Money

The budgeting apps worth using two years after Mint's shutdown

The forced migration when Intuit closed Mint in 2024 sent millions of users looking for a replacement. The dust has settled and a clear set of winners and losers has emerged.

By Wendell Crowe

Published January 29, 2026 · 7 min read

The bottom line

Monarch Money has emerged as the strongest direct successor to Mint for users who want a polished interface and broad bank-account aggregation. Copilot Money is the better choice for users on Apple devices who want a more modern interface. YNAB remains the right answer for users who want envelope-style zero-based budgeting. Free options have gotten worse, not better, since Mint's shutdown.

Intuit closed Mint in March 2024. The shutdown forced something like five million active users to find a replacement, and the consumer budgeting-app market spent most of 2024 in a chaotic adjustment period. By late 2025 the market had begun to settle into a clearer set of winners; by early 2026 a working consumer can make an informed choice from a smaller number of credible products.

This piece reviews the four leading consumer budgeting apps as they exist in early 2026, with attention to the cases each one handles best.

Monarch Money

Cost: $14.99/month or $99.99/year.

Monarch Money has emerged as the strongest direct successor to Mint for users whose primary need is broad account aggregation, transaction categorization, and overview-level financial visibility. The product looks and feels familiar to former Mint users — pulled-together dashboard, automatic transaction categorization, customizable budgets — and the polish is genuinely good.

Account-aggregation breadth is the strongest of the products in this list. Monarch supports the largest range of US banks, brokerages, retirement accounts, and credit unions, and the connections have been more reliable in our testing than at the smaller competitors. The customization options are extensive: custom categories, budget rollovers, recurring transactions, scheduled income, all configurable to match the user’s preferred conventions.

The pricing is the main objection. At $99.99 per year, Monarch is meaningfully more expensive than Mint was (Mint was free) and somewhat more expensive than the closest competitor. For a user who values the breadth of aggregation and the polish, the price is justified. For a user who wants only basic budgeting, simpler tools cover the case more cheaply.

We would recommend Monarch as the default Mint replacement for most former Mint users.

Copilot Money

Cost: $13/month or $95/year (Apple device only).

Copilot Money is an Apple-only product with a meaningfully more modern interface than the other apps in this list. Transaction categorization is the best in the field — the app’s category-suggestion logic is consistently more accurate than Monarch’s or YNAB’s in our testing. The interface design is a clear notch above the competitors, with thoughtful animations and informative summary views.

The Apple-only constraint is the main limitation. Copilot does not run on Android, on Windows, or in a web browser. For users whose primary device is Apple — iPhone, iPad, Mac — this is fine. For users on mixed devices, it is a deal-breaker.

Account aggregation has been somewhat narrower than Monarch’s; we have seen connection issues with several smaller banks and credit unions. The support has been responsive when these come up, but the breadth gap is real.

For Apple-device users who want the most polished interface, Copilot is the right choice.

You Need a Budget (YNAB)

Cost: $14.99/month or $109/year.

YNAB is the right answer for users who want envelope-style zero-based budgeting — the system in which every dollar of income is assigned to a specific spending or savings category before any spending happens. The product has been refining this approach for more than a decade and has the most disciplined implementation of it available to consumers.

The system is more demanding than the dashboard-style approach of Monarch and Copilot. Users assign each dollar to a category, watch for category overruns, and reassign as needed. For users with the temperament for this kind of detailed tracking, the financial behavior change can be substantial. For users who want only a passive overview of their spending, YNAB is an awkward fit.

We would recommend YNAB specifically to users who are interested in actively changing their spending patterns through a structured budgeting system. For passive overview users, Monarch or Copilot is a better fit.

Empower (formerly Personal Capital)

Cost: free.

Empower is the closest thing to a free Mint replacement and is genuinely useful as a net-worth tracker and investment-account aggregator. Where it falls short of the paid alternatives is in budgeting-specific features. The transaction categorization is less reliable, the budget-vs-actual reporting is rougher, and the customization options are narrower.

The product makes its money by lead-generating to Empower’s advisory services. Users will receive periodic outreach about the company’s wealth-management products. For users who want a free aggregation tool and can tolerate the marketing pressure, Empower is the best free option in 2026.

Other options worth flagging briefly

Goodbudget — a digital envelope-budgeting app at a lower price than YNAB. Functional but with less polished aggregation and a less structured approach to envelope budgeting.

PocketGuard — a simple budgeting app with a focus on subscription tracking. Useful for that specific case.

Simplifi by Quicken — Intuit’s other product, charged separately from QuickBooks/TurboTax. Functional but somewhat less polished than Monarch at similar price points.

Personal spreadsheets — Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers. Genuinely viable for users with the discipline for ongoing data entry, with the major advantages of full control and no subscription cost.

What about the small banks?

A persistent issue across all consumer budgeting apps is the support for smaller banks and credit unions. The major aggregators — Plaid, MX, Finicity — generally support large national banks well, mid-size regionals reasonably, and smaller community banks and credit unions inconsistently. Connections to smaller institutions sometimes break unpredictably and require periodic re-authentication.

For users whose accounts are mostly at major national banks, this is rarely a problem. For users with significant balances at smaller institutions, the connection reliability is worth testing during a free trial before committing to a paid annual plan.

What to actually do

For most former Mint users: Monarch Money. The product is the most direct continuity for the Mint use case and the polish is genuinely good.

For Apple-device users who want the most modern interface: Copilot Money.

For users actively changing their spending behavior through structured budgeting: YNAB.

For users who want a free option focused on net-worth tracking: Empower, accepting the marketing outreach.

For users with the patience for manual entry: a spreadsheet.

The free, polished, no-tradeoffs Mint experience that Intuit ran for fifteen years is gone. The best replacements are paid, and the price has settled at roughly $100 per year for the leading products. For users who genuinely use a budgeting app, the price is reasonable; for users who used Mint sporadically and barely missed it, the case for paying is weaker.

Frequently asked questions

Why did Mint shut down?

Intuit, which acquired Mint in 2009, closed it in March 2024 and migrated remaining users into Credit Karma — a product that has none of Mint's budgeting and aggregation features. The official reason was strategic consolidation; the practical reason was that Mint's free model could not be sustained on the advertising and lead-generation revenue Intuit was extracting from it.

Are any free Mint replacements still good?

Most of the free budgeting apps that launched as Mint replacements have either pivoted to paid models or remained underdeveloped. The free tier of most consumer budgeting apps in 2026 is meaningfully worse than Mint's free product was at its peak. The honest answer is that high-quality budgeting software has mostly moved to subscription pricing in the $5 to $15 per month range.

Should I trust these apps with my bank credentials?

The leading apps in 2026 use Plaid, MX, or Finicity as their account-aggregation backend. These services use OAuth-style authentication for most major banks, which means the budgeting app does not store your bank password directly. For some smaller banks and credit unions, credential-based connection is still the only option, and the security model is somewhat weaker.

What about Excel or Google Sheets?

Spreadsheets remain a perfectly good budgeting tool for users who are willing to do the data entry manually. The advantages are full control, no subscription fees, and no third-party access to financial data. The cost is substantial ongoing time. For users with the discipline to keep a spreadsheet up to date, this is a defensible choice.

Is Apple's Wallet app a budgeting tool?

It is a payment and card-management tool with some spending-summary features. It is not a budgeting tool in the sense Mint or Monarch is — there is no goal-setting, no category-based budgeting, no aggregation of accounts outside Apple's own card. For users whose only credit card is the Apple Card, the spending breakdown is useful as a partial summary.

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