The Best Personal Finance and Budgeting Apps for 2025

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Knowing where you stand with your money—your budget, credit score, expenses, income, and investments—is essential. PCMag has been covering apps for budgeting and managing personal finances for more than 15 years. If you commit to using a personal finance app, it can help you stay up to date with everything you need to know about your money, including how to get out of debt. Many apps are free, and the rest cost a few dollars per month. We recommend three apps above all others: Simplifi if you want the best balance between features and ease of use, Quicken Classic if you want to manage your money in more detail, and YNAB if you’ve struggled with budgeting before. Read on for more about why these are the best personal finance apps, along with recommendations for other services that might work even better for you.

Are Personal Finance Apps Safe?

The personal finance apps we reviewed all have robust security protocols. Most ask to connect to your bank accounts, credit card accounts, and other financial institutions. These apps download lists of transactions and balances from those accounts so you can see all the activity neatly in one place. To connect, you typically enter your login credentials for those financial sites, though you usually have to provide additional security information—which is good.

Those that connect to your financial accounts use encryption and other safety measures to protect your login information. Many use third parties, such as Plaid, to make secure connections.

That said, you must also do your part to make the experience safe. Three key things you can do are:

• Use a unique username and password for your financial logins and the personal finance app. A is indispensable.

• Enable wherever you can, especially for logging into the personal finance app and any connected bank accounts. Yes, it takes some extra time, but not nearly as much as reconstructing your financial life

• Keep all your details, such as your date and city of birth, private because bad actors can use them as authenticators to access financial data and accounts.

What Is the Best Free Personal Finance App?

Most personal finance apps are free or have a free tier of service. They typically make money by showing you targeted ads for financial products, like credit cards or savings accounts.

NerdWallet is our favorite totally free app. It combines bank account imports and transaction management with excellent information about your credit score. It also has a ton of editorial content (including tutorials) on personal finance topics. Ads partially support NerdWallet, but they don’t get in the way. The app also tracks your net worth and cash flow as long as you connect to all your online financial accounts. It also shows you your credit score and explains how it came to be, although Credit Karma (also totally free) does a better job here.

What Can You Do With a Personal Finance App?

Personal finance apps do a lot more than help you budget your money. Here are some other examples:

Watch Transactions Across All Your Accounts

Connecting a personal finance app to your bank accounts and credit cards allows you to monitor all your transactions in one place. So, instead of logging into each of your banking apps once a day to see which charges and transactions cleared, you can do that from a single app. This single view might help you spot unauthorized transactions quickly. The sooner you can alert your bank about such activity, the quicker the bank can cut off access to the account.

Categorize Your Spending

After importing a batch of transactions from credit cards and bank accounts, most people spend some time cleaning up the data. Transactions need to have the correct category for their type of income (interest, rental income, or salary) or expense (food, mortgage, or utilities). Most apps guess the categories, but you can always change them and even split transactions among several.

If you’re conscientious about categorizing your income and spending, your personal finance app creates charts and reports that accurately summarize where your money comes from and where it goes. This is crucial for budgeting and tax preparation. Many apps also let you tag transactions, which can be a good way to keep track of similar expenses, like medical expenses or tax-related spending.

Get an Overview of Your Financial Situation

The best personal finance apps have a dashboard. Sometimes, it’s the only page you need because it has the most pertinent information about your finances, such as your account balances and pending bills. The charts and graphs on the dashboard give you an overview of your financial situation. They might tell you, for example, your income versus spending and how you’re doing with your budget. Or you might see your net worth and credit score. Or your dashboard might show your customized financial goals and your progress toward them. In short, the dashboard gives you a quick look at your money and is a springboard to a deeper financial study.

Learn How to Budget

Being conscientious about your finances includes minimizing your expenses so that they are lower than your income. That’s the goal, anyway, and personal finance apps help you achieve it through budgeting.

The mechanics of creating a workable budget are much easier than specifying your limits. It’s often guesswork until you’ve had a budget for several months and start seeing how your money comes and goes. For that reason, Quicken Classic and some other personal finance apps let you use past income and expenses as models. That way, you can answer the question, “How much do I usually spend each month?” and get an answer that relies on past data.

Set Financial Goals

Setting goals, such as establishing an emergency fund, isn’t rocket science. With a personal finance app, you specify the amount you’re trying to save and the target date for achieving it, and the application tells you how much you have to save every month to meet your goals. Some sites do more. Monarch Money and NerdWallet, for example, let you link your goals to the appropriate spending account for easy progress tracking.

Plan for Retirement

Most personal finance apps don’t focus on retirement planning, much less lifetime financial planning—but Quicken Classic has tools to establish a comprehensive lifetime financial plan, help you pay off your debts faster, and plan for taxes. Empower also has some tools for retirement planning, although it quickly tries to sell you financial advisory services if you use those tools.

Keep an Eye on Your Bills

Most personal finance apps let you record bills and bill payments, but you usually can’t pay through the app itself—unless you use Credit Karma’s spending account or Quicken Classic (additional fees apply). With Quicken Classic, you can set up automatic connections to online billers or enter offline bills from suppliers who don’t bill you electronically, such as a dog walker or babysitter. Quicken alerts you when they’re due, and you can mark them as paid.

Manage Your Money on the Go

You probably don’t need advanced money management tools when you’re away from your desktop or laptop. But when you’re out spending money, you need to know how much you have available. All the personal finance services we reviewed provide mobile apps. Most have reduced functionality, but you can at least add transactions, check your account balances, see graphs related to your spending and income, and view transactions.

Educate Yourself

One of the biggest benefits of using personal finance apps is that they help you learn more about your money and personal finance in general. NerdWallet, for example, has excellent articles and resources about everything from bankruptcy to investing. Apps that focus on credit scores and credit reports detail all the different factors (such as how often you pay your credit cards on time) in play. NerdWallet has handy calculators that help you decide the best way to pay down debt, given the specifics of your situation.

Can Personal Finance Apps Boost Your Credit Score?

An excellent credit score is gold. It helps you get approved for a car loan, credit card, mortgage, and so on, as well as minimizes the interest rate you pay. It’s important to know your credit score at any given time, how credit bureaus calculate it, and what you can do to improve it.

Credit Karma, NerdWallet, and do this, and they’re all free. Credit Karma is especially comprehensive. It pulls your credit score daily from two of the three major bureaus and gives you access to your credit reports. It also explains how different factors contribute to your credit score and what you can do to try and boost it.

One of the ways you can improve your credit score is to use financial products—credit cards, mortgages—that have attractive interest rates and other benefits. Credit Karma, NerdWallet, and WalletHub all show you targeted ads for these kinds of products; it’s how the apps can remain free (you sign up for a credit card, and the app gets a commission). Just keep in mind that frequently canceling credit cards and acquiring new ones negatively affect your credit score.

Do Personal Finance Apps Know Your Net Worth?

It depends on how much you tell them. You might want a personal finance service only for budgeting, day-to-day income and expense management, and goal setting. In that case, you don’t need to tell the app about other accounts and assets you have, whether it’s a trust fund or property. If there’s an account you don’t want your app to know about, just leave it out.