Mint vs YNAB

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.

Provides a 4 step method for budgeting money, that really makes budgeting simple and powerful.

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.

YNAB regularly offers live workshops on a variety of different topics. These workshops include time for Q&A which is very helpful.

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.

I've tried several including Quicken desktop app and I just like the way YNAB works. It is easy to learn and actually works as advertised.

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.