Online budget planning tool

Stay on top of your finances by seeing where your money comes and goes. Join Mint. This app has helped me get my spending on track.

Absolutely the best bill tracking app in the playstore. Skip To Main Content. Budget-friendly, loaded with free features. You can personalize these categories, which are unlimited. Besides those budgeting features, Mint may help users pay down debt, save more money and track goals.

The app also shows users their credit score and net worth. Why you may want to think twice: Mint is impressive in many ways, including the fact that it tracks just about everything on your behalf.

Cost: Free. Apple store rating: 4. Google Play rating: 4. Note that all ratings were current as of Dec. Why we recommend it: Goodbudget is more about planning for your finances than tracking previous transactions.

This app is based on the envelope budgeting system , in which you portion out your monthly income toward specific spending categories called envelopes. Then you assign money toward envelopes. You can access the app from your phone and the web. Goodbudget offers a free version that allows one account, two devices and limited envelopes. Its paid version, Goodbudget Plus, allows unlimited envelopes and accounts, up to five devices and other perks.

Cost: Goodbudget is free. Why we recommend it: YNAB is designed so that users plan ahead for their financial decisions, rather than track past transactions. This app follows the zero-based budgeting system, which has you make a plan for every dollar you earn. As soon as you get paid, you tell YNAB how much of your income should go toward various categories, including expenses, goals and savings. With all this decision making, YNAB is about as hands-on as you can get.

YNAB allows you to link your checking and savings accounts, as well as credit cards and loans. The app works on the phone, desktop, iPad, Apple Watch and Alexa. By design, it works best for users who want to get hands-on while planning for their money. Also, compared to the other apps that made our list, its price is high, and its Google Play ratings are low. College students can use YNAB for free for a year. Google Play rating: 3. First, an explanation of the names: EveryDollar is a free budgeting app.

You manually enter incoming and outgoing money throughout the month. You also categorize line items in your budget and set reminders for bill payments. You can also track debts, see reports on how you spent your money and print your transaction history. Cost: The basic version of EveryDollar is free.

Why we recommend it: Personal Capital is primarily an investment tool, but its free app includes features helpful for budgeters looking to track their spending. You can connect and monitor checking, savings and credit card accounts, as well as IRAs, k s, mortgages and loans.

The app provides a spending snapshot by listing recent transactions by category. You can customize those categories and see the percentage of total monthly spending each category represents. Personal Capital also serves up a net worth tracker and portfolio breakdown. We narrowed down our best picks for just about anyone: beginners, investors and small business owners.

The selections we chose all come at zero cost to use and have strong user reviews. See our methodology for more information on how we choose the best free budgeting tools. No, but some templates offer third-party add-on software that automatically pulls financial transactions into Google Sheets. Google server protection: Unless you've shared your Google Sheet with someone, nobody can access your files without your Gmail account username and password.

For this, Google offers two-factor authentication and physical security keys like YubiKey. Allows users to plan their household's spending using the "envelope method," where they allocate a certain amount of their income into categories like groceries, rent and debt payoff. Users are only supposed spend what's in their envelopes and if they go beyond their budget the envelope will show red to indicate that they overspent.

App is free, but users have option to add investment management services for 0. Desktop software that uses double-entry accounting method to tracks users' bank accounts, income, expenses and investments.

It also offers basic accounting functionality for small businesses to manage invoicing, bill payment and payroll. GnuCash is not an online, cloud-based program so no one has physical access to your data; the software runs on your computer and your data lives wherever you store it, such as on your desktop, a hard drive or Dropbox.

Budgeting gets a bad rap for being a monotonous and tedious task, but it can also be a helpful way to understanding your spending habits. And a budgeting tool can make the process a lot easier if you find the right one for your needs.

That tool might be an already-formatted spreadsheet where you just plug in your transactions, or an app that auto-categorizes your spending for you.

Because different budgeting tools offer slightly different approaches to tracking your money, first decide how intentional you want to be. Hands-on methods, such as manually enter your transactions into a spreadsheet, may take more time, but the process can help you be more thoughtful about your spending.

You'll also want to decide if you want to pay for a budgeting tool. While the top-rated tools on this list come no cost to users, those who don't mind paying a premium have options for budgeting tools with more robust features. Learn more in the app's review. Once your budget is created, the bulk of the work is done and from then on you are just revisiting it to make tweaks as your spending habits or income change.

To determine which free budgeting tools offer the best user experience, Select analyzed over a dozen different budgeting tools and looked at their features and user reviews. We narrowed down our ranking by looking for at least one pick in each of the following categories: spreadsheets, desktop software and smartphone apps. We wanted variety in the ways users can build their budget, and we ranked each tool by who it is best designed for anyone, beginners, investors or small business owners.

The five tools we selected for this ranking are all free and easy to use. For our selection, we also favored budgeting tools that have strong user reviews. Other factors we looked at included the security features, user customization and illustrative data insight, such as graphs and reports, that are available. Skip Navigation. Select Logo. Follow Select. Our top picks of timely offers from our partners More details. Upstart Personal Loans. LightStream Personal Loans.