Best Budgeting Apps Reviewed

It isn’t glamorous, but everyone should have some kind of budget. Budgeting helps keep you aware of the money you make and the money you spend and ensures you don’t find yourself overspending and going into debt. A good budgeting app or software makes it easy to keep track of your income and expenses, and it can make managing your money much simpler.

Many people were saddened by the end of Intuit’s Mint service, which was one of the most popular budgeting apps on the market. The good news is that there are still plenty of options from which to choose. Whether you’re looking for a new app to move to or giving budgeting apps a try for the first time, here are some of the top options.

Why You Need a Budgeting App

Using a budgeting app is important for a few reasons.

The most obvious is that it stops you from overspending. If you spend more than you make, that means you're depleting your savings and/or going into debt. That's obviously something you don't want. A budgeting app makes it easier to avoid doing that by accident.

Second, budget apps can make you more mindful about your spending. If you pay closer attention to where you use your income, you can take the time to think about whether that spending is truly making you happy. That gives you the chance to adjust your spending habits so that you use more of your money on things that you care about.

Finally, many budgeting apps include additional tools to make managing your finances easier. This can be anything from automated investing services to tracking the due dates for your bill. Using an app means less stress when it comes to managing your cash.

It also might help if you think of the process of budgeting in this way: it's not a constraining, boring process but instead gives you a plan for financial independence.

Best Budgeting Apps of 2024

Monarch Money

Monarch Money has made a name for itself as the best app for replacing Mint. Like Mint, it’s easy to use, but it offers a robust feature set that makes it great for people who want to take a deep dive into their finances.

Once you link your financial accounts, Monarch Money automatically syncs with each of your accounts and categorizes your transactions. You can view all of your accounts from a single dashboard, making it easy to get a quick overview of your financial situation.

Automatic tracking of transactions means following a budget is easy. Once you’ve built your budget in the app, you can quickly see how much you’ve spent and how much spending you have remaining. Monarch Money also offers diagrams and charts that will help you visualize your spending.

The biggest drawback of Monarch Money is that you’ll have to pay $14.99 a month or $99.99 annually for the service. It offers a seven-day free trial, but there is no long-term way to get access to the service for free. Get 30% off your first year with code WELCOME and start your free trial today.

Empower

Empower (formerly Personal Capital) is one of the best budgeting apps for people who have excess income and who want to build wealth, which is true of many doctors.

The app focuses more on investing and wealth management than budgeting. You can use it for a basic budget that tracks income and expenses, but it doesn't do as good a job at the in-depth tracking that other apps do.

For investments, Empower has a fee analyzer that tracks your investment fees and makes recommendations for less expensive options. You can also use it to plan for the future with retirement and education planning tools. If you’d like to make investing hands-off, you can also let the app manage your portfolio for you at a cost of 0.49%-0.89% of your invested assets.

Rocket Money

Rocket Money is another app that has been popular with people looking for an alternative to Mint. It offers typical budgeting features, including account linking, automatic transaction imports and categorization, and the ability to build a budget to track your spending against.

The tool also goes beyond simple budgeting. It includes a credit score tracker, helping you see how your credit changes over time based on your financial activities. It can also help you negotiate your bills to try to reduce the amount you pay each month, though you’ll pay a fee if Rocket Money succeeds in lowering your bill.

You can get started with Rocket Money for free, but features are limited. Free users can link accounts, get balance alerts, and track their spending. Rocket Money Premium has flexible pricing options, costing $48 or $60 per year or between $6-$12 per month. Premium unlocks a subscription cancelation assistant, expert support, net worth tracking, more advanced budgeting tools, shared accounts, and access to a Rocket Money savings account.

You Need a Budget

You Need a Budget (YNAB), like other budgeting apps, lets you sync your bank and other financial accounts to keep track of all of your money in a single place. However, it also allows for a fully manual experience, uploading information for each transaction you make.

YNAB uses the envelope method of budgeting. The idea is that you have $X at the beginning of the month and you allocate each dollar to a certain type of spending, putting it in a labeled envelope. You take money from the relevant envelope each time you buy something, and if you run out of cash in that envelope, you stop buying that category of product.

This gives every dollar you earn a job, whether it be going toward investments, a mortgage payment, or something else. This makes YNAB a much more proactive tool than other apps, which are more reactive.

YNAB also comes with video courses and workshops that you can use to learn more about managing your finances and how to best use the app.

One drawback is that YNAB isn’t free. While you can test it out during a trial period, you’ll have to pay $14.99 per month or $98.99 annually (equivalent to $8.25 a month) to use it. YNAB claims that the cost is well worth paying, stating that its average customer saves $600 in their first two months of using the tool and $6,000 in the first year.

PocketGuard

PocketGuard is another premium budgeting app. Its focus is on people who regularly overspend and find themselves without money for important bills at the end of the month. The app claims it’s helped people save $900 million toward goals and pay off more than $90 million in debt.

Once you sign up for the app, you’ll link all of your financial accounts. PocketGuard will go over your spending history to see what you spend, what you save, and what bills you pay every month. Using that information, the app generates an “in your pocket” number.

The money “in your pocket” is the cash you have available to spend after accounting for any bills that are coming due and the paycheck you’ll earn. For example, if you have $500 in your checking account but a $300 bill coming, you might see that you only have $200 in your pocket. That makes it easier to know when you can spend money and how much you can spend.

Another unique feature is that PocketGuard tracks your bills, and it can help you negotiate them lower. You can also use the app to set up an automatic savings plan.

While basic service is free, you’ll have to pay a fee for PocketGuard Plus, which unlocks the app’s full features. The service costs $12.99 a month or $74.99 for a year.

Goodbudget

Goodbudget is a free budgeting tool that, like You Need a Budget, relies on the envelope method of budgeting. This makes it a strong choice for people who want a more active budgeting tool instead of a reactive one.

With the free version of the app, you can’t sync your financial accounts. That means that you have to track all of your spending manually, but that may not be a bad thing. Manual tracking means that using the tool is a bit more effort, but it forces you to think about every dollar you spend, which can reduce your spending.

You can set up envelopes for savings goals, letting you allocate your extra cash toward things like buying a car or saving for a vacation.

Goodbudget also lets you sync and share your budget with other people, which means you can use the tool to build and track your budget together with a partner.

The free version of Goodbudget lets you set up 10 spending envelopes and 10 saving envelopes and use it on two devices. For $10 per month or $80 per year, you get access to account syncing and unlimited envelopes, can use the app on five devices, and can store up to seven years of spending history on the app.

Simplifi

Simplifi, by Quicken, is one of the best budgeting apps when it comes to tracking your cash flow. Like most budgeting apps, it starts by having you link your financial accounts so it can generate a dashboard that lets you see all of your money in one place.

Simplifi monitors your spending, automatically categorizing each transaction for you. However, it takes the tracking a step further by automatically building a spending plan for you. Based on your income and spending history, it also can create a budget for you. It also notifies you of upcoming bills so you don’t overspend.

You can use watchlists to keep track of your spending and notify you if you get close to overspending in a certain category. You can also track your savings goals and get notifications about your progress.

Simplifi also generates financial reports for you. You can get a breakdown of your income, spending, and savings with detailed graphics that make it easy to analyze how you use your money.

The app has a 30-day free trial. After that, you’ll have to pay $3.99 per month.

Zeta

Zeta is a free budgeting app designed specifically for couples. The app comes with a built-in joint bank account that comes with two debit cards. The account has no monthly fees and lets you share your finances with your partner, tracking your income and expenses together.

If you’d rather skip the built-in checking account, that’s also an option. You can sync external accounts and use the app along with your partner to keep an eye on your income and expenses. You can create both shared and personal budgets so you can use the app if you still have some money you keep separate from your partner.

Like other budgeting apps, Zeta can help track and categorize your spending, and it can send you reminders about bills.

If you like the app, you can sign up for Zeta+. This premium service costs $6.99 per month but allows you to add an additional account and member to the service. Free accounts are limited to three accounts and three members. Zeta+ also gives you access to automation tools, such as custom rules for saving, and more advanced debit card management, such as custom spending limits.

Fudget

Fudget is one of the simplest budgeting apps on the market, making it a great choice for people who want to avoid the bells and whistles of other budgeting apps. When you download the app, you tell it how much you make and your regular expenses. You can then check off each expense as you pay it, helping you keep track of what you need to be ready to pay for.

There’s no account syncing, transaction importing, or other fancy features—just a very simple tool for keeping track of upcoming spending.

Fudget is free to use, but it has limited functionality unless you pay for its premium service. Free users get five budgets and 250 entries. For $19.99 a year, you can sign up for Fudget Plus which gives you access to unlimited budgets and entries, the ability to share your account, and the ability to use it on more than one device.

Credit Karma

When Mint ended service, users were encouraged to export their data to Intuit’s other financial app, Credit Karma. Credit Karma’s mobile app now has very basic budgeting tools included, but it’s designed more to help people keep track of their credit.

Like Mint, Credit Karma syncs with your financial accounts and imports your transactions. It also categorizes your spending. However, there isn’t a way to set up a target budget or to view your spending compared to your target. There is a basic spending breakdown, which lets you see where you’ve spent money this month, as well as your total spending in previous months. But you can’t see much data from previous months.

Overall, the app may be useful if you want a quick way to view your account balances in one place and to keep an eye on your credit score. As a budgeting tool, it’s outclassed by the competition.

There are lots of different budgeting apps out there, and each works in a slightly different way. You might have to try a few before you find the one that fits your needs. However, it’s worth the effort, because budgeting apps can make tracking your income and expenses much easier. That can put you on a better financial path and help you start setting aside extra cash for important goals like a down payment, paying off loans, or retirement.

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