In past Ask HN threads I've seen recommendations for Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app/) and You Need A Budget (https://www.ynab.com/). I can't personally speak to them as I use GnuCash, but I don't recommend it for you because it does not do automatic sync as you requested.
I've been really enjoying Monarch money. It's not free, but they offer an introductory discount for Mint users.
I'm not a power user. I used Mint mostly for a window into the current state of my accounts, and to check recent transactions. I find the Monarch UI to be snappier and less laggy than Mint, which makes sense given it seems like Mint was not a very well-funded project at Intuit.
I've toyed around a bit with Monarch's transaction tagging and grouping features and they seem to do what I expect. I've also played with their budgeting feature which is helpful as a way for me to try to keep tabs on my spending per-category month-to-month.
Personally I do prefer the idea of paying for a service like this, but that's because I know it will probably decay if it's not supported monetarily by users. I also prefer my data _not_ be sold to third parties (which Monarch promises.. for now). Unfortunately I suspect the end goal for Monarch is to get acquired by one of the FinTech giants which probably sadly means it sees a similar fate to Mint down the road.
> A while back there was a tread in here where someone had an inexpensive one-time license mac software, but I cannot find it.
I think you are looking for https://www.banktivity.com/
It feels a lot like Quicken which isn't a paradigm that works well for my brain and I moved to https://lunchmoney.app + a small app that consumes the API, does some transformations and exposes to Google Sheets' =IMPORTDATA formula.
This gives me: * full featured transaction syncing that I don't need to worry about * a nice UI for bulk editing, tagging, etc. * a programatic way to perform transformations and add features Lunch Money doesn't have: I like to use categories and tags in concerts to give me per trip breakdowns of expenses by category of my travel * the flexibility of a spreadsheet for reporting and quick iteration.
A very new player that I haven't tried fully yet is https://finwiseapp.io/
Tiller is $79 a year - https://my.tillerhq.com/ - but puts all the data straight into a Google Sheet and lets you do what you want with it. I love the flexibility.
If you like spreadsheets, BudgetSheet might be an option for you: https://www.budgetsheet.com
You can try it for free, and if you want to upgrade you can pay monthly or annually.
Disclaimer: I am the creator of BudgetSheet :)
I tried out YNAB, Rocket Money, and Quicken Simplifi.
YNAB was a bit too opinionated and "hands on" for my tastes. Rocket Money seemed to be geared toward the "we'll cancel subscriptions for you" use case and was otherwise not configurable enough.
Quicken Simplifi seems much closer as a spiritual successor to Mint. It's mostly hands-off, though you can set up configurable rules and budgets. And it worked with all of my accounts.
The subreddit r/mintuit[0] has tons of posts and detail on all these alternatives and people's experiences with them with reviews and everything else you could want to know.
YNAB isn't too expensive though I don't like that they went to an annual subscription. It does sync with most accounts (I don't use that feature but it seems to work well for others, pretty sure the same syncing backend as Mint and others use).
GnuCash can sync with some banks but I only had luck with one of mine, and never tried with other account types like investment and retirement accounts. If you're willing to do a bit of work, your banks will provide CSV or other export options and you can download that and import it into GnuCash. Doing that, I had to tidy things up a bit but it wasn't awful if I did this somewhat regularly so the number of transactions to examine wasn't high (like once every week or two, versus once every few months).
I was just trying to integrate with my banks this past weekend because of this, with no luck. I was pointed at OFX (Open Financial Exchange) as an integration method, but it seems banks have since moved on from that to FDX (Financial Data Exchange). But FDX seems to be under maintenance and individuals can't register? Is this the right method to integrate with your personal accounts to get transaction information or do you need to use a service like plaid?
If you just want to review your spending categories across all your accounts and don't need all the fancy planning features with more involved programs, I have been liking Fidelity Fullview. It's free and lets me keep tabs on things which is all I really used mint for as well.
Fullview also is one of the few services not married to Plaid, if that's a factor for you.
LunchMoney is now the sole closed source application that I (1) love, (2) use daily, (3) blows away OSS alternatives. Jen is brilliant, the product is great. It just gets steadily better over the last 4 years, while remaining the same core product, visual identity. It's web, not-mobile, first, and I love that, too.
I haven’t found anything better than Tiller.
I tried moneydance for the cross platform/offline operation but it’s kinda clunky.
An option I don't see mentioned usually is Every Dollar. It's from Dave Ramsey's company, so it carries all of the opinions of his "Financial Peace" system but it may be a good fit for some.
I personally enjoy Monarch. Nice looking UI, full financial picture like Personal Capital but they use multiple data aggregators to sync your data and most institutions you sync they allow you to choose which aggregator you want to use.
Link to site: https://www.monarchmoney.com/
If you are feeling charitable, my referral link: https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/d8nz9odkbx
Just started using Copilot, I like the UI and their Mac and iOS apps are well done: https://copilot.money/
I used to like auto-synching with accounts, but I found this encouraged a pattern where I would only look at my budget periodically, long after the information would have been useful (e.g. in the moment of asking whether I should make a purchase).
Instead, I've switched to software that requires me to manually input each transaction (firefly-iii with lychnos, a custom front-end I wrote). This keeps me aware of the budgets since I get in the habit of looking at them each time I make a purchase and record it.
I've switched to a paid annual plan with Monarch Money. The app is sleek and it works fine, but I'm open to switching over to something open-sourced and/or free.
"where someone had an inexpensive one-time license mac software,"
I know there's another one I'm thinking of but https://moneymoney-app.com/ comes to mind.
I've also tried working on one based on beancount (plan text accounting) and fava: https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage
I use SoFi Relay Insights[1] to help make a balance sheet of all my accounts once a month.
I made a web app to scrape my SoFi Relay data so I can paste it into a spreadsheet: https://github.com/Leftium/transform
I've been using Kubera for the past few years. It's a web app and works great with many types of synced accounts. I also wrote some thoughts about it:
Quicken's Simplifi is pretty close. I tried Monarch as well. Simplifi seemed a bit more polished. To me, YNAB was a different type of tool than what I wanted. I didn't want everything assigned to a budget and such. I just want something to collate all my transactions, do some basic tagging and classification. That's it.
I moved everything to Gnucash about 8 months ago and didn't look back. Online and automatic was convenient, but local is working fine for me. I thought I would miss the automation more, but in practice it doesn't take much time to import transactions downloaded from providers, or just enter them manually.
If automation is a critical feature it may not meet your needs.
Not free, but I use old-school desktop Quicken and have never really had any trouble with it. The huge down side is they've gone to subscription pricing which is horrible. I have not migrated away only because I haven't found an acceptable alternative.
So my recommendation is a product that I hate. That's the current state of this category of software.
Actual Budget is fantastic and now open source. The bank integrations are only for European banks though I think.
https://www.budgetrewards.com/
Free for a couple months, run by a husband/wife duo as a small business, lots of budgeting in addition to the basic account dashboard and transaction syncing you expect.
I'll throw out that another option is to categorize at the time of purchase with an envelope budgeting app like Qube money. Using Qube has been life changing for our family.
Fidelity Full View. Pro: Free, High grain management especially on investment asset Con: Detail is not fully polished. Auto-categorization has lots of flaws.
Thanks for asking this question- I'm in the same boat. I keep meaning to see if Yodlee is still a viable option (they used to be what Mint was based on).
I've been using Simplifi by Quicken and it's been very nice. It's around $50/year, I can track all of my transactions and bank accounts.
I tried lunchmoney and I really wanted to like it but just couldn't make it work for me.
I ended up using YNAB.
Fidelity Full View. It's free.
I'm quite happy with Monarch.
Fidelity Full View. Hands down.
I tried both Mint and YNAB but they both had syncing issues that infuriated me. My friend recommended Copilot[0] and it's been a joy to use. It's designed so well that it somehow got me to take the time to label my transactions & set my budget, where with Mint/YNAB I would just add my accounts & not do anything else because of the laggy interfaces.
Personal capital, now empower. I don't think there's a better one that's free as well.
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YNAB has turned my financial life around. I wish I had started using it 10 years ago. They also have built an importer from Mint. Some highlights I love:
* One window to every account I have, which mostly automatically updates/syncs
* Envelope budgeting has forced me to look at every penny and figure out what it's for
* API to work with other tools (for me, Splitwise - https://github.com/vascopinho/split2ynab/)
And here's my referral code for a free month: https://ynab.com/referral/?ref=ASH303nViLPCKyr-