Best Mint Alternatives For 2023 (Budgeting Apps To Try)

Mint was one of the earliest free budgeting apps available online, and it recently announced it would be shutting down. As a result, millions of people are looking for Mint alternatives. 

Mint isn’t going away altogether, but rather migrating their users into Credit Karma – another platform, but with far fewer budgeting tools. Instead, Credit Karma focuses on credit building – not necessarily what most Mint users are looking for. 

We’ve reviewed all the most popular budgeting apps available, and here are our picks for the best Mint.com alternatives.

Features Of Mint 

Mint was one of the first budgeting apps I ever used. It was free, it linked to all of your accounts and downloaded the transactions, and helped you categorize and track your spending.

Here’s a fun screenshot from way back when I first started using Mint (check that date out). 

If you’re looking for a Mint replacement, chances are you’re looking for the following options:

It’s important to remember that FREE is going to be hard to come by. If you’re using a free service, chances are YOU are the product. In Mint’s case, Mint would advertise to you based on your data. For example, encourage you to signup for a credit card. 

Many services today focus on privacy – and as a result, they will charge you a monthly subscription. What does your subscription go towards? Well, connecting to banks and brokerages costs these companies money (usually about $0.10 to $0.50 per account per month). Plus, these companies have to pay developers, customer service, and more. Having a free product is hard to do all of this with advertising dollars alone. 

Mint Alternatives

With those key features in mind, here are our picks for the best Mint alternatives today. We’ve reviewed all these products and services (and all of our team uses at least one of these regularly). 

1. Empower

Empower (formerly known as Personal Capital) is a great financial dashboard that connects all of your accounts, and allows you to track your spending. 

Budgeting isn’t as strong as some others on this list, but the tool is FREE. The drawback of being free is that they will try to upsell you into their investment management (which they do charge an annual fee for – a percentage of assets under management). 

If you are wanting to view your investments and understand how well they are performing, this is where Empower shines. You can sign up for free and sync your investment accounts. Or sync all accounts if you want to see your net worth.

Read our full Empower (Personal Capital) review.

2. YNAB

YNAB stands for You Need A Budget. Budgeting is it all YNAB does. It’s also very good at it. YNAB makes you give every dollar a job. This means you assign each dollar of income to a category, virtually cutting out any chance that you’ll spend money spontaneously.

Categories are setup to group expenses. If you happen to go over in one category, you can take from another category to cover the difference.

Eventually, the goal with YNAB is that you are living off of the previous month’s income. The way you get there is through consistent use of YNAB and making sure you follow its rules, which is difficult not to do.

YNAB can be installed as a desktop app on Windows or Mac, mobile app on Android or iPhone or simply run it from the web. It offers a 34-day trial and thereafter will cost $98.99/yr. YNAB is able to justify this cost through the amount you’ll save by using the software. 

Read our full YNAB review.

3. Monarch Money

Monarch has been building an amazing budgeting and net worth tracking app that combines all the features we love – transaction categorization, net worth tracking, and investment monitoring. In fact, the founder was one of the original team members at Mint. 

And unlike some of the other apps that connect and update your accounts automatically, Monarch actually works! We rarely see connectivity issues or problems. 

It’s a paid app though, and you’re going to be paying $9.99 per month or $89.99 annually.

Read our full Monarch review here.

4. Copilot

Copilot is one of the newer apps on our list, but they have been developing a great budgeting and financial tracking app. It offers great connectivity, great visualizations, and is one of the few apps that also supports cryptocurrency. It also looks amazing.

The one drawback right now is that this app is only available for Mac and iPhone (which, honestly, is pretty rare as most apps favor PC).

Copilot is a paid app. You get 60 days free with promo code TCI2023, then it costs $8.99 per month or $69.99 per year.

Read our full Copilot Money review here.

5. Quicken Simplifi

Simplifi is app-based, focused on budgeting and spending tracking, and has a nice user interface. The best features of Simplifi include its spending tracking and watch list for certain spending categories. 

If you’re looking for an app focused on expense tracking, Simplifi is a great option.

Simplifi is from Quicken, which is a leader in personal finance software. It’s important to note that Quicken used to be part of Intuit, but they were spun off and became their own company in 2016. So if you’re worried about this company facing the same issues as Mint, they’re not part of the same firm.

Read our full Simplifi review here. 

6. EveryDollar

EveryDollar is the budgeting app created by Dave Ramsey’s company. Similar to YNAB, EveryDollar follows the zero-sum budgeting concept, which is the same as “give every dollar a job”.

EveryDollar has free and paid versions. The paid version has a 15-day trial and cost $99/yr. Without the paid version, you can’t sync your accounts, which means you’ll have to manually enter in every transaction. The paid version pulls them in automatically.

And even though Dave Ramsey is very against credit cards, you can link your credit card accounts in this app.

Read out full EveryDollar review here.

7. Tiller

Tiller Money is the Mint alternative if you’re a spreadsheet junkie. Tiller takes personal finance, budgeting, and investment tracking, and helps you put it into a spreadsheet, and keep it updated.

Tiller allows for full customization within Excel or Google Sheets, but also has a variety of starter-spreadsheets that you can use to get started right away.

What’s amazing is that Tiller has figured out how to make your spreadsheets dynamically update, and they connect to your bank and brokerage and import the latest data. That’s amazing. 

Read our full Tiller Money review.

8. Qube Money

Qube Money isn’t just a bank account. And it’s not just a budgeting app. It’s both, rolled into one. Users can deposit money into an FDIC-insured Qube Account. Then, you can design a plan to allocate funds among different digital envelopes or “Qubes.” You can use some of the pre-generated categories or you can make your own.

This system is based on the zero-based budgeting system familiar with apps like YNAB and EveryDollar. However, they take things one step farther by allowing you to link your debit card to the appropriate “Qube” or envelope. As a result, you have a whole system setup around your budgeting and spending.

Read our full Qube Money review.

9. CountAbout

CountAbout is a web and app-based basic budgeting app. It simply connects with your bank accounts, syncs your information, and then helps you track and manage your spending habits.

CountAbout will analyze your spending and display it in an easy-to-understand graph. CountAbout lets you “memorize” transactions, which is another way of analyzing spending habits.

Like most people using budget software, if you are currently using Quicken or Mint.com, you can import transactions from both apps, allowing you to start from the same place in CountAbout. 

CountAbout offers two plans: Basic for $9.99/year and Premium for $39.99/year. The Premium plan lets you automatically download and import transactions from your financial institutions. You can also import from Quicken and Mint.

Read our full CountAbout review here.

10. Fidelity Full View

Fidelity (yes, the major brokerage company) has a hidden tool many don’t know about – Full View. This is a free solution for Fidelity customers who want to track their spending.

With Full View, you can connect your non-Fidelity accounts (like banks, credit cards), and then see a full picture of your net worth and transactions. Fidelity also allows basic categorization of your spending so that you can see what you’ve spent. 

Where it shines is that it integrates with all of Fidelity’s full financial planning features.

Read our full Fidelity review.

How Do You Pick The Right Budgeting App?

How do you pick the right budgeting app as an alternative to Mint? It really depends on your style and what you’re looking for.

We break down most apps into three key areas:

1. Budgeting
2. Net Worth Tracking
3. Cash Flow Planning

Depending on what you need, you might favor an app that’s strong in one or the other. Also, your personality plays a huge role. Do you want a strict app that follows a zero-based budgeting philosophy? Or do you want an app that’s spreadsheet based? Or are you more focused on investments and long-term planning? 

All of these things play a role in picking the right budgeting app.

Final Thoughts

As you find the right Mint Alternative, don’t forget to export your Mint Data. Many of these apps allow you to import your old transactions, so that makes switching easy! Check out this guide to exporting your Mint data.

Also, as you try these apps, make sure you’re checking the Plaid Dashboard and removing access to any old apps or accounts you no longer use. This makes it easy to keep your information somewhat safe from marketing and other uses.