The Best Budgeting Apps to Help You Manage Your Money

Rocket Money is great for anyone who wants a simple budgeting experience. It has all the features you need to do basic budgeting, plus some advanced ones to help you manage your overall financial situation.

Rocket’s app and desktop platform are intuitive and easy to navigate and it offers a lot of notifications and reports to help you stay on top of your budget, including bill increase alerts and monthly spending reports. You can also set up automated transfers to your savings account to make saving a breeze.

The free version is pretty barebones but you can get the premium version by paying anywhere from $6 to $12 monthly — your choice. You get the same features regardless of how much you pay. Rocket also offers bill negotiation, which costs 30% to 60% of your first year’s savings (you choose the amount), and subscription cancellation. 

As a former Mint user, I tested several popular budgeting apps and found the paid version of Rocket Money to be the best replacement for Mint’s in terms of features, user experience and accessibility to the average budgeter.

You Need A Budget is meant for people who like to sweat the details. Its zero-based budgeting strategy encourages you to give every dollar a job, assigning all income to categories you set — such as specific bill payments and savings goals — to avoid overspending. For example, if you want to save for a future vacation, you’ll need to set that as a goal and assign money to it every month.

At $15 a month or $109 a year, YNAB is pricey. There may also be a learning curve as the app offers more complexity in terms of organizing and analyzing your budget. The 34-day trial should help you decide if the monthly fee is worth another line item in your budget.

PocketGuard is another option that allows you to track your spending based on categories. It’s designed to help you control your spending and focus on savings goals. Linking the app to your accounts automates the tracking process. The app tracks subscription services and flags potential money wasters to help you save.

It has useful features that suggest lower-cost services based on your profile settings, maximizing the money in your pocket. It also offers bill negotiation through Billshark, which costs 40% of the amount it saves you for two years if it’s successful.

The free version offers basic features, including budgeting tools, spending reports and expense tracking. For $13 monthly or $75 yearly, you can create multiple budgets and custom budget categories, unlimited savings goals and a debt payoff plan.

Popular personal finance speaker and author Dave Ramsey launched the EveryDollar app to help fans of his money philosophy follow his “Baby Steps” out of debt and toward financial freedom. Using the zero-based budgeting approach, you categorize your expenses before the month begins, assigning all of your take-home dollars until there’s nothing remaining.

EveryDollar’s free version allows you to create and customize your budget, manually track expenses and sync data across multiple devices. The Premium plan allows the app to connect to bank accounts and dynamically track spending, plus gives you access to group coaching calls with financial experts. It also offers a financial roadmap to track your net worth, progress toward retirement goals and Baby Steps milestones.

However, you’ll still need to manually categorize your transactions; the app won’t do it for you. That’s because it aims to make you “feel that money leaving [y]our account.” And at $18 per month or $80 per year, it’s one of the priciest apps on our list.

Note: A recent upgrade has prompted some users to complain about the app’s responsiveness. The Ramsey Solution organization has been working on bug fixes but users continue to experience problems. 

Building a budget for the first time can feel overwhelming. Goodbudget breaks it down using the envelope method of budgeting, a decades-old financial strategy that splits your income into separate envelopes or categories. For example, you might have envelopes for rent, bills, groceries, gas, nonessential purchases and savings.

Goodbudget lets you employ this method digitally. You choose envelopes from a list of predesignated goals and deposit money into them every month. With the free version, you can choose from 10 preset envelopes — you can’t design your own. The Plus version allows you to create an unlimited number of envelopes for $10 per month, as well as enjoy expanded features such as unlimited accounts and a longer transaction history. There’s no free trial but you can get a full refund if you cancel within 30 days.

If you’re looking for help sticking to a spending plan, Goodbudget’s easy user interface, preselected goals and visually pleasing envelope method can help you create good budgeting habits. The biggest downside is that it doesn’t link to external accounts — you must manually input each transaction. This can help you get a better idea of just how much you’re spending each day but some users will find it tedious.

Quicken Simplifi is the other budgeting app on our list that doesn’t offer a free version — and unlike YNAB, it doesn’t offer a free trial to test it out. Quicken is known for personal finance software and has distilled its decades of experience in the personal finance arena down to a handy budgeting app. Simplifi targets users who have complex financial lives with tools that create custom plans based on income and expenses.

Like most budgeting apps, Quicken allows you to create and monitor your budget, track spending and link multiple accounts across one main dashboard. The app offers a helpful snapshot of your bank accounts, top spending categories, spending watchlists and historical patterns. The projected balances tool uses recurring transactions to estimate your balance over the coming 30 days.

Some users may find Simplifi’s wealth of information and customizable reports overwhelming; there is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to navigating it all. But if you want to dive into multiple aspects of your financial life from your investments to your net worth, it offers a lot of ways to do so in one platform.