondary to its core ethos. The problem I found with the more analytical apps drifted in to passive monitoring (with very nice reports) rather than active budget management and I just spent, spent, spent; whereas YNAB kept me in the rails.
The old YNAB4 has been depreciated and is able to still be used if you want a free basic version of the old YNAB - plenty of people swear by it, but features like iphone and syncing can be counted out.
I fundamentally found like many disgruntled users that YNAB simply saved me far more than it was costing me, even trying all alternatives, I came back to them.
Hello! Original threadstarter from back then…
There are some very good alternatives to YNAB.
First of all there is YNAB4. It has better credit card handling and still works on Mac and Windows. I know, you prefer iOS, but I have to mention it for the sake of completeness.
Then there is Actual. It is almost on bar with YNAB and it has overtaken YNAB4. The development is very active and devs are listening. The web.app on iOS is very good. It’s what I have settled with. There are good guides how to set it up. If you don’t want to mess around alone, 2$ a month isn’t that bad, coming from YNAB. https://actualbudget.org
Then there is bucket. Bucket is great. I tried it, it has multiplatform support, also iOS. It is in active development as far as I know. If you’re coming from YNAB, bucket has NOT the nice UI YNAB offers. But it works. And it works well. Your data isn’t shared with anyone else. https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com
Last but not least there is Lunchmoney. It costs almost as much as YNAB but supporting a single developer instead of a multimillion $ company is maybe an option for you. You can make breaks and get credit for it and start again. I didn’t like the UI back then but it looks nice. https://lunchmoney.app
And they will raise it again. Because they know that a ton of people depend on it and need it. “But, I’m still saving more with it than without it”. I can’t hear it anymore. It’s what they want people to believe. It isn’t YNAB who is saving the money, it is you. And the method is as old as paper envelopes. Or even older.
They are a company I just don’t want to trust. I wouldn’t use it again if they half their prices. First they “lured” YNAB4 users with a cheap subscription and a grandfathered price, then they changed it and said it was never meant to be “lifelong”.
They closed their very active community forums because… nobody knows. They don’t have patchnotes anymore, I’ve read on reddit, because… how often can you upgrade something like a blown up Excel sheet? But you have to justify those high subscriptions anyhow.
And yadda yadda.
You can read it elsewhere.
I fundamentally found like many disgruntled users that YNAB simply saved me far more than it was costing me, even trying all alternatives, I came back to them.
Yes. But you will save much more if you don’t use it. 1000$ in 10 years or even more if they raise their subs again. Which is a new Macbook Air. Or an iPad. Or any other gadget that costs as much.
YNAB will raise their subs again because they know that there are no other big players in the game.
I’ve got two modern apps for you that are iOS/iPadOS centric. They look to be zero based, but I have not tested them to full vet how close they come to YNAB. I’m still on YNAB myself, but I’ve been eyeing these alternatives. I"m unsure on date based goal setting, I know there are goals, but not sure about date based to help you fund it regularly like YNAB does.
I know there are lot of powerful apps out there with macOS focused designs like Banktivity, or maybe MoneyWiz is a good option, but these never clicked for me. YNAB is still king as much as I wish for an alternative, but these have my eye for now.
I definitely get where you are coming from, but I disagree with this point. $1000 saved over a decade is just not a lot of money for most of us in the US. That’s $8.33/month. There are many places in my budget where I could cut back and save more in less time so the amount spent on a budgeting app just isn’t a priority. We got ice cream at Culver’s last night and that cost more than YNAB costs us in a month.
Also I don’t know about everyone else here, but spousal approval factor is a major consideration for switching apps we both use. My wife finally started using YNAB in the year or two and has kind of taken it over from me in terms of day-to-day management. I’d be sleeping on the couch if I suggested something new without a very very good reason!
You are right, 8$ is a coffee at Starbucks… But that’s the thing. It’s just a coffee for the dev her, another coffee for another dev there. I’m not someone who doesn’t like to pay for stuff. I mean, I should run Linux instead of MacOS and iOS if this was the case. No. I’ll gladly throw money at any good software that will ease my life.
What I don’t like is the direction software development is taking in general. They suddenly need a constant cashflow to survive. And that’s not true.
Especially in cases like YNAB. Or Fantastical. Or Bear. I mean, look at YNAB. What big features have they added since YNAB4? It took them ages to get on par with YNAB4s reports. And now Actual has better reports than nYNAB. They have goals and targets. That’s it.
It’s just 8$, yes, but it’s 8$ for this app and that app and then it’s 100$ per month or more. I’m not against subscriptions in general. There are some devs that use a fair sub model. Like: sub and use it forever but if you don’t subscribe anymore you don’t get new features.
I’ve also looked in the past and not been able to find anything that really compares with YNAB.
The Open Banking integration in the UK is good and helps to keep the books balanced and was a main draw away from the desktop app, as I used the old YNAB on the desktop for a few years, ignoring the app iOS/iPad app.
Some of the features are lacking but YNAB Toolkit helps there - I think if YNAB toolkit disappeared or stopped working, I’d be moving to Actual Budget.
I don’t like the amount of money it costs - but I currently pay it each year. In the end, I’m paying for the hosting of the data and access to Truelayer, which gets the data from my banks. Part of me thinks that they should charge less for those areas where the automatic import isn’t possible (like it wasn’t in the UK for ages).
For most people outside the US and UK bank syncing isn’t available as much as I know.
I don’t really know how much Truelayer costs but data costs per user are below minimal. Let’s assume 1 transaction uses 1-2kb of data, which is a very generous assumption, a user with 5000 transactions per year would use 15-16MB. Assuming they are using AMW S3 cloud user data costs are below 5$ per year.
sooo… think about games. Hunt, a popular tactical PC game, costs 10$ when on discount. And you can play for free. No additional costs, no subs. They have massive data / user usage. And they make a lot of profit. How much data does a spreadsheet use.
It’s not exactly what you are looking for, but might be useful for somebody else stumbling upon this thread: I’ve heard very good things about IFinance 5. They offer an iOS app and it actually seems to be on sale right now. It’s also a one time purchase to boot, not a sub🤢scription
I get what others are saying in this thread: the mental overhead of changing is so high and the cost of doing so is probably not worth the saving of switching. I know for me the idea of switching and all the testing I’m doing is stressful and I have other things I should be (or want to be) working on. But equally I have a low level background dislike of the fact I’m giving money to the company, and it spikes each time my bill comes due or they put up prices. I’ve dragged my heels on this for 2 years so I figure I’d probably be better off freeing myself and eliminating that background hum of discontent. (Also, it’s probably relevant that I am the sort of person who regularly engages in product boycotts when a cause aligns with my own values, so giving money to a company I’m annoyed with doesn’t sit well with me!)
So far with my testing, my thoughts are:
Banktivity - looks like a nice app and it has a decent trial period (30 days), and I really like the clean homepage with key stats (net worth, upcoming transactions, etc.). But, it doesn’t seem optimised for zero-based budgeting and I think it will be too much work to make it handle it smoothly and without error. Also, not being able to set the date of when an envelope is due is baffling to me (e.g. you can set your app sub as due “annually”, but you can’t say “annually in September”).
MoneyWiz - I’m still testing this one. It’s not easy to get set up, but seems like it would run with less chance of error as zero-based budgeting has been considered in the app even if it’s not the main preference. (Also to be honest I can’t remember how long it took me to set up YNAB how I like, so I don’t have a baseline to compare to. Although my budget itself is a well-oiled machine and I just have to replicate it in a new app, the actual mechanics of doing that takes time!) The trial period is only 7 days which I think is unfair. Most people are paid monthly or fortnightly so this isn’t long enough to test. I happen to be testing over my payday so it’s fine for me, but if I had been testing during another week I’d be vetoing this app because of not being able to test it properly.
Others I’ve discarded: Aspire Budget seems to have been abandoned. Mint has rarely been favoured by the envelope budgeting community so I never looked at it.
Apps I’m considering testing: I’d like to test Buckets but it’s not accepting users to iOS so I’m pondering how to proceed but may well give up on that one. It made my shortlist a couple of years ago for consideration so I’ve kept it on the list for now. Actual budget seems to be slightly less intimidating now than it was a couple of years ago, as the hosting options seem to have been improved for non-techy people. If I can free up some mental bandwidth, I might see if it’s something I could implement for testing. Lunch Money looks clean and simple and I’m going to give it a whirl (thanks @johnkree, I love a random app mention and it’s why I come to this forum!). Bills to Budget looks slightly adjacent to what I’m after so I won’t look into that further for now.
I’m still open to suggestions and other apps mentioned in the thread that I’ve not mentioned here are likely to also be poked in the coming days to see if they’re interesting
I feel you. In this regard, I’m like a Warhammer dwarf – I have a book of grudges in my mind, and it’s filling up with company names right now…
I actually made a mistake in my post, it isn’t 100$ per year, they let you choose how much you want to pay between 40-150$ per year. I just noticed this yesterday fiddling around with the pricing page.
