Best Mint Alternatives [2024]: Are the Replacement Apps Worth the Cost?

When the personal finance app Mint shut down in early 2024, many users, including me, were left looking for an alternate way to monitor their financial lives. Several personal finance apps are trying to take Mint’s place, but only a few are clear successors.

For example, Monarch Money is one of my favorite apps because it allows users to manage all of their finances — not just their budget — using one platform. While it does have a yearly subscription fee, its many features and the easy swap from Mint make it convenient to use.

I also recommend Quicken Simplifi if you’re looking for straightforward budgeting and notification tools at a less expensive cost. It offers customizable budgeting, a dashboard similar to Monarch Money, and reports to help you manage your finances.

Finding the right Mint alternative that fits your needs can take a little work. Let’s look at some options that might jive with your financial life, help you better manage your money, and offer peace of mind.

How we evaluate products

The companies we chose for our best Mint alternatives list may be current or past FinanceBuzz partners. We didn’t review all personal finance or budgeting apps on the market. When evaluating these companies, we considered factors such as budgeting and money management features, pricing, app store ratings and reviews, and the user experience.

The six best Mint alternatives

• Rocket Money
• Monarch Money
  
• You Need A Budget (YNAB)
  
• Quicken Simplifi
  
• PocketGuard
• Goodbudget

Comparison of the best Mint alternatives

App name	Best for	Pricing options
Rocket Money	Canceling unwanted subscriptions	Limited free features 7-day free trial for the Premium membership, then $6 to $12/mo
Monarch Money	Customizable features	7-day free trial $14.99/mo $69.99 billed annually ($5.83/mo) for your first year, then $99.99 billed annually ($8.33/mo)
You Need a Budget (YNAB)	Detailed budgeters	34-day free trial $14.99/mo $109 billed annually ($9.08/mo)
Quicken Simplifi	User-friendly money management tools	$3.99/mo ($47.88 billed annually) for the first year, then $5.99/mo ($71.88 billed annually)
PocketGuard	Building a debt repayment plan	Limited free features $12.99/mo $74.99 billed annually ($6.25/mo)
Goodbudget	Digital envelope budgeting	Limited free features $10/mo $80 billed annually ($6.67/mo)

Rocket Money

Rocket Money is one of the only apps offering some free features. I haven’t used Rocket Money for a long time (just a week), but I like some of its features, including the subscription review and spending insights.

A free Rocket Money subscription gets you access to account linking (bank, investment, and credit card), balance alerts, subscription management (but not cancellation services), and spending tracking.

If you sign up for the Premium membership, you’ll unlock Rocket Money's more famous features, such as bill negotiation, subscription cancellation, and credit scores and reports.

Premium membership comes with a free 7-day trial, and after that, it costs between $6 and $12 a month. Rocket Money uses a pay-what-you-want method, which means the price can fluctuate between $72 and $144 annually, plus any additional fees paid for bill negotiation.

This membership lets you build unlimited budgets, track your net worth, and cancel unwanted subscriptions. It also offers spending insights and identifies your biggest spending categories. You can get multiple alerts for bill increases, bank fees, changes in spending, or changes to your credit score.

Its feature called “Financial Goals” moves money into an FDIC-insured savings account to help you grow your savings balance automatically. However, the account doesn’t earn interest, and you can only transfer funds back to your original checking account.

Rocket Money’s best-known feature walks you through canceling unwanted subscriptions with various payment methods, or you can ask the app to handle the cancellations. The bill negotiation feature can also help you save money, but you’ll pay a fee of between 35% and 60% of what you save in the first year.

Rocket Money tracks your FICO 2 credit score and alerts you about changes. However, unlike many of the best budgeting apps, this app doesn’t offer customizable reports showing how your money changes over time, which may be frustrating if you relied on that feature in Mint. It does let you monitor changes to your debts, assets, and net worth though.

I like how Rocket Money summarizes my linked accounts and tries to find ways to save me money. However, its budgeting features aren’t as robust as with Monarch Money or YNAB, and I don’t like that I can’t run reports.

Rocket Money is available on the Apple App Store with a rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars and more than 113,000 reviews. It's also available for Android on the Google Play Store, with a rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars and over 67,000 reviews.

Visit Rocket Money | Check out our full Rocket Money review

Monarch Money

Monarch Money is a personal finance app with much of the same functionality that Mint offered. I signed up for a free 7-day trial, and the multiple features available surprised me.

One feature I was excited to use was the money dashboard, which creates a custom view of your money. You can drag and drop widgets along the dashboard or remove unused items. I also liked the calendar that automatically tracks and notifies you of all recurring bills and subscriptions in one place.

Like Mint, Monarch Money is available for Apple and Android devices and desktops. I tested it on a desktop, and it responded well without glitches.

Monarch Money tracks all your financial accounts, including bank accounts, loan balances, and credit cards. You can also set savings goals and run various reports. Plus, it helps track your spending and displays your net worth.

It has extensive budgeting features, including monthly and annual budgets. You can create categories, roll over unused budget amounts from previous months, and create forecasts analyzing how different situations might affect your long-term finances. Plus, the platform will show you how your spending impacts your retirement and says that more advanced retirement tools are in the works.

Much like Mint, Monarch Money allows you to create custom charts and reports. It also lets you monitor your investments and assets, such as your home and car, along with your debts.

For example, it integrates with Zillow, the real estate marketplace, to track your home’s value, and it can sync with your Coinbase account to track your cryptocurrency.

But unlike Mint, Monarch Money doesn’t provide your credit score or a credit report.

The collaboration feature lets you add a partner or financial advisor to your account at no additional cost. Each of you gets your own login, so you don’t have to share your password. Plus, collaborators can add accounts and transactions.

One downside to Monarch Money is its subscription fee, which is more expensive than for some apps. After the 7-day free trial, you’ll pay $14.99 billed monthly or $69.99 for an annual subscription for the first year ($5.83 a month). Your annual charge will then jump to $99.99 ($8.33 monthly).

Monarch Money has a rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars on the Apple App Store and over 28,000 reviews. It has a rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars on the Google Play Store and over 6,000 reviews.

Visit Monarch | Check out our full Monarch Money review

You Need A Budget (YNAB)

You Need a Budget (YNAB) is a popular Android, iOS, and desktop-based budgeting app. It uses the zero-based budgeting method, which gives every dollar a job. It offers bank account syncing and imports your transactions from linked accounts.

Like Mint, YNAB provides one central location to see your accounts and visuals of your saving and spending categories. However, it dives deep into your planned and unplanned expenses and encourages you to allocate every dollar to a budget.

The YNAB method helps you prepare for emergencies by setting aside a bit each month for the inevitable surprise car repair or vet bill and for yearly costs like car registrations that might take us by surprise.

It's good at creating a detailed budget that accounts for your various expenses. It will automatically categorize repeated transactions, though you need to enter any cash you spend manually. If you go over a budget category, you must move money from another category to cover the extra expense.

It will import your bank and credit card transactions and help you keep track of your loan accounts.

You can also use the partner feature called “YNAB Together,” which allows you to create a group and share your budget with up to five others with just one subscription.

However, YNAB is a budgeting app, not a personal finance app. It can track your retirement accounts if you add them, but you must manually create a category, transfer funds, and reconcile the account after each contribution, which is a lot of work. It also doesn’t track your credit score or provide credit monitoring.

I was a YNAB user a couple of years ago, and during my current testing, I found that the app's look has changed, but the process remains the same.

I liked using YNAB, but one of my biggest problems was the disconnect between how my budget looked in the app and what was in my bank account. Since YNAB doesn’t actually pull money out of your account and into your budgeted categories, applying your theoretical budget to your real-life bank account can be difficult.

It’s also expensive, costing $14.99 a month or $109 for an annual subscription (which works out to $9.08 monthly). However, it comes with a 34-day free trial to help you test out all the features before you commit, and you don’t have to provide a credit card for that trial.

YNAB has 4.8 out of 5 stars in the Apple App Store and more than 52,000 reviews. In the Google Play Store, it has 4.8 out of 5 stars and over 19,000 reviews.

Visit YNAB (You Need A Budget) | Check out our full YNAB review

Quicken Simplifi

Quicken Simplifi is a pared-down version of the Quicken business and personal finance software. It has an easy-to-use interface and many features Mint users will be familiar with.

Within Simplifi, you can create a budget; track your spending, savings, and debt repayments; and monitor your investments and net worth. Like with Monarch Money, you can share the Quicken Simplifi account with a partner or financial advisor, and it will also let you check your credit score.

When you first log on, the app shows a customizable dashboard with your current net worth, savings goals, upcoming bill payments, investments, and top spending categories, among other widgets.

As I tested the app, one of my favorite features was the Spending Plan. Simplifi will analyze your accounts and create a flexible budget for you. You can create and customize your budget categories, but the app will also automatically review your recurring transactions, such as subscriptions, and your income so it can make recommendations.

You can run various reports, and Simplifi alerts you about unexpected transactions and upcoming bills. You can also enter triggers for spending or balance limits or monitor for pending refunds.

Quicken Simplifi doesn’t offer a free plan, but it only costs $3.99 a month ($47.88 billed annually) for the first year and then renews at $5.99 a month ($71.88 billed annually). While there’s no free trial, you get a 30-day risk-free period during which you can ask for a refund. It's the least expensive option on this list and has many features not found with other apps.

Quicken Simplifi has a rating of 4.2 out of 5 stars and almost 4,000 reviews on the Apple App Store. It has 4.1 out of 5 stars on the Google Play Store and more than 2,300 reviews.

Visit Quicken Simplifi | Check out our full Quicken Simplifi review

PocketGuard

The PocketGuard app lets you link bank accounts, investments, credit cards, and loans within one dashboard. Its free version lets you set up two budget categories, add recurring income and bills, and set goals.

You can upgrade to PocketGuard Plus, which costs $12.99 a month ($155.99 per year) or $74.99 billed annually ($6.25 a month). It has features like making a debt payoff plan, tracking cash, and even helping you cancel unwanted subscriptions. It also includes the In My Pocket feature, which considers your bills, goals, and debt repayment and tells you how much you have left to save or spend.

PocketGuard has many features similar to Mint, like budget categorization, goals, and reports. It also offers a bill payment tracker to help you remember upcoming payment dates. Plus, you can categorize your budgets using hashtags, images, or notes to identify transactions quickly.

One of the features that interested me the most was the debt repayment plan. PocketGuard will help you set up a payoff budget, choose a strategy through the snowball or avalanche methods, and tackle your debt. It also allows you to see how many payment cycles you have until you’re debt-free, which can help keep you motivated.

One of PocketGuard's drawbacks is that its website is difficult to navigate. It glitched several times while I was exploring the features. Plus, since it only offers a few features for free, you must pay for a subscription to make the app more broadly useful.

I don’t think PocketGuard is as helpful as some other apps for tracking and categorizing your spending. However, the debt repayment and In My Pocket features are worth considering if debt payoff is one of your primary goals.

PocketGuard has 4.6 out of 5 stars on the Apple App Store and more than 7,000 reviews. On the Google Play Store, it has 3.6 stars out of 5 and only around 2,100 reviews.

Visit PocketGuard | Check out our full PocketGuard review

Goodbudget

Goodbudget is a budgeting system similar to YNAB and based on the popular envelope method. It's easy to set up but doesn’t have as many features as some other apps. Like YNAB, you need to be a hands-on budgeter to make the most of it.

When you sign up with Goodbudget, you must create and add funds to your budget categories, which the app calls “envelopes.” You’ll reduce each category's budgeted amount to zero as you spend money throughout the month. When you don’t have any budgeted funds left, you can’t spend any more in that category or you have to move funds from another category to cover it.

You can sync certain types of accounts and add transactions. But, much like YNAB, Goodbudget is a budgeting app, not a personal finance app.

If you have Goodbudget Premium, the app can automatically import transactions from a linked bank account, but you must still assign transactions to each envelope or confirm each one is going into the correct category. You’ll have to manually enter each transaction if you spend cash or have an unlinked account, or you can import transactions from certain files.

Goodbudget only supports automatically syncing checking, savings, and credit accounts. It can’t track investments like 401(k)s, brokerage accounts, or cryptocurrency. While it doesn’t support linking loan accounts, you can manually add and track your debt balances.

One of the things I like about Goodbudget is that it helps you establish your spending priorities and save for big goals. It’s also a much simpler system than YNAB. Plus, you can share a free plan with a partner across two devices; this goes up to five devices with Goodbudget Premium.

Like Mint and YNAB, Goodbudget doesn’t move your money into a separate account. But if you want to pay off debt or save for a significant expense, using an envelope in Goodbudget and moving your money into a corresponding high-yield savings account can help you see your progress and keep you motivated.

It's also one of the least expensive options available. Goodbudget’s free account provides 10 regular envelopes, 10 additional envelopes for goals, and a one-year transaction history. The Premium plan, which costs $10 a month (or $80 billed annually), includes unlimited envelopes and accounts across five devices. It also keeps your transaction history for seven years.

Goodbudget has 4.6 stars out of 5 on the Apple App Store and almost 13,000 reviews. On the Google Play Store, it has 3.9 stars out of 5 and has over 19,000 reviews.

Visit Goodbudget

How to pick the best replacement budgeting app

As you look for a new personal finance app, consider the following things.

Pricing

While some money management apps have free features, you’ll likely need a subscription to unlock the most helpful ones. Look for an app that fits your budget and has the features you need most. Try to avoid paying for things you won't use or aren’t interested in.

For example, if all you want to do is monitor your spending and net worth over time, you probably don’t need an app that focuses on debt repayment or bill negotiation. Instead, look for the least expensive option that covers your basics.

Compatibility

Make sure the app you select works with your devices. If you primarily check your finances via computer, ensure the interface is available and works without glitches. While PocketGuard can be a helpful app, it froze repeatedly when I tried to access it on my desktop.

Money management tools

Each app has different tools that set it apart. Depending on your primary financial goal, you might find one app more helpful than others. For example, I want an app that helps me track my spending, know when I’m over budget, and have a broad overview of my financial picture. Monarch Money and Quicken Simplifi provided the features I was interested in, but other options might work better for you.

Security

Ensure your chosen app uses bank-level encryption and has safety features like multi-factor authentication and read-only access. You should also check an app's privacy policies to understand the type of data it collects and how the company uses your information.

Financial goals

If you’re like most people, using a financial app is a way to visualize your future goals. Choose an app with tools to help you plan for the future, like setting savings goals, developing an emergency fund, and monitoring your retirement and investment accounts.

Ease of use

An app should be easy to use and sync seamlessly and securely with your financial institutions. Read reviews on the various app stores to see what other users say and whether there are any problems syncing to banks or other financial institutions.

Sharing

One thing Mint didn’t do well was sharing your budgets with your partner or other family members without giving them access to your login information. Many newer apps have partner-sharing features, making it much easier for two (or more) people to stick to the budget but maintain their own logins and accounts.

FAQs

Bottom line

Mint was known for being free, but some of the best alternatives require a monthly or yearly subscription. While paying to manage your money isn’t fun, the advanced features of some of these apps could make a subscription worthwhile and help you develop smart money habits.

Keep an eye out for an app that has the features you want. Look for popular tools like transaction monitoring, bank and credit card linking, investment tracking, and bill pay features, and confirm the app uses bank-level security and encryption. Don’t just sign up for the current “it” app. Instead, research your available options and choose one based on your financial needs.