Announced the next version of its self-titled flagship product, Quicken for Mac 2018 (and Quicken for Windows). The company has three different version of the accounting and billing. Quicken 2019 for Windows imports data from Quicken for Windows 2010 or newer, Microsoft Money 2008 and 2009 (for Deluxe and higher). Quicken 2019 for Mac imports data from Quicken for Windows 2010 or newer, Quicken for Mac 2015 or newer, Quicken for Mac 2007, Quicken Essentials for Mac, Banktivity.
Best Personal Finance Software 2019 - Programs for Mac, Windows PCs
We spent over 60 hours testing 20 personal finance apps and programs to find the best budgeting and money management tools. Our choice for the best personal finance software is Quicken Premier. It combines the best budgeting tools with easy-to-use tax reporting. It can track your investments by letting you compare your portfolios with the market, as well as allowing you to track fund fees and set retirement goals. Quicken Premier is the most complete program we reviewed and a good choice for anyone looking to get a better handle on their finances.
Best Overall
Quicken Premier
Quicken Premier connects quickly to your bank accounts and easily tracks your spending and your investments. It offers useful budgeting tools like online bill pay and budgeting alerts.
Best Value
Quicken Starter
When looking at the number of features available versus the cost, we found the Quicken Starter hits the sweet spot. It has the same budgeting tools as Quicken Premier but doesn’t track investments.
Best Mobile App
Buxfer
Buxfer is the best mobile app we reviewed. It’s incredibly easy to keep track of your spending and set up alerts for when you deviate from your budget. It is one of the easiest programs to use that we reviewed.
Best OverallQuicken Premier
Best tools for managing investments
Pay your bills through Quicken
Quicken Software For Mac Computers
Since it is a desktop app, you must be at your computer to use it
Our pick for the best personal finance software is Quicken Premier. Quicken is one of the most well-known names in personal finance, and it is constantly updating its software with new features.
The version of Quicken Premier we tested was incredibly easy to connect to any bank to track finances.
When you connect the program to your account, it will import your transactions and categorize them automatically. If something is incorrect, you can edit it. The categories are used to help you organize your budget. Quicken color-codes your budget, green for within budget and red for over budget. The program sends alerts when you approach or exceed your budget. Quicken gives you multiple options for setting up your budget. You can keep the same limit each month, or direct any unused amount to roll over into the next month. Where Quicken Premier stands out is in its tools for managing investments. If you own stocks or other securities, this is the best choice for you. Its tools analyze your portfolio and compare its performance with the market. You can also create retirement goals and use the calculator to evaluate your finances and determine what you need to save toward your retirement goals. Best ValueQuicken Starter
Lowest cost of any of the programs we reviewed
Can use the app to save receipt information
Doesn’t work on Mac
Quicken Starter is a scaled-down version of Quicken’s personal finance software. With a cost of $39.99, this is among the lowest-cost programs we reviewed.
This is our best value option because it gives you the same useful budgeting tools as Quicken Premier.
Quicken Starter connects directly to your accounts and imports your balances and transactions, automatically categorizing them. You can manually adjust the categories if default tags don’t match your budget. Budgets are easy to create and can be divided into categories to track how much you spend on groceries, rent and other items. You can set up email or text alerts for when you approach or exceed your budget limit in a certain category. The Quicken mobile app also lets you check on your budget from your phone. You can also use the app to take pictures of receipts and add those to your records. Quicken Starter has no tools for monitoring or tracking your investments. You can’t import information about your investments or use any of the tools for tracking fees or creating retirement savings goals. If you just want a personal finance program to track your spending and manage a budget, not having those investment tracking features shouldn’t be a deal breaker. Best Mobile AppBuxferBuxfer Pilot
$1.99
Buxfer Plus
$3.99
Buxfer Basic
Easy-to-use mobile app
Shared-expense tracking lets you divide costs with roommates, friends or family
You can’t create savings goals
Having a mobile, web-based personal finance program makes it easy to track your spending and expenses from anywhere.
Once you create an account with Buxfer and download the app, you can connect it your bank and credit card accounts. Once connected, your balances and transactions are added to Buxfer and automatically categorized. You can also edit the information if the automatic categorization isn’t accurate.
Creating a budget with Buxfer is easy. You set an overall spending limit for each week, month and year you intend to budget. You can use the categories to further refine your budgeting. The budgets are color-coded. One advantage of being primarily app-based is that you can always have your budget available and reference it when you’re out shopping. Buxfer also has shared-expense tracking, which lets you send money to others, especially useful if you split rent or utilities with roommates. Buxfer offers simple reports that help you visualize your spending. You can use the pie charts to determine what percent of your income you spend on various categories. Line graphs give you a quick view of your income versus your expenses. One drawback of Buxfer is that you can’t set up savings or retirement goals. Best for InvestorsMoneydance
Connects to brokerage accounts, letting you monitor your assets
Doesn’t send alerts when you approach a budget limit
If you have investments and brokerage accounts, Moneydance is one of the best options for you.
This program has tools to help you track your investments and monitor the progress of your portfolio. It syncs to your brokerage account and shows your balances and trades. In addition, it has reports that let you track your transactions and the performance of your investments. Moneydance is an easy-to-use program that lets you categorize your spending so you can see how much you spend and what you spend it on. You can also sync to your bank and P2P lending accounts to directly import your transactions.
Best for Envelope BudgetingMvelopesQuicken For Mac 2018 Bill PayMvelopes Basic
$4
Mvelopes Plus
$19
Mvelopes Complete
$59
Easy to set up and import transactions
Mvelopes is one of the best programs if you practice envelope budgeting.
With this method, you split your budget into envelopes marked with categories such as groceries, bills or entertainment. You then purchase items with money from the envelope category they fall under. Mvelopes lets you track your expenditures by assigning them to digital envelopes. When you exceed a spending limit, the envelope balance changes to red, and the program prompts you to address the situation by adding funds or letting it stay negative. This is a good way to visualize your spending and track where your money goes. One drawback is it doesn’t send you an alert when you go past a limit.
Why Trust Us?
We’ve reviewed personal finance software for 12 years. For this most recent update, we spent 60 hours using 20 programs before settling on the best 10. You may notice that some newer apps don’t appear in our reviews. We chose not to include free services like Mint or Personal Capital, though we may reconsider in future updates.
We did look at both of these programs. Mint is one of the most popular personal finance apps. It also offers a free credit score and has a wide range of alert options. Personal Capital doesn’t have budgeting tools, but it lets you track all your accounts and is very well-suited to people with investments they want to track.
How We Tested
To test these programs, we purchased or downloaded complete trials and used them to create budgets, connect to a bank account and monitor how well each program performs. We found that setting up your budgeting software can take some time, so be sure to give yourself an hour or possibly more. The best programs connect automatically to your bank, credit card or investment accounts directly. A few require you to import through Dropbox or another intermediary. Our Options & Functionality Score reflects this; anything with an 80 percent or above is easy to connect.
Once our transactions were imported, we let the program categorize them for us and began creating budgets. We noted the tools each program has to simplify the budgeting process, and whether you can copy the budget from month to month and set up recurring payments.
To make sure we tested these programs for all manner of financial scenarios, we also looked at the tools for monitoring investments. Many of the programs at least give you an overview of your portfolios and track their performance. The more extensive personal finance programs allow you to compare your portfolio to the rest of the market.
How Much Does Personal Finance Software Cost?
Personal finance software can cost as little as nothing or as much as $130 – much depends on what you want your software to do and if you prefer using an app, an online portal or a program downloaded to your computer. There are free apps like Mint and more robust apps like You Need A Budget, which costs $6.99 a month. If you have investments or need more complicated budgeting and accounting tools, a program you download may be your best choice. These usually cost around $50 to $130.
How to Choose a Personal Finance Software
Before settling on a personal finance program, take stock of what you need it for and how you’ll use it. Everyone’s financial situation is different, and some of these programs may not suit all your needs.
Basic Budgeting
If you need to get a handle on your finances and track your spending, each of these programs offer something for you. A budget can be as simple or complex as you need. You may want to simply track your total spending, or you may want to divide it into a range of categories. Some people like the envelope budgeting method, which allows you to set aside money each month for specific items or goals. Mvelopes is a good program that utilizes this method.
Goal-oriented Budgeting
If you’re budgeting because you want to save toward a goal, say a down payment on a home or for retirement, many of the programs offer tracking tools that let you set aside an amount each month and track your progress. Using personal finance programs to manage your budget can help you find areas you’re overspending in or ways you can cut back your spending to make your goals.
Tracking Investments
Not everyone invests money in the stock market, but if you do, you’ll need a program that can cover the full breadth of your financial picture. Many of the programs we tested integrate with your financial firm and can at least give you a top-level look at your portfolio. The best let you track your performance and compare your portfolio with the market. If investment tracking isn’t what you need, you can find a lower-cost program with the budgeting features you’re looking for.
Best Free Personal Finance Apps
Most of the personal finance programs we reviewed cost money to download or sign up for, and a few have monthly subscriptions. If you’re just starting to budget and track your finances, take a look at some of these free apps:
Quicken For Mac Support
Mint: This is a free budgeting app developed by Intuit, the same company responsible for Quicken. Mint is free to download and use. Once you install it, you sync it to your bank and credit card accounts, and it pulls all that information into one main dashboard. Mint categorizes your transactions, so you can check your bank and credit card balances at a glance. It even goes a step beyond and lets you check your credit score and investment performances as well as your home’s value.
Mint automatically creates a budget for you, though you can adjust it depending on your needs. You can also set up alerts to tell you if you’ve gone beyond your budget or have a bill coming up. One drawback of using a free app like Mint is you get ads and promotional offers.
Clarity Money: This is a relatively new app, owned by Goldman Sachs. It's very similar to Mint in that it syncs to your bank accounts, tracks spending and sends alerts when you have a bill due. However, it stands out by monitoring your subscriptions to services and websites, and it can cancel them for you. Clarity Money gives you a good picture of your finances, but if you need more in-depth budgeting tools, it may not be as useful.
PocketGuard: This is a basic app that tracks your spending. It doesn’t have many additional features and may not be good for reconfiguring your entire budget, but it’s a useful way to see how much money you have on hand.
Related Product Reviews
If you're looking to replace Quicken, you're in the right place.
For years, Quicken was the name in personal finance software.
But let's accept reality – Quicken breaks a lot. It doesn't sync your accounts randomly, you have password problems, screens that should appear are blank, and it's just not a great experience anymore. Sometimes it feels like they're just getting you to buy the newer version, right?
Quicken was once the most popular and powerful personal finance management software out there.
But Quicken isn't what it used to be. It's hard to innovate a platform built in 1983. Back then, cell phones were bricks (if you could afford one) and apps were what you ordered at a restaurant. Quicken has faced a lot of technical issues and its support is meh at best. (if you own Quicken for Mac, you know this headache first hand)
In 2010, Intuit acquired Mint for $170 million. In 2016, Intuit sold Quicken to private equity firm H.I.G. Capital. That tells you something.
Look:
If you're tired of Quicken, its support and sync issues, and want a suitable free alternative or replacement – we have some options.
Here are some of the best Quicken alternatives available:
Our Best Picks
Why It'll Work For You
Personal Capital is our Editor's Pick as the best Quicken alternative because it covers nearly as much ground as Quicken (no billpay) and regularly updated so you don't have to worry about sync problems. It has a solid suite of investment tools, a robust budgeting system, and portfolio analysis that beats the rest. It's free.
Hands down the best spreadsheet automation tool on the market. If you want to move to a spreadsheet you can customize to exactly what you need, Tiller will pull the data for you. You can build it from scratch or use a template, and Tiller will save you a ton of time and hassle.
15 Best Quicken Alternatives:
1. Personal Capital
If you're a long time user of Quicken, you're beyond the “help me build my budget” phase.
If you're more interested how your investment account is performing and less interested in just knowing how much you're spending on groceries, Personal Capital is a great Quicken alternative (but it'll also pull your credit card transactions so you will know how much you spent on groceries if you want!).
Personal Capital is a full-featured, free, personal finance management tool that focuses on helping you with investing.
It has a powerful mobile app (also means it's a cloud-based service) that replicates the web experience. They're free because some users pay them for their wealth management services (optional). They are not stuffed with advertisements like some other free tools. You can read my full review of Personal Capital.
Why it is a good alternative to Quicken: It's better than Quicken because it's updated, has a rich set of tools for investment and retirement, and it has a budget and expense tracking component. It's a website and not a software application, there's no software to download and patch or update (ugh) – that's all done automatically.
I am a fan of their retirement planner, a tool that helps you project your future financial needs and whether you'll get there. It's worth checking out.
One other vote of confidence for this Quicken replacement is their CEO – Bill Harris. He was formerly the CEO of Intuit and PayPal. You know he has the leadership skills to dominate in this space and the ability to lead teams to build financial systems that are top notch (the rest of the leadership team is very impressive in their own right!).
What could be better? The budget and expense tracking are good but it's not as old as Quicken, so it's not as developed as Quicken. I don't find it to be a negative because it works for me, but people with really complicated budgets may find it limiting.
(since you access it with a browser, it is compatible with Mac OS!)
2. Tiller
One of the most popular personal finance tools out there is a little software application known as Microsoft Excel.
People love spreadsheets.
You can customize it, tweak it, and get it tailored to exactly what you need. The only downside to spreadsheets is how you need to pull the data yourself… and who really wants to do that? Quicken was great back in the day when there weren't nearly as many sync issues because it pulled the data for you.
There's a solution:
Welcome Tiller – a $4.92 a month service (after a free 30 day trial) – that pulls your data for you and puts it into a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel document.
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. (see our review of Tiller)
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.
3. You Need a Budget (YNAB)
You Need a Budget is one of the best budgeting software tools available.
Think of it like Mint with a personality and a philosophy.
YNAB's philosophy revolves around four rules:
Those four pillars form the foundation for a budgeting app that has helped many people transform their financial lives.
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.
Why it is better than Quicken: Quicken only tracks your budget, YNAB does that AND helps you build a budget that meets the demands of your life and your savings needs. 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.
4. CountAbout
The founders built CountAbout to be a Quicken alternative. Founded in mid-2012, 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!
Like Quicken, CountAbout isn't free but it costs $9.99 for the Basic subscription and $39.99 for Premium subscription. The Premium subscription includes automatic transaction download. 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 has a lot of similar features to Quicken’s: split transactions, recurring transactions, attachments, budgeting and more.
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. And with CountAbout’s iOS and Android apps, your financial information is always at your fingertips.
Check out the key features (reminds me a lot of Quicken):
5. Pocketsmith
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