Best Personal Finance Software For Mac

One of the most popular personal finance tools out there is a little software application known as Microsoft Excel. People love spreadsheets. You can customize it, tweak it, and get it tailored to exactly what you need.

• Best Personal Finance Software For Mac 2017
• Best Personal Finance Software For Mac 2018

Quicken was traditionally known as one of the best personal finance software options for desktop users. However, the Mac version had traditionally lacked the features found in the PC version, and that was disappointing to many users.

While last year's version was a big improvement, it still wasn't there for everyone. After using Quicken for Mac 2019 for several weeks, we're happy to see that Quicken has continued the improvements over prior years. It's not as robust as we'd like to see yet, but it's definitely been moving in the right direction. So, how did Quicken for Mac 2019 do?

Honestly, it's an incremental improvement over 2018. But we like the direction it's going, and if you can get a great deal on pricing (which you typically can on or when they have a sale), it could be worth it. Key Features Of Quicken For Mac 2019 Quicken For Mac continues to build on the many traditional features that Quicken users expect. As always, it comes with great spending tracking (compared to other online options like and ), it has investment tracking, and budgeting.

For 2019, they have improved the usability of the platform, but the navigation is still a little challenging. Even after using Quicken for about a week, I still find it hard to get to different reports. It's not intuitive. They also improved the web interface for Quicken. If you don't want to use the desktop software, and prefer a web version (like what you get with Mint), you can have that now. But I prefer the app over the web version. Here's what the home screen looks like.

The pricing for Quicken For Mac 2019 continues to be a focus point for most users. Quicken changed their pricing model last year to a subscription-based model, instead of a one-time fee. I see this as both good and bad. It's bad, because many Quicken users kept their software for years, and never upgraded.

For users, this was fine - because you could avoid bad rollouts like Quicken for Mac 2017. However, to continue to receive updates and banking information, you had to update every few years anyway or Quicken would cut you off. It's good, because my hope is with more recurring revenue, Quicken can continue to improve their software and ensure banking connectivity. Quicken For Mac 2019 has three price points this year. I think 90% of users would benefit simply using the Deluxe version, which is $49.99/yr at full price.

Here's what the pricing looks like. It's hard to say if Premier is worth the huge additional price. I think Deluxe is the best value, for the added features of investment and loan tracking. But I've never used BillPay, and I highly recommend that most people don't use a service like BillPay because not only does Quicken charge more, but many banks charge for the service as well.

Note: For Windows, there is also a Home and Business version. However, we think most consumers with a small business would benefit more from using a tool like, versus using Quicken Home and Business.

Special Promotional Pricing As you probably already know, Quicken is notorious for running promotional pricing all the time. Recently, they were offering 40% off their prices - which I think is a fair price for the product. I would have a hard time paying $49.99 per year for Deluxe, but paying $29.99 per year makes much more sense - especially considering that I would typically upgrade every 2-3 years, this aligns much better with the pricing I'd expect.

However, in our search for deals, we found that Amazon.com is offering a 14-month subscription of the Deluxe version for $38.49 (which is 30% off full price). Given the $49.99 price is $4.17 per month, Amazon's deal is $2.75 per month.

Still not as good as Quicken's own sale, but the second best deal we've found. Quicken World Mastercard Another interesting product/feature that Quicken launched this year is the Quicken World Mastercard.

The Quicken credit card provides real-time transaction notifications in the Quicken mobile app, and offers integration with Quicken for Mac desktop. This card also gives you a free year of Quicken Deluxe when you spend at least $500 in the first 90 days. If you already have a subscription, you'll get a 1 year extension. The card offers 2x rewards points on all your qualified spending, and has no annual fees.

Given that this card is really about integration with Quicken, we're surprised that you don't get Quicken free every year as long as you spend at least $500 per year. Otherwise, all the rewards are on par or below the other. 14 Shares Filed Under: Tagged With: Editorial Disclaimer: Opinions expressed here are author’s alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, airlines or hotel chain, or other advertiser and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of these entities. Comment Policy: We invite readers to respond with questions or comments. Comments may be held for moderation and are subject to approval. Comments are solely the opinions of their authors'. The responses in the comments below are not provided or commissioned by any advertiser.

Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any company. It is not anyone's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered. About Robert Farrington. Robert Farrington is America's Millennial Money Expert, and the founder of, a personal finance site dedicated to helping millennials escape student loan debt to start investing and building wealth for the future.

You can learn more about him One of his favorite tools is, which enables him to manage his finances in just 15-minutes each month. Best of all - it's free! He is also diversifying his investment portfolio by adding a little bit of real estate. But not rental homes, because he doesn't want a second job, it's diversified small investments in a mix of properties through.

Best Personal Finance Software For Mac 2017

Worth a look if you're looking for a low dollar way to invest in real estate. You’re totally right on that long term value – that’s why I’m not sure at full price. However, at $29.99, now we’re talking $300 over 10 years – which is on par with what Quicken users have been paying for the last 10-15 years anyway with required upgrades. You have to remember, Quicken pays to have access to that bank connectivity.

I’ve heard it costs about $1 per account per year for a service like Quicken. When you think that the average user probably has 5-10 accounts linked, their ongoing data expense alone is $5-10 per each user.

It makes sense that on that cost alone they can’t offer bank connectivity forever at a single one time fee. I’m concerned about the inability to track “Transfers” to loan accounts in the Budgeting function.

Our family was setting up a budget that involved 13 loans including 11 student loans that have to be paid for out of our checking accounts every month. This obligation is a substantial portion of our family budget, yet cannot be tracked with the latest version of the Quicken Deluxe for the Mac platform. Many other users in the Users Forum complain about this deficiency and Quicken promises that they are aware of it and plan to make changes. Is this a fatal flaw for families that need to budget loan payments, or are you aware of a workaround that will address this problem. So I’m confused. Is it because when you setup the loan, it only counts the interest as the expense and not the full amount (since part of it was a transfer)? What I’ve found to work is renaming the split (I had to do this in prior versions of Quicken as well, and early versions with Credit Card Payments even) – “Student Loan Payment”.

You could even get specific by loan type. It looks like this: Then, when you go into your spending and budgeting, you can see it here – just look at the line for both Student Loan Payment and Loans (which is interest and I could also rename). I have been using Quicken Mac 2007 for all this time because my stock data has multiple lots with different purchase dates. I bought the 2018 edition because they claimed it will handle multiple lots — and it does, though the import had a few glitches which I was able to work around.

But I’m sorry I spent the time doing that, as the 2018 version is severely crippled. It won’t even let you print or export a simple “portfolio value report”: about the most basic function I can imagine; all you can do is look at it onscreen. Custom reports are all about transactions, not current holdings and values. It claims to generate exportable files for transfer to Q Mac 2007 and for Q Windows, but neither of them worked. So your data goes in, but you can’t get it out, which doesn’t satisfy their “data guarantee.” I discovered this a few days after the 30-day money back period, but was able (after hours unsuccessfully trying to reach a chat agent, and half an hour of phone hold) to get them to refund my purchase price, but I’ll never get back the time I spent fixing the data importing or trying to make it do what it ought to do.

I would advise everyone to avoid this product. Quicken Mac 2018 is a glorious flaming waste of time if you want a semblance of tracking investments. I have been using Quicken Mac since 2004. I have diligently been forced into upgrading purely because mac has improved with time and no longer can run older versions of Quicken. I am now on the 3rd round of customer service calls. (I installed Mac 2018 this morning.) I am an expert Quicken user and know my way around my mac.

Importing my data file was a breeze. Thanks for that.

My issue – when I sell shares of a security, it doesn’t update in the portfolio or cash. Three rounds of customer service and I am now asked to enter a transaction to sell shares.

And a transaction to remove shares. And a transaction to add a ghost “placeholder.” And if its a full moon maybe your shares will actually appear correctly. The other option is to go into your account and delete every possible transaction relating to the security you just sold. Compliance and data integrity nightmare. The graphics are fun and pretty just don’t actually use the data generated. Back to the drawing board quicken. $50 annual fee?

Thats laughable! I have been using Quicken 2007 for 11 years. I pay my bills with Quicken, and reconcile my checkbook by downloading bank transactions with Quicken. I believe that at one time, I paid my bank a monthly fee for this privilege, but as far as I can tell, I pay nothing now. How is Quicken 2018 different in this regard? Once upon a time, I reconciled my credit cards by downloading transactions from my credit card companies. I stopped doing that some time ago, but should I wish to start up again, does Quicken 2018 support that, and is there a charge for that?

I would just continue to use Quicken 2007, but I am concerned about the upcoming abandonment of 32 bit applications by Apple. Quicken 2019 has a dreadful user interface. GONE is the ability to run simple reports for this year, last year, date-to-date, etc.

With any ease, if at all. GONE is the simple accounts window that you are used to. GONE is the empty register line at the bottom of your account window waiting for you to fill in the newest transaction (you have to use a “+” “New Transaction” clumsy interface now). I could go on. The people who revamped this app appear to have done ZERO research with real world users. The investment firm who bought Quicken?

They’re doing nothing good here. I am one of thousands or millions stuck in Quicken 2007 and LIKE the interfaces in that version. Why can’t Quicken LISTEN to all the people screaming how unhappy they are with this product? I could care less about the online features. It’s just not there yet and I would never use it anyway. I have my stuff in the cloud, it’s fine.

I use Quicken on a desktop or laptop so the phone app is of no use for me. It’s fine to build that in for those who like it.

But you have to perfect, as best as you can, the actual application first and foremost. Quicken has become bloated and unintuitive over the last few versions. They’ve lost sight of the original idea and purpose.

This is simple bookkeeping. And simpler, is BETTER, when it comes to accounting software. Graphs, charts, and icons are fine, but can we please have the ability to turn them off. I don’t want to look at all the clutter constantly. Give me an accounts window (without the unnecessary folders for cash, cc, investments), individual account windows when I open them, keep the legacy register format that has been used for many decades (it just plain works and makes sense, newest on the bottom, empty one at bottom ready to be filled in), a way to run reports the way it’s done in 2007 (again, simple, makes sense, easy to get what you want out of it). STOP the incessant altering and revamping.

It does not work as well for the end users. Capital, sell this software to someone who gets it and will rework with some thoughtful acumen and intelligence. Forget the subscription plan too. It’s insulting.

People upgrade as needed every couple years or so without be forced into it. Subscription methods set a bad tone between the company and it’s users. Allow users the respect to upgrade when they choose rather than strong-arming them into it from the get go.

Whether you're stuffing your life savings into a mattress, dropping every dime into a savings account, or spending your money as fast as you make it, you need to know where your cash is coming from and where it's going. We took a look at five personal finance programs - SweetCocoa Software's PigMoney 1.1, Snowmint Creative Solutions' Budget 4.3.3, Reilly Technologies' Moneydance 2003, Max Programming's iCash 1.4.3, and Intuit's Quicken 2004 - most of which include excellent features for a wide variety of people. Unless otherwise noted, all the programs we reviewed print checks, create financial reports, and provide functions for balancing your checkbook. In the end, Quicken remains the program you can bank on, but PigMoney and Budget are excellent alternatives for people who don't require all of Quicken's specialized financial features. PigMoney If a very basic Excel spreadsheet is the first step in financial record-keeping, SweetCocoa Software's PigMoney 1.1 is the second.

It's a perfect solution for younger savers who are just starting to keep an eye on all their baby-sitting or lawn-mowing money. You create new transactions in PigMoney by clicking on one of the program's three main transaction buttons - New, Edit, and Delete - and then entering details, such as payment amount, payee, and category, in the transaction window that appears.

PigMoney has an autocomplete feature similar to Quicken's; it remembers items you've entered and enters them automatically as you begin to type them again. As you enter each new transaction, a small window displays a list of expense categories sorted by the amount spent; below that is a pie chart detailing each of your expenses by category. The amount of information in the window can swamp PigMoney's interface. If you have many different expenses, the expense list often ends up disappearing behind the corresponding pie chart. However, this isn't a problem for finance amateurs with simple budgets. PigMoney has no check-printing capabilities, includes no way to balance a checkbook, and, like many of the programs we looked at, made importing financial information we downloaded from a real bank account a frustrating experience. Beginning budgeters don't usually need to print checks and import bank transactions, but if you're setting up your first real bank account, being unable to reconcile PigMoney's account data with your monthly bank statement is a serious problem.

So as good as the program is for people in the earliest stages of saving, it's not currently capable of expanding to meet growing financial needs. Budget Of all the programs we looked at, Snowmint Creative Solutions' Budget 4.3.3 was the most unique. Unlike most programs, which use a ledgerlike check-register metaphor, Budget uses a conceptually vivid envelope metaphor, providing the digital equivalent of cashing your paycheck and then distributing the money to different expense envelopes. To set up your budget within Budget, you create envelopes for your bank accounts and each of your expense categories. Every time you spend money, Budget transfers it from your available income envelope to the appropriate expense envelope. If you have regular expenses such as auto insurance or rent, Budget will automatically distribute a portion of your paycheck to the proper envelope each time you get paid. For example, if your rent is $1,000 per month and you get paid $700 per week, Budget drops $250 into the Rent envelope every time you get paid.

The beauty of Budget - and the way it differs from other financial programs - is that it actually shows you how much money you have available to spend, as opposed to showing your current bank balance. To help you organize similar items, Budget allows you to create group envelopes, which contain a collection of other envelopes. So if you want to keep your telephone, gas, electric, and water bills in one place, you can create a Utility envelope that contains separate envelopes for each of your utilities.

Once you've created a group, you can easily add existing envelopes to it by dragging and dropping them on top of the group. This useful feature keeps the program from getting visually disorganized, which could be a problem if you have a large number of envelopes. Budget includes very few reporting tools, but it does give you a quick overview of your current financial status. Selecting a group envelope and then clicking on the Stats button brings up a window in which you can view either a bar graph or a line graph of that specific group's expenses. If you select the window's Table view, you can quickly see an envelope's deposits and expenses, as well as the total percentage of your income that a particular envelope is eating up. Unfortunately, aside from these very basic printed reports, Budget's reporting capabilities are pretty thin. It doesn't have any year-end tax reports or any easy way to determine the current value of all your assets.

If you require these features, you may want to consider another application. Budget's only other shortcoming is fairly minor: its weak stock-tracking capability is simply no match for Quicken's.

But when it comes to keeping track of your money according to the way you've earmarked expenses, Budget is superb. It's a perfect option for people who prefer to plan spending and saving but don't have many investment or reporting considerations. Moneydance With its wide range of features, Reilly Technologies' Moneydance 2003 is the only program we looked at that was nearly as complete as Quicken. Like Quicken, Moneydance uses a check-register format for data entry and provides fairly extensive support for tracking a wide variety of stocks and mutual funds. The program supports plug-ins, which allow developers to extend the program's capabilities. Even though Moneydance has a wealth of features, its user interface was confusing and occasionally quirky. Once you've created your first account file, Moneydance opens a customizable navigation window (the documentation refers to it as a home page), which displays your current net worth, a calendar of upcoming transactions, a list of overdue transactions, and current currency-exchange rates; from here you can access all your bank and stock accounts with a single click.

This home page is where the program's first quirk appears. Clicking on any of your accounts in this window typically opens a register where you can view account information and enter new transactions. But clicking on the item for stock prices opens a window where you edit information on currency-exchange rates. The program actually presents this as a feature, since it treats all your stocks as 'currencies.' But every new stock you enter appears at the bottom of the currency list, and the window gives no indication that it's there.

Best Personal Finance Software For Mac 2018

For most users, especially those who have no interest in currency rates, this is a very confusing way to handle stocks. In fact, we had to call the company to figure out that this 'feature' wasn't a bug. We did find a bug when we tried entering a new transaction in the account window, which offers a checklike interface for entering new transactions.

However, when we selected the account we wanted to use for the payment from a drop-down menu, no account name appeared in the account field - it remained blank. Reilly Technologies acknowledged the bug and said that it plans to fix this problem in the near future.

Moneydance categorizes your transactions in an unusual and confusing way. Unlike Quicken, which treats categories and accounts as separate entities, Moneydance treats every category as an account, so if you want to get detailed information on where you're spending your money, you need to create accounts for gas, groceries, entertainment, and the like.

The strange thing about this is that after you've made a few payments, the account displays a positive balance. When it comes to expenses, this is downright absurd; it's the kind of accounting logic that personal accounting programs should avoid or, at the very least, hide from those of us who tremble at the thought of balancing a checkbook. Finally, Moneydance ships with no predefined accounts, so you'll have to create them all from scratch. Combine this with the program's bugs and quirks, and what you get is a frustrating user experience. ICash Max Programming's iCash 1.4.3 is a conundrum: an elegant-looking Aqua application that's extremely confusing to use. ICash consists of a single window with five tabs at the top - Balance, Accounts, Transactions, Queries, and Reports. You access all of the program's features by clicking on the tabs.

Clicking on the Balance tab and then clicking on a specific account or category gives you a quick view of how much money you have in an account or how much you've spent on a specific expense category. Like PigMoney, iCash provides no easy way to balance your bank accounts. You can put a check mark in the boxes next to each transaction to signify that a check has cleared on your bank statement. But there's no way for you to enter your bank's beginning and ending balance information and then verify that what you've entered in iCash matches your bank statement. We got the sense that this application was only half finished. ICash ships with a set of predefined bank accounts and expense-category settings.

The trouble begins when you start to create any new transaction. Try to enter a new transaction and you'll discover that there's no payee field, so if you want to keep track of who gets your money, you'll need to put that information in the notes field. Try to create a transaction for which you have no category defined, and you'll have to jump back to the Accounts tab, create the category, and then jump back to the Transactions tab to re-create the initial transaction. This amounts to a huge hassle, especially if you're just beginning to set up the program. And while iCash is aimed at users who don't have complicated banking needs, the program itself seems too complicated. Quicken Intuit's Quicken remains the preeminent personal financial program, the one that best suits users of all stripes and that almost all the other programs seek to emulate. There's a reason for that: Quicken is intuitively easy to use, and it provides an amazing collection of financial tools at a relatively low price.

Quicken 2004 is largely unchanged from previous versions of the program. New features include integration with iCal, which makes setting up reminders of upcoming transactions easy; an Emergency Records Organizer; and several tools for managing your stock portfolio, most of which link to online information (such as investment research and stock analysis) and all of which require an Internet connection. So unless you've been desperately waiting for these features, upgrading will be unnecessary. The beauty of Quicken's new integration with iCal is the reappearance of transaction reminders outside the Quicken application. In the old days, before OS X, Quicken could remind you of upcoming financial events every time you fired up your Mac.

Quicken 2004 automatically creates a calendar event in iCal that will remind you of an upcoming bill, whether or not you open Quicken. Note, though, that Quicken doesn't automatically set an alarm for the iCal event, so if you want notification of pending bills, you need to edit the iCal event to add the alarm.

Quicken's most significant new feature is the Emergency Records Organizer. This tool - a database in which you can track a wide variety of personal information - centralizes your most pertinent information in one location. You've probably got this data scattered all over the house or, worse, stored in your head: the location of your will, say, or your home owner's insurance-policy number.

You can record all this information in the Emergency Records Organizer, and then print all or individual parts of the data for safe storage and emergency reference. When it comes to financial-planning tools and investing, there's never really been any software comparable to Quicken. It still includes great tools for analyzing your personal cash flow or figuring out how much you can expect to save if you refinance your mortgage.

But when it comes to investing, most of what's new in the program consists of links to data on the Quicken.com Web site. Granted, you can now access this information more easily from within the program, but in reality, the same information is available from a variety of Web sources, many of them free, regardless of whether you own Quicken - so why pay for the data? For most people, even though Quicken offers some integration of Web-based investment information, the new investment features aren't significant enough to warrant the upgrade price.

Also, we did confirm one fairly major bug in the program that will trouble you if you're an investor who likes to sell stocks short: Quicken doesn't report the capital gains accurately. Short-sell 1,000 shares of a stock at $3.00 and then buy 1,000 back to cover the short at $2.50, and Quicken's capital gains report states that you've realized a gain of 50 cents. It should be $500, a fact that could leave you feeling woozy when the IRS comes knocking at your door. Macworld's Buying Advice Quicken 2004 is by far the most comprehensive financial package available for the Mac, and on a feature-by-feature basis, it clearly leaves all the other applications in the dust.

However, both PigMoney and Budget are good choices for people with less-complicated financial needs.