The Best Personal Finance Software for 2024

Is Connecting an App to Your Bank Accounts Safe?

Many personal finance apps support online connections to your financial institutions. Such apps download lists of transactions and other account data from your bank accounts, credit card accounts, brokerages, and other financial institutions so that you can see all the activity neatly in one place. To connect, you typically enter your login credentials for those financial sites, though you usually have to provide additional security information—which is, of course, a good thing.

The personal finance apps we reviewed all employ robust security protocols. Those that connect to your financial accounts use encryption and other safety measures to protect your login information. Many use third parties, such as Plaid, to make secure connections. However, you must also do your part to make the experience safe.

Three key things you can do are:

• Use a unique username and password for your financial logins and the personal finance app. A password manager is the tool you’ll want to use here.
• Enable multi-factor authentication wherever it’s supported, especially for logging into the personal finance app and any connected bank accounts. Yes, it takes some extra time, but not nearly as much time as reconstructing your financial life if you’re the victim of identity theft.
• Keep all your details, such as your date and city of birth, private because they can be used as authenticators to access financial data and accounts.

Brushing up on the best practices for preventing identity theft is always a good idea.

What Is the Best Free Personal Finance App?

Most personal finance apps are free or have a free tier of service. They typically make money by showing you targeted ads for financial products like credit cards or savings accounts.

NerdWallet is our favorite totally free app. It combines bank account imports and transaction management with excellent information about your credit score. It also has a huge amount of editorial content (including tutorials) on personal finance topics. NerdWallet is partly supported by ads, but they don’t get in the way. The app also tracks your net worth and cash flow as long as you connect to all your online financial accounts. It does show you your credit score and explain how it came to be, although Credit Karma (also totally free) does a better job here.

What Can You Do With a Personal Finance App?

Personal finance apps do a lot more than help you budget your money. Here are some of the other things they help you do.

1. Watch Transactions Across All Your Accounts

Connecting a personal finance app to all your bank accounts and credit cards allows you to watch all the transactions that happen to your money in one place. So, instead of logging in to each of your banking apps once a day to see what charges posted and what transactions cleared, you can do that from a single view in a single app. Additionally, this single view may help you spot an unauthorized transaction quickly, and the sooner you can find and alert your bank about that, the quicker the bank can cut off access to the account.

2. Categorize Your Spending

After importing a batch of transactions from credit cards and bank accounts into a personal finance app, most people spend some time cleaning up the data. Transactions need to be correctly categorized for their type of income (salary, freelance payment, and interest, for example) or expenses (food, mortgage, utilities, and so on). Most apps guess the categories, but you can always change them and split transactions among different categories. So, if you go to one store and buy dog food and a new lamp, you can categorize the correct amounts as pet care and home furnishings.

If you’re conscientious about categorizing your income and spending, the apps will make charts and reports that accurately summarize where your money comes from and where it goes. This information is crucial for budgeting and when tax preparation time rolls around.

Depending on the personal finance app, you might be able to add tags to transactions, too. That way, you can search for transactions that are related in other ways. For example, you might make a tag called tax-deductible, which gives you an easy way to pull up all your tax-deductible expenses at the end of the year. Rocket Money includes an option for this designation in its transaction details.

3. Get an Overview of Your Financial Situation

The best personal finance apps show you a dashboard when you log in. Sometimes, the dashboard is the only page you need to see because it has the most pertinent information about your financial situation, such as your account balances and pending bills. The charts and graphs on the dashboard give you an overview of your financial situation. They might tell you, for example, your income versus spending and how you’re doing with your budget. Or you might see your net worth and credit score. Or your dashboard might show your customized financial goals and your progress at meeting them. In short, the dashboard of your personal finance app gives you a quick look at your money situation and is a springboard to deeper financial study.

(Credit: Quicken)

4. Learn How to Budget

Being conscientious about your finances includes minimizing your expenses so that they are lower than your income. That’s the goal, anyway, and personal finance apps help you achieve it through budgeting.

The mechanics of creating a workable budget are much easier than the process of specifying your limits. It’s often guesswork until you’ve had a budget for several months and start seeing how your money comes and goes. For that reason, Quicken Deluxe and some other personal finance apps let you use past income and expenses as models. That way, you can answer the question, “How much do I usually spend each month?” and get an answer that relies on past data.

5. Set Your Financial Goals

Setting goals, such as establishing an emergency fund, isn’t rocket science. With a personal finance app, you specify the amount you’re trying to save and the target date for achieving it, and the application tells you how much you have to save every month to meet your goals. Some sites do more. NerdWallet, for example, lets you link your goals to the appropriate spending account, so your progress is automatically tracked.

6. Plan for Retirement (Quicken Deluxe only)

Most personal finance apps do not focus on retirement planning, much less lifetime financial planning—but Quicken Deluxe has tools to help you pay off your debts faster, plan for taxes, and establish a comprehensive lifetime financial plan. 

7. Keep an Eye on Your Bills

Most personal finance apps let you record bills and bill payments, but you usually can’t pay the bills through the app itself—unless you use Quicken Deluxe and pay an additional fee. Still, with most personal finance apps, you can at least factor in the cost of your bills when analyzing your personal finance picture.

With Quicken Deluxe, you can set up automatic connections to online billers (Xcel Energy or Verizon, for example) or enter offline bills from suppliers who don’t bill you electronically, such as a dog walker or babysitter. Quicken alerts you when they’re due to be paid and lets you record payments manually.

8. Manage Your Money on the Go

You probably don’t need advanced money management tools when you’re away from your desktop or laptop. But when you’re out spending money, you do need to know how much you have available. All the personal finance services reviewed here are available as mobile apps. Most offer somewhat reduced functionality, but you can at least check your account balances, view transactions, add transactions, and see graphs related to your spending and income. You may also be able to get your credit score and check the status of pending bills.

9. Educate Yourself About Personal Finance

One of the biggest benefits of using personal finance apps is that they help you learn more about your money and personal finance in general. NerdWallet, for example, has excellent articles and resources about everything from bankruptcy to investing. Apps that focus on credit scores and credit reports detail how and why different factors, such as how often you pay your credit cards on time, affect your credit score. WalletHub and NerdWallet have excellent debt payoff calculators that help you decide the best way to pay down debt while teaching you one way might be better than another, given the specifics of your situation.

Can Personal Finance Apps Boost Your Credit Score?

An excellent credit score is gold. Beyond helping you get approved for a credit card, mortgage, car loan, and so on, it helps minimize the interest rate you pay. It’s important to know your credit score at any given time, how it gets calculated, and what you can do to improve it.

Credit Karma, Credit Sesame, NerdWallet, and WalletHub—all free—do this. Credit Karma is especially comprehensive and efficient in this regard. It pulls your credit score daily from two of the three major bureaus and gives you access to your credit reports. It also explains how different factors contribute to your credit score and what you can do to try and boost it.

One of the ways you can improve your credit score is to use financial products—credit cards, mortgages—that have attractive interest rates and other benefits, making it easier for you to pay off debt as quickly as possible. Credit Karma, Credit Sesame, NerdWallet, and WalletHub help pay for the services they provide by displaying occasional ads for products that might appeal to you based on your credit profile. You can also browse marketplaces for additional candidates. 

Be warned, however, that frequently canceling credit cards and acquiring new ones affects your credit score. Still, it’s good to learn about these suggested products so that you know the best options when the time comes.

Do Personal Finance Apps Know Your Net Worth?

Do personal finance apps know your net worth? Well, it depends on how much you tell them. You may only want a personal finance service for day-to-day income and expense management, budgeting, and goal setting. In that case, you don’t need to tell the app about other assets and funds you have, whether it’s a trust fund or a property. If there’s an account you don’t want to be reflected in your app, just leave it out.

Quicken Deluxe and a few other apps let you input your assets, including properties, vehicles, and investment holdings, which contribute to your net worth. If you keep your financial data and assets updated and connect the app to all your financial accounts (including accounts in debt), you get a running tally that reflects your total net worth.

Pick the Best Personal Finance App for You

Which personal finance app is best? It depends on what you need at the moment. If you don’t want to pay anything for a personal finance app and you want the most information about not only your money but also personal finance education, NerdWallet is best. If you want an excruciatingly detailed picture of your money and financial health, plus some of the best tools for managing investments, Quicken Deluxe is best. If you want to understand and improve your credit score, you’ll probably want to use Credit Karma or NerdWallet. And if you want the best overall user experience that features the financial basics and some innovative tracking tools, try Editors’ Choice Simplifi by Quicken.