Best Budgeting Apps for November 2023

You Need A Budget is meant for people who like to sweat the details. Its 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. 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, YNAB is pricey. There may also be a bit of 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.

Intuit Mint is another well-known and highly rated budgeting app, and for good reason. It not only enables you to set your own savings goals by linking multiple banking and credit accounts, but it also offers free access to check your credit score and lets you manage your bill payments from one spot. Launched back in 2006, Mint is one of the original free budgeting apps, and it has a long track record of stability and security.

Linking the Mint app to your bank and credit card accounts is the best way to get started tracking your income and expenses, and Mint’s intuitive interface makes it easy to do so. Once your accounts are set up, Mint will create an overview of your finances and help you create and maintain a personal budget with simple tools for logging and categorizing your spending.

Unfortunately, Intuit recently announced that Mint will cease operations at the end of 2023. Intuit is encouraging Mint users to transfer their account data to Credit Karma, which offers similar financial management tools but lacks Mint’s budgeting features.

Learn how to download and/or delete your data from Mint before the service expires.

Building a budget for the first time can feel overwhelming. Goodbudget utilizes the “envelope” method of budgeting, a decades-old financial strategy that encourages you to split your income into separate envelopes or categories. You might have envelopes for rent, bills, groceries, gas, nonessential purchases and savings. If you like the visualization of keeping your money in separate envelopes or compartments, 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 will allow you to create an unlimited number of envelopes for $8 per month.

If you’re looking for a great strategy to stick to a spending plan, Goodbudget’s easy user interface, preselected goals and visually pleasing envelope method can help you create good budgeting habits.

Fudget is a simple budget planner with a catchy name. The bare-bones interface is a basic spreadsheet, so the learning curve shouldn’t be steep. The app lets you create a list of income and expenses for future goals and updates them as needed. There aren’t any graphs to analyze your spending, but if you’re looking for a tool to provide a no-frills overview of your monthly spending, Fudget might be your pick. Fudget neither syncs with external accounts nor allows imports, so all entries will be manual. 

There’s a one-time fee to upgrade, but you can use the basic version with ads displayed throughout.

PocketGuard is another option that allows you to keep track of 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 also offers useful features that suggest lower-cost services based on your profile settings, thereby maximizing the money in your pocket that it’s keeping track of.

The free version offers a variety of features, including budgeting tools, spending reports and expense tracking. For just under $8 per month, or a one-time fee of $80, you can create multiple budgets, unlimited savings goals and a debt pay-off plan.

Empower is one of the only budgeting apps on the market with extensive investment forecasting capabilities. This app is perfect for long-term investors looking to track their investments, net worth and personal portfolios while setting and tracking long-term savings goals, like retirement. Empower’s charts make it easy to track your everyday expenses and cash flow month-to-month, while working toward long-term goals. It also offers recommendations for improving your portfolio, specifically with its Smart Watch feature that points out the best options to take advantage of your employer’s retirement plans.

Popular personal finance speaker and author Dave Ramsey launched the EveryDollar app to help fans of his money philosophy follow the “baby steps” out of debt and toward financial freedom. Using an approach called zero-based budgeting, you categorize your expenses before the month begins, assigning all of your take-home dollars until there’s zero remaining. A recent upgrade has prompted some users to leave complaints about responsiveness, a complaint that the Ramsey Solution organization acknowledges is a problem. 

The free version allows you to create and customize your budget, manually track expenses and sync data across multiple devices. The premium plan will allow the app to connect to bank accounts and dynamically track spending plus give you access to group coaching calls with financial experts.

Merging expenses with your partner can be tricky -- and managing a budget together can be downright frustrating. But if you’re looking to build a joint budget, Honeydue makes the process a little easier. It lets you link all your bank and investment accounts you want to include in one app, then it tracks all of your combined transactions and savings. It also includes a chat feature that allows you to ask your partner about unusual or suspicious transactions. However, Honeydue doesn’t offer goal setting, just tracking -- so you can’t contribute money from any account toward a specific goal.

Simplifi by Quicken is the other budgeting app on our list that doesn’t offer a free version. Quicken is known for personal finance software and has distilled its decades worth 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 apps, you 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. You get all this, ad-free, for $4 a month.