If you’ve decided to be a better steward of your finances in 2021, then a logical place to start is with a good budgeting app that meets your own unique circumstance and requirements.
Finance apps, in general, exploded on the scene in a major way in 2019 and have been transforming the way we spend, invest, manage and budget our own money. The pace of user adoption is also growing rapidly. In 2020 personal finance apps saw a staggering growth rate of 90% in usage and downloads. If the past is any indicator of the future, then we expect 2021 to only continue that trend.
All that to be said, new personal finance apps are entering the market at a breakneck pace, so as a consumer you’ve got plenty of great options out there – and they’re only getting better!
In our report below we’ve outlined what we believe to be the best budgeting apps for various hypothetical circumstances.
At the very minimum you’ll want to make the budgeting app you choose has the basics covered. Generally speaking, these are:
- Ability to connect with your financial accounts. Ideally several at a time.
- Ability to track spending and automatically categorize your expenses to get a holistic view of where your money flows.
Depending on your individual circumstance, your budgeting app should be able to do a great deal more than that. Hopefully our breakdown of the best budgeting apps of 2021 (below) can supplement your research and help you make your decision.
Goodbudget – Best App for Overspenders
If you often have trouble keeping your spending in check, try a budgeting app like Goodbudget that makes it easy to avoid overspending.
Goodbudget uses the envelope budgeting system, also called zero-based budgeting. This approach to managing your money allows you to portion your paycheck into different categories—like mortgage payments, emergencies, and groceries—so that not a dime is unaccounted for. This means no surprises, which is often why many people end up overspending without meaning to.
Using Goodbudget, you can set aside money for each expected expense you have, with up to 10 free envelopes, and sync with your bank accounts to track balances as you go. With this app, you don’t have to deprive yourself of the things you want. Instead, you set reasonable limits for spending and can spend or save whatever is leftover (not in an envelope) as you please. You can even use Goodbudget to track your progress in debt repayments and set budget goals for big expenses like a wedding or home purchase.
A Goodbudget free plan gives you 20 envelopes, one account, two devices, and one year of history, while a Plus plan gives you unlimited envelopes, unlimited accounts, and up to seven years of history. A Plus plan costs $7 a month or $60 annually.
These app ratings are accurate as per the publish date of this article.
Personal Capital – Best For Investors
Individuals with clear investing goals should take advantage of budgeting apps that allow them to plan their investments, not just their expenses and savings. Personal Capital provides just that.
Personal Capital is not your average budgeting app. Personal Capital offers comprehensive investment services, including portfolio management, investment tracking, retirement saving, and a net worth analyzer. A little like a robo-advisor, Personal Capital analyzes your investments to give you a snapshot of what you’re spending in fees, how your investments are doing, and let you know what asset classes you have investments in. Link your cards and accounts to track your spending and budget for expenses, even see upcoming due dates.
This app is great for managing multiple accounts in one place and seeing your budget alongside your investment portfolio.
You can get started with this tool at no cost or upgrade for a more complete service. Personal Capital offers professional advising services for an additional fee and wealth management for a fee of 0.89% annually.
These app ratings are accurate as per the publish date of this article.
Honeydue – Best for Couples
When you want to work together with your partner to build and manage a budget, choose an app that lets you easily share information and keep multiple accounts. Honeydue is the best app out there for couples in 2021.
Honeydue supports couples in meeting their budgeting goals by making it easy to share spending information and coordinate goals and due dates. With this app, you get to choose how much your partner sees. If you prefer a bit of privacy, you can choose to display only the balance of your accounts and no transactions. If you and your partner want to be completely accountable to each other, you can opt to keep everything out in the open and put real-time transaction updates on display.
It’s easy to use Honeydue to avoid late fees as well. Set push notifications to remind yourself and your spouse of upcoming bills and see how much you’re paying in late fees. If you have a concern about a purchase your significant other made, you can comment on the transaction right in the Honeydue app (before it turns into a fight).
Honeydue is free to use because the app advertises credit cards and other financial products to users.
These app ratings are accurate as per the publish date of this article.
Albert – Best for High Net Worth and Building Wealth
There are numerous great apps out there for high net worth individuals looking to grow their wealth, but Albert is one of the best. More than just a budgeting app, Albert is a money management tool that can help you track your spending, build an investment portfolio, and meet savings goals.
Only a $1 minimum investment is required to start investing with Albert and trades are commission-free. You may choose to either let Genius, Albert’s automated investment manager, build your portfolio for you with guided investing at the risk tolerance of your choosing, or you may opt to manage your investments yourself. Whatever you choose, you will have access to both U.S. and global stocks and options across numerous categories.
Albert can help you with budgeting by tracking your spending for you from your linked accounts, alerting you to upcoming bills, and projecting upcoming deposits before they are made. It also automates savings for you with a tool called Smart Savings that identifies opportunities to cut costs based on patterns in your spending. These savings are instantly deposited into a digital wallet in the app and can be withdrawn at no cost. If you have the free version of Albert, you’ll get one Smart Savings deposit a week and an annual bonus of 0.10%. If you have a Genius subscription, you’ll get as many Smart Savings deposits as you want and an annual bonus of 0.25%.
An Albert Genius subscription starts at $4 a month, but you will receive more support if you pay more. With this service, you’ll be able to talk to human advisors about your investments and choose the automated investing option mentioned above. Albert Investments is an SEC-registered Investment Advisor. A basic Albert subscription is free.
These app ratings are accurate as per the publish date of this article.
PocketGuard – Best Free App
You don’t need to pay for a subscription to keep a tidy budget. For a free app with full budgeting capabilities, try PocketGuard.
Set your budget by allocating funds for bills and necessities first and then PocketGuard will let you know how much spendable money is leftover. Customize your budget by categorizing your spending into pockets and the app will generate a personalized budget for you. Tweak this as needed when you first start budgeting with PocketGuard, then let the app take over.
PocketGuard also looks for savings for you by scanning your bills and finding opportunities to lower them, even helping you negotiate lower rates as needed. The more accounts you link and bills you decide to track, the more money you will save. With PocketGuard, you can also turn on automated savings to be deposited into your wallet from your checking account as you get paid. Just set savings goals and, again, PocketGuard does the heavy lifting.
All services offered by PocketGuard are completely free when you use the basic version and app. There is a paid version called PocketGuard Plus, a subscription that will run you $34.99, but this upgrade is not necessary for most budgeting purposes.
These app ratings are accurate as per the publish date of this article.
EveryDollar – Best for Cash Flow
If you ever find yourself wondering where exactly your paycheck ends up each month in a mess of bills, a budget app that focuses on cash flow will likely be good for you. To see where your money comes from and where it’s going from your smartphone, get EveryDollar.
This is a zero-based budgeting app created by personal finance advisor Dave Ramsey. Use this app to make a plan for every dollar of your paycheck and easily track your cash flow when you earn, spend, save, and donate money. EveryDollar allows you to micro budget to the dollar and makes it easy to do. It also shows you a graph that breaks down your spending into categories so you can see where the majority of your money is going and identify possible places to cut your spending.
The premium version of EveryDollar—Ramsey+, formerly called EveryDollar Plus—costs $129.99 annually, but the basic version is entirely free. The only difference between the two in terms of budgeting is that the free version requires you to manually track your transactions and the paid version syncs with your accounts to track transactions automatically.
Ramsey+ also offers more comprehensive financial literacy resources including courses and coaching as well as debt repayment tracking, but you don’t need any of this for day-to-day budgeting.
These app ratings are accurate as per the publish date of this article.
Toshl Finance – Best for Business
Business owners have a lot on their plates when it comes to money management, and that’s why it’s important to get an app like Toshl Finance to make this difficult task a little more straightforward. This app allows users to create budgets easily and track spending using a “River Flow” graphic that shows how your money trickles down into various expense categories.
While Toshl is not specifically marketed as a business app, it lends itself nicely to business accounting. It is incredibly user-friendly and feature-packed. It’s easy to enter data into the Toshl app via file imports, manual entries, and account syncing. It’s also possible to input income streams in multiple different currencies and print monthly expense reports right from the app to keep a record of your spending.
When you budget for your business with Toshl, you can link several financial accounts to fully customize your budget projections. On top of this, Toshl lets you create categories and tags for your expenses to make it that much easier to see spending patterns. Your budget can operate on whatever timetable is most convenient for you, whether that’s day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, or something else entirely. Sync your expense cards and business credit cards with the app to track your business spending, which is projected in a clear graph that shows how much you’ve spent each month. Use the “left to spend” feature to see what you can afford to pay in operating expenses while still staying in the green.
A basic Toshl subscription, which allows you to set up to two budgets and sync with two sources of income, is free. A Toshl Pro subscription is only $39.99 a year and it allows you to set unlimited budgets, sync multiple income streams, set repeating transfers, and even upload receipts.
These app ratings are accurate as per the publish date of this article.
YNAB – Best for the Super-Organized (Type A Personality)
If you have a type-A personality, you probably keep a meticulous budget. For super-organized budgeting like this, download You Need a Budget or YNAB. You Need a Budget is another zero-based budgeting app, but with a unique approach to executing this type of money management.
What makes this app perfect for super-organized, type-A users is that it is very hands-on. It gives you total control over every aspect of your budget so you can play an active role in your finances. YNAB’s philosophy is that looking forward and making plans for your money will save you more in the long-run than spending money as you normally would and reflecting on what you’ve spent afterward. With that said, you won’t find any “set it and forget it” features in this app. You need to be prepared to keep checking in and updating your budget.
Budgeting with You Need a Budget means making a plan for every dollar you earn, even dollars you don’t have quite yet, and assigning everything—everything—a category. YNAB will remind you to make payments, give you choices for making those payments based on your linked accounts, and then prompt you to manually record those payments. Every time you go over budget in a spending category, You Need a Budget will immediately alert you to this and give you the option to adjust the budget as needed. Basically, while YNAB requires you to be heavily involved in your own budgeting, it provides many helpful prompts along the way so that you’re not figuring it all out alone.
An annual subscription for YNAB costs $84 per year. This cost includes not only budgeting software but also free workshops by personal finance experts, the ability to budget with your partner, and plenty of graphics and reports showing you how you’ve spent your money.
These app ratings are accurate as per the publish date of this article.
Wally – Best for Simplicity
On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes you just want to keep things simple and put minimal effort into budgeting. If low-maintenance budgeting is your thing, the Wally app is for you. This app is known for its simple and functional interface.
Like the other budgeting apps mentioned so far, Wally lets you easily categorize your expenses and spending and see how you’re doing staying on track from the home screen. But where this app really shines is that it requires almost no intervention on your part. You do need to input transactions manually (unless you have the paid version), but you can scan receipts to do this if that’s easier. Wally also tracks your location as you use your card to automatically generate purchase details and create tracking shortcuts for the places you frequent.
Wally also offers the option of budgeting with a group of people. You can even upload important documents like lease agreements and bills with the people in your group for the sake of accountability and (relatively) painless shared financial responsibility.
The free version of Wally uses a stripped-down budgeting platform with few bells and whistles. The paid version of Wally, Wally Gold, costs $35.99 a year or a one-time payment of $47.99 for a lifetime subscription. This version includes the option of linking joint accounts and setting payment reminders, among other possibly useful features.
| Where to Download | Rating (out of 5) |
| IOS | 4.0 |
| Android | NA |
These app ratings are accurate as per the publish date of this article.
Mint by Intuit – Best for Monitoring & Building Credit
When credit is your number one concern, keep an eye on it with a budgeting app that can help you manage and build credit. Mint by Intuit accomplishes this by giving users easy access to their credit score.
The Mint app is critically acclaimed for a number of reasons, but it made it on this particular list because it features credit monitoring services. Through the Mint app, you can see your credit score at any time for free (and, of course, without hurting your credit) and Mint will keep an eye on your full credit report too and let you know if anything changes. You do not need to pay for or opt into this service—it’s available to all users.
In addition to helping you monitor and build your credit, Mint lets you track your spending, customize your budget, and set financial goals like any other great budgeting app. This app also offers investment portfolio tracking, notifies you of upcoming payments by predicting what will be due based on your spending habits, and lets you set unlimited financial goals without a pricey subscription.
Mint is completely free. There isn’t even a paid version to mention, as Mint generates revenue by advertising financial products with other institutions. What’s more, the Mint site features a Home Affordability Calculator that can give you an idea of what kind of house you can afford and a Loan Repayment Calculator to show you how long it’ll take you to pay off your loans.
These app ratings are accurate as per the publish date of this article.
What to Look for in a Budgeting App
Above all, a budgeting app should make your life easier, not harder. You shouldn’t need to spend several hours learning how to use an app that you’re trusting to help you with money management, because you’re more prone to making mistakes when you don’t understand.
An app should also do most of the hard work for you. If you have to track every transaction yourself, input every deposit and withdrawal, or calculate your spending by category, then you’re better off looking for a different app (unless hands-on budgeting is the purpose of the app, as is the case for YNAB).
Look too for features. The best apps offer flexibility and additional services on top of budgeting capabilities. Will you have access to a support team or advisor? Are there any financial literacy resources available? Can you share your budget with someone else, access any graphic representations of your spending, or import and export files from the app? Will the app nudge you to make payments on time or look for ways you can save money on recurring expenses?
Security-wise, any budgeting app you use should have exceptional security measures in place to protect your information, especially if you’re looking to link your accounts or let the app move any money for you (as in an automated savings program). Nothing less than federal bank-level security will do. Look into encryption information and data protection policies for any budgeting app you consider.
There are enough great options out there that you can afford to be picky.
When Should you Pay for a Budgeting App vs Use a Free Option
The answer to this question really depends on two things: what exactly you’re using a budgeting app for and what the premium version costs. If you’re just using a budgeting app to get an idea of how much you’re spending on various expenses and its paid version offers features you know you’d never use, keeping the free version is a no-brainer.
Likewise, if your goal with budgeting is to save money or reduce your spending because you have a lot of debt, it probably doesn’t make sense to shell out over $100 for a budgeting app annual subscription unless there is a guarantee you will easily make that money back in savings in less than a year.
Take the examples in this list. If you own a business, you could stand to save a ton of money doing a lot of the budgeting work for yourself over paying an accountant to do that for you. At only $39.99 a year, a Toshl Finance subscription that offers robust budgeting tools is probably justified. But if you’re just using a budgeting app to save money, you probably don’t need to pay $129.99 a year for Ramsey+ when you could just use the EveryDollar app for free and access unpaid financial literacy resources elsewhere.
When in doubt, try the free version of an app first and see if it meets most of your needs. If it doesn’t, try a different one instead or addition to it. Also, most premium subscriptions include a free trial for anywhere from two weeks to 30 days. Take advantage of opportunities to try these out before buying and look into refund policies just in case.
