This software is terrible when put beside others like YNAB and MINT. It just does not measure up. It doesn't even automatically import from accounts online. Not user friendly at all.
Mint can handle banking accounts, saving accounts, credit cards, etc. It consolidates all your accounts together so you do not need to put work into following multiple accounts.
Mint splits your spending into different categories, such as gas or fast food, so you can see where you're spending too much money or how much you need to budget for.
Mint can be set to alert you to various events such as upcoming bills, or low balances on any accounts. It can be set to alert you from the app, through email or by text message. In addition you can sign up to recieve monthly emails about your money and ways to improve your budget.
With very few exceptions, Mint isn't just syncing your data over, but is using your username and password to log directly into the bank website. Banks will not reimburse for any fraud or stolen funds that may result from this, or may use Mint as an excuse to not reimburse for charges or stolen funds that occur from other causes.
Not all transactions are categorized or named correctly, which is understandable. Though there is no method of teaching the software this behavior. You will need to constantly fix the same entries.
HomeBank offers prebuilt packages for many of the major Linux distributions meaning users do not have to wait for their distros repo to add or update the app and can just install or update when they like.
Instead of a one-time purchase, you will need a subscription to use YNAB after the free trial. Subscriptions can be bought annually for $83.99, which is about $6.99 per month.
YNAB lets you try it's software free for just over a month. This gives you a bit of flexibility when doing a monthly budget - 4 extra days to review your budget and determine whether YNAB helped out enough to justify the $5 price.
If you're a student, you can get an additional 12 months for free (for a total of 13 months) and after that you can get 10% off yearly subscriptions.
The YNAB team does a great job of offering rapid response times to support requests, listening to user feedback and implementing commonly requested features into the app via frequent updates as well providing live financial workshops on a daily basis at no additional charge. All of these features make the subscription model well worth the cost to me.
All budget data is stored in the cloud on AWS servers which are most likely based in the United States. HOWEVER, there is an option to save budget data locally as well.
It allows you to move around budget allocations. Sometimes you just need to spend that extra money in one category and take it out of another budget without losing control of the overall budget. It's flexible, clever and understands life.
While not perfect, the Buckets is the only offline budgeting desktop application which has budgeting as front-and-center as YNAB 4, and the developer is continually working on it, so hopefully it will be improved further.
The "memo" field is over used as a payee field within the program. If you use the "memo" for payee, you cannot have any other description of the transaction. If you use the "memo" for a memo, you cannot track the payee.
While the Moneydance has lots of bells and whistles (investment tracking!), the budgeting sub-feature leaves a lot to be desired, and feels like bolted-on afterthought.
While it looks beautiful on a Mac (which is its primary platform), the UI on Windows is unpolished and feels buggy & kludgy while using it. No love for Windows users.
Moneydance is a cross-platform app so for those that use multiple operating systems. It is much easier to import and export information to each OS running the same financial application.
Checks main feature is that it will make sure your bills are always paid on time. You can set up many different accounts, all you have to do is set when the bill should be payed and Check will take care of the rest.
Check uses bank level security as well as other security features such as PIN-locking and data wiping. They are also monitored by outside companies such as Norton and TRUSTe.
Tons of reports will give you a perspective on your spendings and earnings, that you never had before! MoneyWiz also allows you to build custom reports based on what you want to know about your money.
Ledgerist allows you to manage multiple accounts at the same time. This way you can keep track of your checking account and credit card and any other accounts within the same app.
Ledgerist can sort and organize your transactions by naming them or adding notes. You can then use this to find out where and how much of your money is being spent.