Category: 2. Mint alternatives

Keeping and maintaining a budget is critical when it comes to reaching our financial goals, whether they are to reduce debt or save for vacations, retirement, or your kids’ education.

While Mint does a decent job of budget tracking and syncing, there’s a world of budgeting apps out there with tailored approaches to your savings style while offering security, reliability and functionality. If you’re stuck with Mint just because it was one of the OGs, the benefits you’ll see in your savings plan could far outweigh the small hassle of tinkering with some new apps.

The right Mint alternative for you depends upon several factors, including the device you’d like to use it on, your personality, your goals, the fee structure, and what exactly you want the app to accomplish. Here are a few questions to consider when deciding which app is the best for you.

Do you want to manually log your expenses or have them automatically updated and categorized for you?

Ultimately, the budgeting app that will work best for you depends on your style. If you need to be fully in control and actively tracking to stay accountable to your goals, we suggest a clean, visual app like PocketSmith. If you want a hands-free approach, Digit puts your savings on autopilot and does your budgeting for you.

Do you prefer mobile-only, desktop-only, or do you want the flexibility of both?

Never near a desktop? Always near a desktop? Some of these apps (like Wally) are mobile-only, while others (YNAB) let you do all your budgeting on a desktop app (and a mobile app). If you don’t mind doing some tasks on a computer while monitoring on your phone, or prefer the flexibility of being able to toggle between both, may we suggest—gulp—Mint?

Do you want a birds-eye view of your entire financial picture?

Want to keep an eye on your investments, loans and credit cards as well as your checking and savings? Here’s where you might opt for Pocketguard or Personal Capital.

Will you be syncing your budget information with a partner?
For family budgeting or combining finances with a partner, Tiller, Honeydue and Wally lets several devices and account types on at once.

Are you looking to rewire your savings approach?
If you’re looking to form good spending habits while doubling down on your savings or debt repayment goals, consider picking up a method-based goal-setting app like You Need A Budget or Goodbudget.

Digit is a “smart” app that does just about everything automatically once you set it up. It first made a splash when it launched for its ability to tuck tiny, inconspicuous amounts into your savings goals for you, but since then it’s grown into a saving powerhouse.

Whenever you make a deposit, it moves money into a separate account for bills to cover monthly necessities so you can stay ahead of your bills. Want to invest but don’t know how much money you can spare? Digit analyzes your spending, calculates how much you can afford to put into the market, helps you choose the right ETF mix for you based on your goals and tucks money away for you.

Digit is free for 30 days and then $5 a month after that. Ultimately, it’s one of the best alternatives to Mint if you want a microsavings app that also lets you invest.

Anyone who lives with a partner knows that personal finance is never a solo venture. That’s where Honeydue comes in. Ideal for combined finances, Honeydue links to all accounts, automatically splits bills, sends overdue reminders to whoever’s paying which bill, and even has an in-app chat feature for when you need to talk money.

Users can also open a joint Honeydue checking account that instantly notifies the partner of their financial transactions. The app is available for both iOS and Android.

A downside of the app is that it provides no reporting or analytics and lacks a tool for tracking progress toward goals—but a major plus is that it’s free to use. If anything, you can use apps like Mint for budgeting and then use Honeydue to split bills and for sending bill reminders.

Wally is a super-secure budget tracker with a global presence. It automatically syncs with your external accounts and credit cards, with a network of over 15,000 banks in 70 countries. Its distinctive feature is that the app automatically analyzes your last two years of spending.

You can also upload all your bills and warranties to keep them in one centralized location, and Wally will shoot an alert on when bills are due. The rest is what you would expect of a top-tier budgeting app: Sync with your household, set spending limits for your chosen categories, track progress in real-time, and set aside money towards your savings goals.

It has a free version and an upgraded version (Wally Gold) for $74.99, which throws in currency conversion and advanced insights. If you have bank accounts in multiple countries, it’s an excellent app like Mint to consider.

PocketGuard provides a simplified view of your bank accounts, credit cards, loans, investments, and bills. It also shows you how much you have left for discretionary spending. Not only does it allow you to get a full overview of your finances, including your net worth, it also analyzes your bills to show you where you can negotiate for better rates.

It comes in a free version and paid version at $7.99 a month. This is more expensive than Mint, but the bill negotiation feature is one of its unique selling points.

PocketSmith is similar to Mint in that you can aggregate all of your banking and investing accounts with one app. From there, you can create custom budgets and spending categories to stay on top of your finances. It also summarizes your transactions just like Mint.

But we like PocketSmith as an alternative to Mint because of its forecasting features. It has a cash-flow forecasting tool that highlights how your current spending habits influence your net worth and future wealth. Its budgeting calendar also provides a nice visual layout of your upcoming expenses and income, so it’s an excellent app for highly-visual budgeters, not spreadsheet fans.

The downside versus Mint is that you need to pay for PocketSmith to get most of its features. For most users, the middle-tier Premium plan, which costs $9.95 per month or $90 per year, is enough to get the job done.

Goodbudget uses an envelope system where part of your monthly income goes toward specific expenses. You manually add account balances, debts, and income, then assign the money toward envelopes. This helps you avoid overspending and is one of the older budgeting systems out there.

Goodbudget also allows you to sync budgets with other family members. It offers a free version that gives you 20 envelopes and two devices. The Plus version costs $8 a month.

If you’re mostly interested in avoiding overspending, this is one of the best alternatives to Mint you can use.

Tiller, also known as Tiller Money, syncs with more than 18,000 financial institutions across the United States. It uses the information from these accounts to automatically track and categorize expenses into their custom-created spreadsheets. If you’re a spreadsheet nerd, Tiller is one of the best Mint alternatives on the market today.

Tiller works with a “Foundation Template” that allows you to create budgets, or you can create a customized spreadsheet. It also includes tools for freelancers and small business owners, saving them the madness of receipt-digging around tax season.

On top of logging daily expenses, Tiller also sends emailed budget summaries and organizes your monthly expenses into easy-to-read graphs so you can spot where you’ve overspent. After a 30-day free trial, Tiller charges $79 annually.

YNAB has long been one of the strongest Mint alternatives if your goal is to become debt fee. It helps spenders break the habit of living paycheck to paycheck by encouraging them to live solely off the money earned the previous month and setting intentions for each dollar that comes in.

YNAB makes recording expenses and goal-setting a breeze with the ability to categorize expenses and link bank accounts to automatically log your transactions. On top of instructing you to stick to spending only last month’s income, YNAB has three other rules:

• Give every dollar a job. You allocate every dollar based on spending priorities that you’ve previously established. To gain the most from this feature, you’ll need to spend a bit of time upfront setting up those priorities.
• Embrace your actual expenses. If you have annual expenses, you’ll break them up over 12 months so that you set aside a little each month.
• Roll with the punches. Address overspending when it happens by readjusting over other categories. Then move on.

YNAB is fee-based, priced at $14.99 a month or $98.99 a year but offers a 34-day free trial. It has several iterations, including Web, Android, and Apple. You can read our Mint vs YNAB post for a complete comparison of these two budgeting apps.