Best Mint Alternatives: 8 Apps People Actually Switched To

Mint shut down in March 2024. I tried every replacement so you don't have to. Here's an honest, hands-on ranking of the 8 best Mint alternatives in 2026 — from $0 to $109/yr.

By Larsen

May 7, 2026

Mint Died. Where Did Everyone Go?

Intuit shut down Mint in March 2024 and folded what was left of it into Credit Karma. About 3.6 million people had to find a new home for their budget. Two years later, the dust has settled and the answer is clear: there is no one Mint replacement. People split into roughly four camps. The folks who wanted Mint's exact look and feel went to Quicken Simplifi or Monarch. The serious budgeters went to YNAB. The spreadsheet people went to Tiller. And a quieter group decided they were done with bank-linked finance apps entirely and went back to a Google Sheet they actually own.

The Mint shutdown taught a lot of people something uncomfortable: when a free finance app dies, your data dies with it. Years of categorized transactions, custom budgets, careful tagging — all of it lived on Intuit's servers, and most of it did not survive the migration to Credit Karma. That experience has shaped how I evaluate every tool below. Price matters. Sync matters. But what matters most is whether the data still belongs to you when the company changes its mind.

The Quick Comparison Table

1. Quicken Simplifi — The Closest Mint Replacement

If what you miss about Mint is the dashboard and the auto-categorized transactions, Quicken Simplifi is the closest you'll get. It pulls from your bank accounts, credit cards, loans, and investments, builds a spending plan from your last 30 days of activity, and shows you a clean overview of where the money is going. The first year is $2.99/month billed annually, then it jumps to $5.99/month. There's no permanent free tier.

What I liked: the spending plan view is genuinely better than Mint's. Bill detection is accurate. The mobile app is fast. What I didn't like: the goals system is shallow, the report builder is locked behind the higher tier, and the connection to smaller credit unions can be flaky. If you want Mint with fewer ads and slightly better UX, this is the obvious pick. Just remember you're renting it — your transaction history lives on Quicken's servers and they can change pricing whenever they want. Quicken Simplifi.

2. Monarch Money — Built by Ex-Mint, Polished for Couples

Monarch was started by a former Mint product manager, and it shows. The dashboard is the most polished one I tried. It handles investments, real estate, crypto, and shared budgets natively. It was built from day one for couples — separate logins, shared data, no sharing-a-password hacks. Pricing is $99/year or $14.99/month after a free trial.

What I liked: best-in-class investment view, clean budget rollovers, custom categories that actually work. What I didn't like: the price is closing in on YNAB without YNAB's methodology. Sync can take a day or two to settle in. And it's still a subscription where your data lives on someone else's server. If you and a partner want one place to track everything and you don't mind paying every year forever, Monarch is the most refined option on this list. Monarch Money.

3. YNAB — Strict, Effective, Expensive

YNAB (You Need A Budget) is the closest thing to a religion in personal finance. The method is zero-based budgeting: every dollar gets a job before you spend it. The tool exists to enforce that method. If you stick with it, it works — there are countless people on Reddit who'll tell you YNAB changed their financial life. The flip side is the price ($109/year) and the learning curve. Expect to spend a couple of weeks before it clicks.

YNAB is not really a Mint replacement. Mint was passive (it tells you what already happened); YNAB is active (it tells you what to do before you spend). If you want to change your behavior, that's a feature. If you just want to see where your money went last month, YNAB is overkill and it'll feel like a chore. I've covered this comparison in detail in Write It Down vs YNAB. Direct link if you want to evaluate it: YNAB.

4. Tiller — Bank Sync Into a Real Spreadsheet

Tiller is the bridge between “I want my data in a Sheet” and “I don't want to type every transaction.” It connects to your bank and pushes your transactions into a Google Sheet (or Excel file) every morning. From there, you build whatever you want — they ship templates, but the Sheet is yours to mangle. It costs $79/year after a 30-day free trial.

What I liked: the data really does land in your Sheet. You can run formulas, build pivot tables, do anything spreadsheets can do. What I didn't like: if you stop paying, the sync stops and the Sheet becomes a static snapshot. So you don't fully own the workflow, you own the output. Tiller is the right answer if you want spreadsheet flexibility plus automation, and you're comfortable with bank linking. Tiller.

5. Rocket Money — Free with a Subscription Cancellation Hook

Rocket Money started life as Truebill and got rebranded after Rocket Companies bought them. The free tier gives you basic budgeting, spending categorization, and bank sync. The Premium tier ($4–12/month, you choose what to pay) adds the real product: subscription tracking and a service that calls companies to cancel subscriptions on your behalf. They take a cut of what they save you.

What I liked: subscription cancellation is real and works. The free tier is a legitimate Mint replacement on a tight budget. What I didn't like: the free tier is heavily upsold, the budget tools are average, and like Mint, this is a free product where you are part of the product. Useful as a complement to a real budgeting tool, not as your primary one. Rocket Money.

6. Empower — Free, but Really an Investment Platform

Empower (formerly Personal Capital) is free and shines at one thing: net worth tracking and investment analysis. The dashboard is one of the best in the industry for seeing all your accounts in one place, including 401(k)s, brokerage accounts, real estate, and crypto. The retirement planner is genuinely useful. The investment fee analyzer will quietly save you thousands over a lifetime.

What you should know: Empower is free because they're a wealth management firm. If you connect $100k+ in linked assets, expect calls from an advisor trying to sell you their managed services. The budgeting tools are an afterthought — categorization is weaker than most competitors and you can't set proper category budgets. Use Empower for net worth and investments. Use something else for day-to-day budgeting. Empower.

7. Copilot Money — Beautiful, Apple-Only

Copilot is the prettiest budgeting app I've used. It's built for iOS and Mac, runs on Apple Intelligence for transaction categorization, and the design polish is in a different league. Pricing is $13/month or $95/year. There's no Android version and there isn't one coming.

What I liked: AI categorization is fast and accurate. The recurring transaction detection is excellent. Investment tracking is built in. What I didn't like: iOS-only is a hard limit if anyone in your household uses Android. The price is high for what is essentially a single-user budget app. Copilot is the right call if you live inside the Apple ecosystem and design quality genuinely matters to you. For anyone else, you're paying a premium for things you can't fully use. Copilot Money.

8. Write It Down — The One I Built

I built Write It Down after burning out on the loop above. I didn't want another subscription. I didn't want to give my bank credentials to another company. I didn't want my financial history to disappear the next time a startup got acquired. I just wanted a clean Google Sheet I could open every Sunday for ten minutes and know exactly where I stood.

So I made one. Write It Down is a Google Sheets template you buy once for $5.99 ($8.99 for the Advanced version with extra dashboards). You enter transactions manually — yes, manually, on purpose, because the act of writing them down is what builds awareness. The Sheet lives in your own Google Drive. You own it forever. There are no bank connections, no servers storing your data, no subscription that can double next year. If the company that sold it to you (me) disappears, the Sheet keeps working.

When it's the right answer: you want a weekly habit, not a dashboard. You don't trust bank-linked apps with your data. You like spreadsheets. You're tired of subscriptions. When it's the wrong answer: you want everything to sync automatically. You have 15 accounts and would never enter transactions by hand. You want investment tracking on top of budgeting. In those cases, go back up this list — Monarch or Tiller is probably the right call. Honest answer.

If you want the longer comparisons: I've broken down Write It Down vs Mint and Write It Down vs YNAB in detail. The case for the manual approach is in Why a Google Sheet Beats Any Finance App.

How to Choose in 30 Seconds

Skip the listicle paralysis. Pick the one that matches your actual life:

• You miss Mint exactly: Quicken Simplifi.
• You and your partner share finances: Monarch Money.
• You want to fix your spending behavior, not just see it: YNAB.
• You want a Sheet but with auto-sync: Tiller.
• You're broke and want free with no commitment: Rocket Money (or Empower if investments are your focus).
• You live in iOS and design matters: Copilot.
• You want a one-time purchase, full ownership, no bank link: Write It Down.

Frequently Asked Questions

One last thing. The Mint shutdown wasn't a one-off. It was the third time in a decade a major free finance app vanished and took user data with it. Whichever tool you pick, the question worth asking is: if this company is gone in three years, what survives? That answer is what should drive the choice — not which dashboard looks the prettiest.