We Tried the 15 Best Quicken Alternatives in 2023

If you’re looking for an alternative to Quicken, you’re in the right place.

Before web-based personal finance tools, Quicken was one of the best personal finance budgeting and bill management software available. Where else could you get software that pulled all your financial information, organized your bills, helped you pay for those bills, and was basically a money consigliere? The only “downside” was that you had to pay for it.

But over the years, other companies brought new offers, built from the ground up, and took advantage of the newer technology available. They use code that runs faster, connects seamlessly with other financial companies (like bank accounts and credit cards), and just has fewer issues doing regular tasks like tracking your net worth. Most importantly, many are free so you can try them yourself.

I was a fan of Quicken but let’s accept reality – Quicken breaks a lot. It doesn’t sync your accounts randomly sometimes, you have password problems, screens that should appear are blank or lag, and it’s just not a great user experience.

The bottom line:

If you’re tired of Quicken, its support and sync issues, and want a suitable free alternative or replacement – we have some options.

Here are some of the best Quicken alternatives available:

🏆 Our Favorite Picks (and why)

We compiled a pretty big list below but here are the two that stand out among the crowd:

1. Personal Capital – It covers nearly as much ground as Quicken (no billpay) and regularly updated so you don’t have to worry about sync problems. It has a solid suite of investment tools, a robust budgeting system, and portfolio analysis that beats the rest. It’s free and what I use personally.
2. Tiller Money – Hands down the best spreadsheet automation tool on the market. If you want to move to a spreadsheet you can customize to exactly what you need, Tiller Money will pull the data for you. You can build it from scratch or use a template, and Tiller Money will save you a ton of time and hassle.

The Full List of Quicken Alternatives:

Quicken’s strength was in being a financial dashboard and helping you manage your financial life – it was more than a simple budgeting app. This is why, when considering alternatives to Quicken, we settled on Personal Capital as the best replacement.

If you’re past the “help me with my budget” phase of your financial life, then you want to keep an eye on your investments (taxable and retirement) and whether you will reach your goals – whether that’s retirement, a big vacation, buying a home, getting married, … you name it. Personal Capital has the tools to analyze your progress and give you advice on whether you’ll reach your goals – on top of the typical budgeting tasks.

Best of all – it’s is free to use. You can get it up and running quickly so you don’t have to worry that you’re investing a ton of time into a tool that’s not a good fit.

You can also schedule a discussion with a financial advisor if you want more hands-on assistance. The initial call is complimentary (no cost) and you only pay if you opt for their Advisor service (optional, but this is how they are able to offer the tools for free). You can read my full review of Personal Capital for this in greater detail.

Why it is a good alternative to Quicken: One of the big problems with Quicken is that you run into synching and connection issues – fortunately, Personal Capital is web-based so it is updated regularly. It also has a rich set of tools for analyzing your finances from investment to retirement to budgeting and even intermediate savings goals like a house or education. There is also a budget and expense tracking component that works decently well.

I am a fan of their retirement planner, a tool that helps you project your future financial needs and whether you’ll get there. I have never talked to an advisor there.

What could be better? The budget and expense tracking pieces are good but it’s not as old as Quicken so they aren’t as complex. You can’t, for example, manage your bill pay through this tool. I don’t find it to be a negative because it works for me, but people with really complicated budgets may find it limiting.

As with any service that connects with many banks, there are little quirks here and there (for example, all of my holdings at Ally Invest are categorized as cash – annoying but they are working on a fix) but overall it works well.

Learn more about Personal Capital

(since you access it with a browser, it is compatible with Mac OS!)

If you are thinking about quitting Quicken and moving to a spreadsheet stored locally (or Google Docs), you’ll want to know about Tiller Money. I use a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to track our net worth and if you want a hand in pulling data, you’ll want to check out Tiller Money.

Tiller Money will automate your spreadsheets at a low cost of just $6.58 a month ($79 per year after a free 30 day trial). With a bit of tweaking, it’ll pull your data for you and put it into a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel document.

You can start with one of their free templates or build your own, but after the initial work, you’ll have a fully automated spreadsheet tailored to what you need. You can use this to track your net worth, set a budget, or anything else you can imagine. (see our review of Tiller Money)

Why it is a good alternative to Quicken: Quicken offers a lot of features out of the box and Tiller requires a bit of work to get it up to the same speed and quickness – but when you do, Tiller is nearly infinitely more customizable because it’s built into a spreadsheet. If you put in the work, you can create your own reports, your own dashboards, and have completely visibility into your finances.

Tiller has some great resources, including templates, to get you off the ground but it does require an investment of time. Quicken is now cloud-based so if you want to avoid putting your data into the cloud, going with a spreadsheet is your best option. Tiller makes it possible for you to get automation AND keep your data locally.

What could be better? Tiller doesn’t require you to be a master at Excel or Google Sheets but it helps if you are comfortable around a spreadsheet. You don’t need to know advanced functions but you have to be comfortable with the basics of spreadsheets or have a desire to learn it.

Learn more about Tiller Money

Vyzer is a financial dashboard and management system that is designed for higher net worth individuals who are managing a variety of investments. One of the limitations of tools like Quicken is that it’s difficult to track assets that don’t fit neatly into one of their integrations (and even then, sometimes the integrations don’t work).

With Vyzer, you’re able to track assets that aren’t held neatly in a brokerage or bank account. They offer a service where you can upload any form and they will parse it and add it to your assets. They literally have a person review the paperwork and fill in the information for you, which is why the service costs $79/month when paid annually.

Do you rent out any real estate? Is it pain to track the cash flow? With Vyzer, they will do it for you and send that data to your dashboard. No one else offers this. This allows you to analyze your portfolio, manage your cash flow, and do all analysis you need because now those assets are being tracked.

Learn more about Vyzer

You Need a Budget is a powerful budgeting software but it also can help you build a budget that you can grow into. But it does more than track your money, it helps you build a framework for growing your wealth.

Think of it like Quicken with a personality and a philosophy.

YNAB’s philosophy revolves around four rules:

1. Give Every Dollar a Job
2. Embrace Your True Expenses
3. Roll With The Punches
4. Age Your Money

Those four pillars form the foundation for a budgeting app that has helped many people transform their financial lives and improve their spending habits.

If you’re looking to transition to a financial tool that will help you (as in help you make the change, not just record expenses), you should take a look at YNAB.

(or, read our You Need a Budget review for more)

Why it is a good alternative to Quicken: Quicken only tracks your budget, YNAB does that AND helps you build a budget that meets the demands of your life and your savings needs. Sometimes you need something more than an app that connects to your bank account. If you want to change the way you budget, while still tracking it, YNAB is your solution.

YNAB is not an entire personal finance management suite – it focuses on budgeting and only budgeting. You won’t get investment tools, retirement planning, or wealth management. It’s strictly about building, maintaining, and transitioning into the budget you want.

What could be better? YNAB was designed to be a budgeting tool and so it is a budgeting tool – it doesn’t help with broader financial needs like retirement, managing your investment portfolio, and the rest. To say it would be a better tool if it incorporated those would be ignoring how it has a straightforward, and important, mandate.

Learn more about You Need a Budget

The founders built CountAbout to be a Quicken alternative. Founded in mid-2012, it is one of the only personal finance apps that will import data from Quicken (and Mint!). If you’re looking to transition away from Quicken but worry about losing all your data, you can feed it your Quicken file and it’ll populate itself. That’ll make the transition far less painful!

Like Quicken, CountAbout isn’t free but it costs $9.99 for the Basic subscription and $39.99 for Premium subscription. The Premium subscription includes automatic transaction downloads. A subscription model means you have complete data privacy and you won’t get annoying ads like with Mint.

Why is it a good alternative to Quicken? CountAbout has a lot of similar features to Quicken’s: split transactions, recurring transactions, attachments, budgeting, and more.

CountAbout is web-based, with multi-factor account security, so you don’t have to download a program onto your computer, and there’s no need to deal with unwieldy syncing issues – all you need is a web browser. And with CountAbout’s iOS and Android apps, your financial information is always at your fingertips.

Check out the key features (reminds me a lot of Quicken):

Imports data from Quicken and Mint
Thousands of financial institutions
Multi-factor login protection
Android and iOS apps
Category customization (add, delete, rename)
Tags (add, delete, rename)
Reporting for Account balances
Reporting for Category activity
Reporting for Tag activity
Report exporting
Attachments

Individual Account QIF importing
Budgeting
Running register balances
Account reconciliation
Graphs for Income & Spending
Recurring transactions
Investment balances by Institution
Memorized transactions
Split transactions
Description renaming
Invoicing

Learn more about Countabout

Pocketsmith is a freemium budgeting tool that uses calendars and the concept of “event-based budgeting.” Being calendar based means that rather than viewing your transactions as merely a long list of transactions, the calendar helps you understand when those transactions are happening and if they are doing so on a regular basis. This helps inform you about your spending and one of the more visual ways, when compared to others on this list.

It’s freemium with the Basic option giving you 12 budgets, 2 accounts, and the ability to project 6 months into the future. If you upgrade to the Premium level, which is $9.95 per month, or $7.50 when you pay annually, then you get automatic transaction importing (you can still do it manually if you wish) as well as categorization of spending. You also get unlimited accounts and projection out to ten years. The Super, which is $19.95 per month or $14.16 when paid annually, gives you unlimited accounts and 30 years projection.

We do have a promotion code for Pocketsmith, gives you 50% off the first two months of Premium – make sure to enter the code 50OFFPREMIUM-5G7T to get 50% off the first two months. (here’s our review of Pocketsmith)

Learn more about Pocketsmith

You might have heard of these guys since they’re now owned by the same company that once made Quicken.

Intuit acquired them in 2010 and that’s the reason why they shuttered Quicken Online shortly thereafter.

Later, Intuit sold Quicken to H.I.G. Capital and that’s when you knew the end was near!

Why it is a good alternative to Quicken: Mint is free and very powerful on the budgeting and expense tracking side. They do not have much to help you with investment and retirement savings, which I think you’ll find is a huge limitation as you get older. The goal of Mint was always to be a budgeting app and with that in mind, they do a very good job.

If you are sick of Quicken and focus entirely on expense tracking, Mint is a good Quicken alternative. It is cloud-based so there’s no software to download, patch, or update. If you have investments and want to manage those, Mint will not be able to adequately fulfill your needs.

Learn more about Mint

Built specifically for MacOS, Banktivity is a personal finance money manager that will import data from Quicken so you don’t lose anything in the transition process. It’ll do everything you want in a personal finance app, including budgeting, track spending, schedule and pay bills, monitor your investments (including real estate), and pull data from financial institutions.

It also has some powerful reporting options that, if you’re a report junkie, you will probably really enjoy building, tweaking, and rebuilding. All this is also possible across iOS devices too with seamless mobile app synchronization.

It is not free, it costs a one-time fee of $69.99 but there is a 30-day trial (no credit card required).

Learn more about Banktivity

MoneyDance is not as well known as some of the other alternatives I’ve listed but I wanted to mention them because they’re one of the few money apps that don’t rely on the cloud. If you are concerned about your data being stored online, this solution is an alternative that keeps your data local to your computer.

You can still link your accounts online, so they pull your transactions automatically, but they only store them on your computer. You can enter transactions manually if you didn’t want to link your accounts.

MoneyDance looks and feels like a checkbook, with the check register for transactions, but has charts and tables for reporting. It does budgeting but can also track your investments as well, albeit not as feature-rich as others.

MoneyDance is free to download and try but it costs $49.99. The free version has all the features as the paid version. The free version’s limitation is that you can only enter 100 manual transactions.

10. EveryDollar

Have you heard of Dave Ramsey?

Many folks swear by his approach and EveryDollar is built with that in mind. His approach takes into account human psychology, rather than relying solely on math, and explains why it is so effective. It also explains why ideas like the debt snowball work so well, we need to work with our biases and tendencies if we hope to succeed. EveryDollar is a budgeting tool affiliated with Dave Ramsey’s group, the Lampo Group.

Much like YNAB, it’s a budgeting tool that uses the principles of zero-based budgeting.

In zero-based budgeting, you assign every dollar to a category (or job, in YNAB parlance). It’s a level of rigor that can be refreshing or restricting, depending on your personality. The app itself is beautiful, available on your smartphone, and there is both a free and paid version. The paid version costs $129 a year.

(paid version offers phone support and automated transaction importing… which is a big time-saver; otherwise, you must manually enter the data)

11. GoodBudget

GoodBudget is a free budgeting app based on the envelope budgeting method. Envelope budgeting is when you set aside a prescribed amount for each category of spending, then spend it down each month.

It’s one of the most popular money management techniques in personal finance. The envelope refers to the manual method of managing these types of budgets where you put the money into an envelope. When you run out of money, you either borrow cash from another envelope or you make do.

GoodBudget adds technology to the mix and will synch up bank accounts to help track your income and your spending. You set the amount for each category and then watch as your spending nears the limit each month. It’s available for both iOS and Android phones.

12. GnuCash

GnuCash is a free open-source accounting software that, if you’re willing to put into the work, can replicate a lot of the Quicken experience for those who are willing to scale the learning curve. It features double-entry accounting (every transaction must debit one account and credit another), which is effective but will require an adjustment if you’re not used to it.

It offers a lot of the functionality of Quicken like splitting transactions, categorizing transactions, managing multiple accounts, schedule transactions, and reporting that includes all kinds of charts and reports (balance sheet, P&L, portfolio valuation, etc).

The big benefit is that it does budgeting as well as investments. It’s not strictly a budgeting tool.

Lastly, it offers QIF importing, so you can import your Quicken files, plus OFX (Open Financial Exchange) protocol. So you can pull in your data if your bank offers you the ability to export transactions.

13. Dollarbird

Dollarbird is another personal finance app with an eye towards collaboration and a monthly calendar. You synchronize your accounts (banking, brokerage, and credit cards) with Dollarbird and they build a schedule of future income and expenditures to help with planning. Dollarbird also offers a 5-year financial plan that lets you establish longer-term financial goals and track your performance against them.

The innovation they bring to the table is the idea of calendar-based money management. You can collaborate with other people (partner, family, or a team) to manage a team budget, though the collaborative piece requires the Pro version ($39.99 / year).

14. MoneyWiz

Of all the alternatives on this list, I know the least about MoneyWiz despite them being around since 2010. They support practically every operating system you can imagine – everything from Windows to Android to iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad – and it’ll sync them in real-time.

It’s a powerful budgeting tool that integrates with 16,000+ banks in 51+ countries – which includes cryptocurrencies if you’re in that investment class. If importing from your financial institution concerns you, you can manually enter data as well and it works just as well. For budgeting, you can work with their categories (which are multi-level) or add your own (and subcategories). You can split transactions, bulk edit, tag, and create powerful reports. It won’t pay your bills for you but does have notification features.

It’s a freemium product with the free version that has all the functionality minus synching across multiple devices and automated transaction downloads. For that, you need to buy the Standard ($49.99) or Premium ($49.99/yr or $4.99/mo).

15. PocketGuard

PocketGuard is a fairly simple budgeting app that links your credit cards, checking and savings accounts, investments, and loans all in one place. It has a complete picture (or at least what you tell it) of your finances but its strengths are in the budgeting – how it updates and categorizes your spending as it happens and looks for opportunities to save. Using your spending, it also builds a personalized budget based on your data as well as the goals you set for yourself.

They have a free version and a Plus version. The free version has all that you need for tracking your expenses and keep an eye on them. Plus allows you to add custom categories, track cash transactions like income and bills. Plus costs $3.99 per month or $34.99 per year.

One of these will make a fine replacement for Quicken.

Quicken Alternatives Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best free alternative to Quicken?

Personal Capital is the best free Quicken alternative because it offers budgeting and wealth management tools. Many other tools offer one or the other, Personal Capital offers both so you can get it all in one place. And if you want, they also offer an advisory service to help you with your investments too.

Is Quicken available without subscription?

No – Quicken is now a subscription-based service that cost anywhere from $41.88 to $107.88. Quicken Starter is the cheapest plan at $41.88 per year while the Quicken Home & Business can be as much as $107.88 (not counting discounts). There are often sales and discounts so if you do decide to pay, don’t pay full price, but with so many free alternatives you probably won’t want to.

Do any Quicken alternatives offer Bill Pay features?

Unfortunately no alternatives let you pay bills through Quicken, but tools like Tiller and You Need a Budget offer tools to help you manage your bills and bill payments so you don’t miss them. You can’t make the payments like Quick Pay or Check through any of these tools, you have to execute them yourself.

What happened to Quicken Online?

Intuit created Quicken Online to try to compete with Mint. Near the end of 2009, they gave up and acquired Mint. Afterward, they opted to shut down Quicken Online and sold the entire Quicken unit to H.I.G. Capital in 2016. Quicken Online no longer exists. Quicken does have an online experience, something they’ve only recently created, but it’s not free and it’s playing catch up.

What is the best non-cloud-based Quicken alternatives?

Some of the best tools out there are cloud-based. Many on this list store your information online. If they are somehow compromised, they potentially could leak your data. They have a lot of security protocols in place to prevent this type of thing, but nothing is 100% safe. The ones that do not store your data in the cloud are less powerful, but … they don’t store your data in the cloud.

Moneydance Personal Finance, which is included in the list above, is one alternative that is a local program and stores your financial data locally. It still has the functionality of pulling data from hundreds of financial institutions so it will still save you time.

Tiller is a tool that integrates with a Google Sheet (which is cloud-based) and Microsoft Excel (which local). They do store some of your information since they have to get the credentials to pull your data but it’s not like other services that contain the credentials and the data.

Which Quicken alternatives work on Mac?

Any cloud-based alternative will work on the PC and a Mac. It’s cloud-based so they work in your browser, which makes them operating system agnostic.

If you want a piece of personal finance software designed specifically to run on Macs, Banktivity is your best option. It’s one of the few personal finance applications built specifically for the MacOS and it has the richest feature-set. Most importantly, especially if you use an iPhone or iPad, it seamlessly integrates among the three.

What is a good accounting software alternative to Quickbooks?

I haven’t used Quickbooks and I’m not familiar with the world of accounting, but GnuCash is often cited as a powerful and free alternative to Quickbooks and Quicken.

It has a lot of features present in accounting software, like double-entry accounting and small business accounting, but many folks have success using it as a personal accounting software package. It’s a software program you download and install locally, which means it’s not cloud-based, and it’s completely free.

Will Quicken be discontinued?

It’s extremely unlikely that Quicken will be discontinued. They have retired older versions of the software and given users a path towards upgrading to their subscription product (which carries no year in its name), but it’s now owned by private equity firms and they’re unlikely to shut down Quicken given how much they’ve invested in buying it.