I think you’ll agree with me when I say this:
Mint was a great personal finance tool when it was released but now many competitors have it outclassed.
When Mint.com first arrived on the scene, it was a revelation.
Here’s a free service that would aggregate all of your credit card spending and take away one of the biggest time sucks in responsible money management. In one fell swoop, you had yourself a budget just by linking up your financial accounts.
Sure, there were initial hiccups. Categorization was a pain, the tools around managing your budget were raw, but Mint.com grew itself from a disruptor of Quicken to a full-fledged competitor. So much so that Intuit would buy Mint.com in 2009 for $170 million, shut down Quicken Online, and sell Quicken to another company.
It’s been nearly eleven years since Mint.com’s launch in March 2006. In that time a lot has changed. A new crop of startups, Mint alternatives if you will, built on fresh new technology and an eye to disrupt the once-disruptor.
If you’re looking to move on (and if you’re tired of constantly fixing your account connections!), you might find your next favorite from this list!
🏆 Our Favorites
Here are the two that stand out:
- Personal Capital – Personal Capital is our Editor’s Pick as the best Mint alternative because they do the best job capturing your finances holistically. It has the best suite of investment tools available plus a robust budgeting system too – so if you’re ready more than budgeting, this is the choice. And it’s free.
- Tiller – It’s like a custom outfit for your budget, Tiller automates your spreadsheet so you can tailor it to exactly your needs. If you don’t have one, they have plenty of templates you can start with and adjust to your needs.
- You Need a Budget – Hands down the best budget transition software available – it’s more than just a tracker. They have these four “rules” that help change your relationship with your budget. It’s a methodology on top of a tool.
Now for more in-depth looks at these and more…
Table of Contents
Personal Capital
My personal favorite of the Mint alternatives is Personal Capital. It’s web-based, focused on investing but with an eye towards tracking expenses and budgeting, and free.
Our Personal Capital review explains the service in greater detail, including how it fits in our financial workflow, but this post on why I switched from Mint to Personal Capital highlights the big reasons why I personally made the switch.
The tl;dr on why I switched was that Personal Capital has a suite of investing related tools that Mint simply doesn’t. I was less interested in the expense tracking features and more interested in getting a better handle on where my investments were, whether I was doing it right, and Mint wasn’t cutting it anymore. With Mint, I feel like you’re looking backwards. With PC, I feel like I have a better idea of where I’m going; if that makes any sense.
Like Mint, and many of the alternatives on this page, Personal Capital is free.
Tiller
If you prefer taking everything in-house and tracking your budget with a spreadsheet, Tiller is the only option on the list that lets you do that. With Tiller, you put your budget into a Google spreadsheet and they do the work of pulling your transaction data from your various financial institutions.
Founded in 2015, it’s the only service that will sync your financial transactions into a completely customizable spreadsheet. It’s not free though, it’s just $6.58 a month, but you get access to a ton of templates to get your spreadsheet started. (our review of Tiller)
(There’s a free 30-day trial.)
You Need a Budget
Mint is a powerful tracker but if you want to really get a handle on your budget, you need to be looking forwards and not backwards. You Need a Budget, also known as YNAB, is great for budgeting for this very reason because it relies on zero-based budgeting and projecting your budget forward.
YNAB focuses on four rules – Give Every Dollar a Job (ie. zero-based budgeting), Embrace Your True Expenses, Roll With The Punches, and Age Your Money – which helps you take what you’re doing now and put it in a framework that sets you up for financial and budgeting success into the future.
YNAB has a $11.99 monthly fee ($84 if you pay annually) after an initial 34-day free trial.
PocketSmith
PocketSmith is a fully featured budgeting tool that leans on calendards and the idea of “event-based budgeting.” Rather than viewing your transactions strictly as a ledger, the approach uses a calendar and tracks recurring expenses alongside one-time transactions to give you a better understand of your spending. It’s a novel approach to budgeting and could be helpful for those who are more visual.
PocketSmith has a free option that makes you manually import transactions, 12 budgets, 2 accounts, and projections for 6 months out. Premium ($9.95/mo) will get you automatic transaction importing, unlimited budgets, 10 accounts and 10 years of projections. Super ($19.95/mo) gives you unlimited accounts and 30 years of projections.
We have a special coupon code that gives you 50% off the first two months of Premium – make sure to enter the code 50OFFPREMIUM-5G7T for 50% off the first two months.
CountAbout
CountAbout was built to solve the headaches of Quicken users and was founded in July of 2012. It is one of the few personal finance apps that can import data from Quicken and mint, which makes a transition to this app much less painful if you’re a data junkie. Unlike Mint, it’s not free but the price point is very affordable – $9.99 per year for the Basic product and $39.99 per year for the Premium. (the main difference is that Premium supports automatic downloading of transactions, Basic does not)
Quicken
If putting your data into the cloud worries you and you thought Quicken might be the answer, I have bad news – Quicken puts your data in the cloud now too. But like everyone else, they have bank level security so it shouldn’t be too much of a worry.
One thing that Quicken does offer that these other services don’t is the ability to set up bill pay, which works well for some of those smaller banks that don’t offer it though it comes with a fee. It also pulls your home value information via Zillow, if that is important to you.
Quicken is a software application you purchase (starts around $30 for the Starter Edition but quickly goes up) and downloads to your computer (or mobile device).
MoneyPatrol
MoneyPatrol is a relative newcomer but it offers some of the most advanced personal finance dashboard tools I’ve seen. It was founded by Bhushan Lengade who has a rich background in analytics and data. In fact, for over three years, he was the Head of Analytics for Mint.com and Quicken before he left for other opportunities. When I spoke with him, he told me that he wanted to build a tool that would fix all the problems Mint overlooked and I think he’s done a great job addressing many of those issues.
The impressive part about MoneyPatrol is how comprehensive it is – you can do detailed cashflow management, study your spending trends, as well as analyze your investments. I’m not overselling it in terms of how complex it is and you can see for yourself with their live demo (no registration required). Just go to the homepage and click on View Demo (next to the orange Sign Up button).
MoneyPatrol has a 15-day free trial and is only $59.99 a year.
EveryDollar
EveryDollar is a budgeting tool affiliated with Dave Ramsey (Lampo Group) and works off the principle of zero-based budgeting. It’s a very beautiful-looking app, available on iPhone and Android, and you have the option of using the free version of the paid Plus version ($129/year).
The big difference between the free version and the paid version is that the paid version has phone support and automated transaction imports/downloads (this is a huge difference). So unless you pay, you have to manually enter transactions. We take a look, with screenshots, at how Everydollar works firsthand.
MoneyDance
You may be surprised to know that MoneyDance is one of the very few personal finance tools that does not upload your data to the cloud. They offer the ability to link accounts online for automatic transaction updates or you can do everything manually.
It was lauded by the Washington Post as being a solid contender to Quicken (and thus Mint) and they offer a free trial plus a 90-day money back guarantee.
While I haven’t personally used it, I’ve heard good things and it’s one of the few options that keeps your data local. If that’s important to you, give it a look.
Wally
Wally is one of the newer entrants but it’s a budgeting only tool. It’s very well designed that helps you track spending and fully understand your budget, with only a few hiccups that are to be expected from a new-ish tool. The one downside and this is probably because they are completely free, is that you can’t download transactions. You have to manually enter them in which can be a good thing. If it’s not automatic, it means you don’t have to log into your accounts through the tool, in case security is a concern for you.
What do you think? Will one of these replace Mint for you?
