The Best Personal Finance and Budgeting Apps We’ve Tested for 2025

We picked Simplifi because it’s the all-around best personal finance management app available and has an affordable price. We like its detail-rich transaction management features, exceptional mobile apps, fresh user interface and intuitive operations, and innovative budgeting tools.

Price and Value: At $5.99 per month (billed annually), Simplifi won’t put a dent in your budget at the same time you’re trying to use your money more wisely. Considering how effectively it works, it’s the best value in this group.

Ease of Use and Security: Simplifi’s exceptional interface conventions and navigation tools combine to create an intuitive user experience. The company supports multi-factor authentication (MFA), and it transmits data using standard 256-bit encryption, meaning it offers bank-grade security.

Account Connectivity and Transactions: Simplifi imports transactions from your financial institutions and allows you to add more detail than competitors. You can, for example, divide transactions among multiple tags or categories, earmark them as one-time or recurring bills, and track refunds.

Budgeting: Rather than a traditional budget, Simplifi offers Spending Watchlists and a Spending Plan. The latter is a unique tool that tracks your earnings and spending in several “buckets” and tells you in real time what you have left to spend.

Investment Tracking: You can import or manually add your brokerage holdings and transactions and then view them in charts and tables. Simplifi’s tools here are fine for casual traders who check their portfolios just occasionally.

Goal Planning and Insights: All the data you store in Simplifi contributes to the site’s simple retirement planner, which can serve as a launching pad for more detailed discussions with an advisor. There’s also a very basic savings goal tracker and mini-reports—customizable data displays that let you isolate the results you want.

Education and Resources: Personal finance applications teach you about financial management through the tools they provide. Simplifi, however, doesn’t have any tutorials or other dedicated learning resources.

Almost Anyone: Unless you need advanced investment management and retirement planning tools (in which case you might have a financial advisor), you should give Simplifi a try. It checks all the boxes for comprehensive money management.

Financial App Novices: Whether you’re 21 or 71, this is a good place to start if you’ve never used a personal finance application before. Simplifi is easy to set up and use, and it helps make your finances make sense.

Transaction Trackers: If you like to micromanage your transactions, you should appreciate Simplifi’s attention to detail in this area. The lively, attractive UI makes it almost fun.

Monarch goes beyond the basic building blocks of personal finance management (though it handles the standard tasks very well). It can import your Amazon transactions, for example, and offers an AI-driven natural language reporting tool.

Price and Value: At $8.33 per month (billed annually), Monarch falls in about the middle of the services we reviewed price-wise. In many ways, it earns its subscription fee.

Ease of Use and Security: Color, icons, large fonts, and a simple, intuitive design make Monarch a pleasure to use, which means it’s good for novices and experienced users alike. Both groups should appreciate the fast, attractive interface. The company says it employs industry-leading security practices to protect your information, and it supports MFA and read-only access.

Account Connectivity and Transactions: Monarch offers more than one service to facilitate connections to your online financial institutions, and AI helps select and monitor the best one. You can assign categories (both personal and tax-related business ones) and add standard details to transactions, but Monarch also lets you attach transactions to goals and assign them to collaborators for review.

Budgeting: In addition to the standard framework some personal finance applications employ (assign estimated budget amounts to categories), Monarch allows you to divide your expenses into three buckets: Fixed (recurring, predictable obligations), Flexible (costs that vary from month to month), and Non-Monthly (expenses that occur at various intervals). This three-bucket approach forces you to look at your money differently and plan better for unexpected expenses.

Investment Tracking: Monarch allows you to create a portfolio of multiple investment types (such as cryptocurrencies, derivatives, ETFs, and mutual funds) by connecting your brokerage accounts or entering holdings manually. It updates benchmarks in real time when the markets are open and your holdings daily, providing great tools for casual investors who want to monitor their portfolios.

Goal Planning and Insights: You can create goals of two different types in Monarch: saving for an emergency fund or other future expense and “pay down” goals (such as student loans). You prioritize them, specify how much you want to save, and link them to accounts for funding and monitoring.

Education and Resources: Monarch asks you a series of questions about future goals and your current financial profile, and then supplies you with lists of tasks you must do to achieve them. Both the questioning and results are quite detailed, and they could be helpful if you want to tackle these actions on your own without consulting with a professional.

1099 Workers: Since you can categorize transactions using IRS Schedule C categories and create customized transaction reports, gig workers and other microbusinesses could track both their personal finances and tax-related business expenses in Monarch.

Households: If you want to share your account with partners or other household members, you can provide them with their own logins. Individuals can then add their own accounts and transactions and customize notification settings.

Goal-Oriented Savers: Monarch’s savings goal tools and its personalized advice make it a good choice if you are motivated to save smartly for specific purposes.

We included YNAB, not despite the fact that it can be challenging to learn, but because of that. It helps you develop and maintain a realistic spending (and saving) plan that gives you confidence in how your money is working as a part of your life.

Price and Value: You can subscribe to YNAB for $9.08 per month (billed annually), which isn’t much when you consider the potential payoff for your diligent work: a spending plan that actually works and helps you make better financial choices.

Ease of Use and Security: The actual mechanics of using YNAB aren’t difficult, and the excellent user experience makes them even simpler. YNAB supports MFA and uses bank-grade or better encryption. It doesn’t store your bank credentials.

Account Connectivity and Transactions: YNAB doesn’t really work unless you import all of your financial transactions (you can manually enter stragglers), and it easily facilitates that process. Transaction forms aren’t as detailed as most competitors’, but they don’t need to be.

Budgeting: “Give every dollar a job” is YNAB’s number one rule, and it works. The site uses zero-based budgeting, which means you assign earned dollars to categories until all the money is gone.

Investment Tracking: YNAB doesn’t provide tools for tracking investments.

Goal Planning and Insights: YNAB is all about setting and meeting financial goals by incorporating incremental saving into your budget. You don’t just say you want to save $3,000 for a vacation and let the app monitor your progress; you make your spending patterns match your goals.

Education and Resources: You can learn a lot about budgeting, the YNAB method, and general money management through the site’s voluminous support options. There’s a searchable help system that contains lively, well-written articles, dozens of free workshops and webinars each week, a robust YouTube channel, and a book about YNAB’s philosophy.

College Students: YNAB for College Students is free for a year. And the sooner you learn to budget your money correctly, the better.

Family and Friends: You can invite up to five family members and close friends to share your account. They can even create their own plans and share them if they want.

Motivated Individuals: YNAB requires study and preparation, and then diligent monitoring of your progress. But the payoff can be substantial, much more so than with a typical budgeting tool in other personal finance apps.

We picked NerdWallet primarily for its exceptional personal finance educational content, including articles, podcasts, and self-guided online courses. Its growing set of personal finance tools makes it even more attractive.

Price and Value: You can’t argue with free.

Ease of Use and Security: NerdWallet is now a mobile-first service. Its apps, available on Android and iOS, are attractive and easy to use—much more so than the aging website. NerdWallet encrypts your financial data (128-bit encryption), requires MFA, and uses industry-standard security controls.

Account Connectivity and Transactions: To learn about your cash flow and net worth, you need to connect your online financial accounts to NerdWallet and import transactions, which NerdWallet stores in registers. Each entry contains fields for the account, amount, category, date, and vendor (or income source).

Budgeting: NerdWallet no longer offers budgeting tools.

Investment Tracking: You can import investment accounts and view their current and historical balances in a chart with multiple date ranges. NerdWallet partners with Atomic Invest to provide two investment accounts with no minimums: an automated investment account and a US Treasury account (for purchasing Treasury bills).

Goal Planning and Insights: NerdWallet doesn’t have a savings goal tool, but you can set up a savings account through Atomic Invest and NerdWallet that has a six-month introductory rate of 4.65% APY, after which it goes down to 4.0% APY.

Education and Resources: NerdWallet made a name for itself by providing financial education. As mentioned, its learning tools and resources come in many forms, including clear, well-researched articles, podcasts, self-guided online courses, and videos.

Beginner Investors: Through a partnership with Atomic Invest, you can benefit from high-yield savings, buy US Treasury bills, and start an automated investment account.

Eager Learners: Editorial content about money management and reviews of financial products and other educational resources are what NerdWallet does best.

Net Worth Trackers: NerdWallet helps you explore both the minutiae of your finances as well as the big picture: cash flow and net worth.

PocketGuard makes this list because it offers a smart blend of features. It should appeal to people who want to monitor their bank transactions easily, save toward specific goals, and monitor their budgets, even if they don’t need very advanced features in any one area.

Price and Value: PocketGuard is moderately priced, considering the variety of personal finance tools it offers. However, its budgeting and debt reduction tools can easily pay for themselves.

Ease of Use and Security: PoacketGuard’s interface is attractive and straightforward, making good use of graphics and color. Its ubiquitous icons add a bit of welcome whimsy. The company says it takes reasonable administrative, electronic, and physical measures to protect the information it collects from or about you, and it supports MFA.

Account Connectivity and Transactions: Good connection tools make it easy to link up with your online financial accounts (including Apple Wallet). Standard transaction details like categorization, image uploads, and splits enable thorough records, and you can use hashtags in the Notes field to easily group related data.

Budgeting: PocketGuard features standard budgeting tools (you estimate your income and expenses by category and compare them to the actual numbers). Each budget has a helpful landing page with a line graph that lets you compare your current spending with that of the previous 18 months and shows a list of related transactions.

Investment Tracking: PocketGuard doesn’t offer investment tracking tools.

Goal Planning and Insights: You can create simple financial goals that you either link to accounts or update manually. If debt reduction is a goal, for example, you can use the app’s tools to either pay off the debt with the highest interest first or the lowest balance.

Education and Resources: PocketGuard doesn’t really have any educational content. Its Insights feature is as close to reports as it gets, displaying charts and graphs that you can filter by three different criteria: categories, hashtags, and top merchants.

Beginners: Besides having an intuitive user experience, PocketGuard comes with a whole raft of understandable help resources. The app is very easy to use, but you might need some support if you are new to personal finance management.

The Debt-Challenged: Between PocketGuard’s budgets and debt reduction tools, it could be very helpful if you are struggling with your financial obligations.

Quicken Classic has been around for decades, and it offers the best of both worlds: a desktop app and an online portal that syncs your most important data. No competitor offers more personal finance functionality.

Price and Value: Quicken Classic’s depth and flexibility are unbeatable, so its starting subscription rate of $6.49 per month is quite reasonable. A Deluxe version ($8.49 per month, billed annually) adds bill payment and more investing features.

Ease of Use and Security: The desktop app requires a bit of a learning curve if you’re new to it, but its corresponding web interface offers a fresh and intuitive user experience. The app uses 256-bit encryption for all data transmission and SSL technology for data transfer from banks, in addition to employing a double encryption method to secure bank credentials before sending them to aggregation partners.

Account Connectivity and Transactions: You can set up connections to your brokerage, checking, credit card, loan, and savings accounts from the desktop app and import the latest transactions. Once they’re in Quicken Classic’s registers, you can absolutely micro-manage them, including assigning them to specific lines on income tax forms.

Budgeting: Although Quicken Classic’s approach to budgeting isn’t as innovative as Simplifi’s or YNAB’s, it provides fairly standard and easy-to-understand tools, which might be all you want. It supports both business and personal categories, so you can use it for tracking tax-related expenses if you are self-employed.

Investment Tracking: Quicken Classic’s investment tracking tools surpass those from every other personal finance app. The software offers an extraordinarily customizable portfolio view that features real-time quotes and cryptocurrency support.

Goal Planning and Insights: The app provides top-notch tools here, too. It can help you establish savings goals, make a lifetime financial plan, reduce debt, and track and project income taxes. No other personal finance application comes close to Quicken’s capabilities in this area.

Education and Resources: Quicken doesn’t provide educational content that teaches about personal finance topics as such, but it does provide research tools that help you learn about investment securities as you make trading decisions, including Morningstar’s lauded Portfolio X-Ray. Quicken Classic’s help resources are excellent.

Fans of Desktop Apps: If you’re just not ready to manage your finances online. Quicken’s desktop app for Windows could be a good choice. Its companion website can help ease you into dealing with your money in the cloud.

Microbusinesses: If you are a gig worker or a sole proprietor, you can track both business and personal finances using Quicken Classic, as well as create income tax-related reports.

Personal Finance Micromanagers: No other personal finance application offers as advanced bill tracking and payment, planning and investing, reports, and transaction management.

Serious Investors: Some personal finance applications allow you to import brokerage data and even transactions, but Quicken Classic goes above and beyond by supplying more frequent traders with advanced resources that can help them make decisions about investments. It provides numerous ways to evaluate your portfolio’s strength and possible future performance.

We picked Rocket Money because it does so many things well. Its exceptional user experience also makes personal finance tasks (almost) fun. The service’s mobile apps are terrific, too.

Price and Value: A free tier is available, but Rocket Money’s best features are in its Premium version, which employs a pay-what-you-wish pricing structure (it suggests between $6 and $12 per month). It’s a good deal if you pay toward the bottom of that scale.

Ease of Use and Security: Rocket Money couldn’t be easier to use, thanks to its intuitive user experience and obvious navigation tools. The company says it uses the most up-to-date industry protocols for storing your data, including bank-level 256-bit encryption. It also supports MFA.

Account Connectivity and Transactions: The application uses Plaid, a secure and well-known third-party service, to create connections to your online financial institutions so you can import transactions. Once they’re in Rocket Money’s registers, you can add a great deal of detail to them, marking them as recurring transactions or tax-deductible.

Budgeting: Rocket Money automatically creates budgets based on the categories it identifies during transaction imports, such as Auto & Transport, Charitable Donations, and Pets. Each budget category gets a dedicated home page that shows historical spending charts and other related information.

Investment Tracking: Although other personal finance services handle investment tracking better, Rocket Money does allow you to connect to brokerage accounts and import balances.

Goal Planning and Insights: You can create savings goals, then move funds into an account through NBKC Bank, which is FDIC-insured. The app can either set up a savings plan for you and automatically make small deposits every few days based on your spending, or you can set up your own transfer amounts and schedule.

Education and Resources: Rocket Money doesn’t offer any educational content or other resources beyond the app itself.

Couples: You can share your Premium account with a significant other to create a household budget, for example, and to categorize joint expenses.

Debt Reducers: If you want to shed debt, Rocket Money can help by negotiating your bills down and canceling subscriptions you want to end. You can also set a debt-reducing savings goal.

Savers: Rocket Money’s automated savings account puts savings on autopilot. Its budget tools help pinpoint overspending in specific areas.

Skeptical Consumers: Rocket Money’s smart selection of personal finance tools, combined with a lively user experience, might appeal to you if you think money management apps are a drag.

We feature WalletHub Premium here because its personal finance features are worth using. We also like its well-researched reviews of financial products and plentiful other educational resources.

Price and Value: WalletHub is worthy of your subscription dollars because of how capably its mobile and web apps support personal finance education and management. The Premium tier is a good value at $7.99 per month (billed annually), if you take advantage of everything it offers.

Ease of Use and Security: WalletHub’s pages have an attractive, intuitive layout that doesn’t feel crowded because most of your financial details appear on linked pages. The company says it uses the same 128-bit and SSL encryption as FDIC-insured financial institutions and supports MFA.

Account Connectivity and Transactions: Like its competitors, WalletHub makes it easy to set up connections to your online financial accounts and import transactions from them. The app supports standard transaction details and tools, but takes it up a notch, assigning labels (tags) to them, for example, and letting you designate expenses as “must-have” or “nice-to-have.”

Budgeting: The service allows you to choose from among multiple budget types, which makes it unique in this group. Options include Envelope Budgeting, Pay Yourself First, Simple, and the 50/30/20 approach.

Investment Tracking: You can connect your brokerage accounts to WalletHub and see your list of accounts with accompanying transactions and performance charts. The site also displays news stories related to your securities and any others you want to add.

Goal Planning and Insights: WalletHub has basic but helpful goal-building tools that specify accounts for funding and monitoring. The app also offers three reports: Budget, Income and Expenses, and Spending by Label.

Education and Resources: WalletHub offers a tremendous amount of educational content related to personal finance, including numerous related articles and studies. It also provides a financial literacy test, more calculators than I’ve seen in any other personal finance app, and exceptionally thorough reviews of financial products.

Budget Shoppers: WalletHub is the only app we reviewed that offers multiple budget options, so you can see which suits you best.

Credit Shoppers: Besides providing the basic specs for each financial product the service advertises, like any annual fees and the APR, you can view customer reviews, evaluations from WalletHub staff members, and lengthy Q&As.

We picked Credit Karma because it provides credit scores and insights on what goes into them for free. The additional personal finance features make it a more well-rounded app than before.

Price and Value: Credit Karma is an excellent value, considering that it offers comprehensive credit score coverage and other financial management tools at no cost.

Ease of Use and Security: It’s not difficult to find your way around Credit Karma’s mobile apps since you can access your credit score and other personal finance information from its main dashboard. Credit Karma offers numerous security features, including 128-bit or higher encryption, MFA, and security questions.

Account Connectivity and Transactions: Like competitors, Credit Karma makes it easy to connect your online financial accounts and import transactions. The app displays transactions in registers, where you can see the amount, category, date, income source, and vendor name.

Budgeting: Credit Karma doesn’t offer budgeting tools.

Investment Tracking: You can import brokerage account balances and link to accounts such as 401(k)s and loans, so Credit Karma can calculate your net worth.

Goal Planning and Insights: Credit Karma doesn’t include a tool for creating savings goals like some competitors, though it offers a savings account through MVB Bank, Inc., Member FDIC.

Education and Resources: Credit Karma educates you on the factors that comprise your credit score, so you can see how you might improve it.

Bad Credit Score Sufferers: The app provides information about what factors go into calculating a credit score and grades you on your progress in each area.

Credit Score Watchers: Credit Karma updates your credit scores daily.

PocketSmith earns a spot on this list because of its outstanding budgeting and forecasting tools and the results it delivers. The app is well worth its pricey subscription rate if you can take advantage of its unparalleled level of insight into your financial habits.

Price and Value: As mentioned, PocketSmith’s subscription price (starting at $9.99 per month, billed annually) is high compared with the other services we reviewed, considering that you need to pay more for extended projections. But if you’re willing to put in the work to learn how PocketSmith works and run it through its considerable paces, you might be able to justify its price.

Ease of Use and Security: In addition to an understandable navigation system, PocketSmith provides numerous study guides and a searchable help database, so you have ample resources for learning how it works. However, it could greatly benefit from an interface refresh that makes all of its tools easier to discover. The software, which requires MFA, always encrypts your connection to it and records all successful login attempts.

Account Connectivity and Transactions: PocketSmith uses Plaid and Yodlee, two trusted data aggregators, to supply bank feeds for transaction imports. Its transaction management tools and flexibility are best-in-class, handling the basics well. However, it goes beyond the standard features by importing transactions from other financial apps and providing numerous flexible display options.

Budgeting: The service allows you to create budgets for any time period, such as a day, week, or month, as well as run unlimited what-if scenarios to test different approaches to your future finances. Charts track historical forecasts and actual spending for anywhere from one day to 30 years.

Investment Tracking: Although PocketSmith’s main focus is on budgets, it also calculates your net worth, so you need to import your investment data. The site allows you to record it in three different ways: as an asset, as an offline account, or via a bank feed.

Goal Planning and Insights: The app doesn’t offer a simple goal-tracking tool like some competitors. It does have several very customizable reports, however, including Cash Flow, Income & Expense Statement, Net Worth, and Trends.

Education and Resources: PocketSmith provides a lot of education about personal finance through voluminous study guides. They teach about financial concepts as they explain in detail how the application itself works.

Desktop Software Loyalists: PocketSmith works well as a desktop application (available for macOS, Linux, and Windows), but it’s not as convenient as online solutions that you can easily access from any computer. It does offer a mobile app (available for Android and iOS), however/

Motivated Budget Builders: Mastering PocketSmith takes time and diligence, but the payoff is worth it.

Retirement Planners: PocketSmith’s what-if scenarios and generous forecasting limits make it a good choice for planning your financial life for the next 30 years.