What is Reddit's opinion of Actual Budget?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

So agreed. If I won the lottery I'd have someone literally build a web version of YNAB with right-red-arrow. That is the only deal breaker for me with nYNAB. I can ignore most of the unneeded changes, but I simply can't accept the absurdity of disallowing me to deal with reimbursements in such a simple way. Funding phantom line items with money, simply to draw down and reimburse back up is ridiculous and hard to track.

Have you taken a look at Actual Budget? It's 99% there AND flawlessly imports YNAB4 data. I just miss a few minor features that still has me heading back to YNAB4 out of familiarity, but Actual is getting so darn close.....

Absolutely! You'd be able to absolutely anything, though some queries might get complex if you want to slice thing in lots of way :)

You could use raw SQL if you wanted to, but we also have a more lightweight query language that takes care of a lot of annoying things for you: https://actualbudget.com/docs/developers/ActualQL/

I don't think I've seen this one here: https://actualbudget.com/

It looks really close to YNAB4 functionality, has local, web and mobile app access and would be my next choice at $4/month. Their sub is dead, but the dev has been active in their Slack channel. I went ahead and restarted my YNAB4 for right now because they don't have spending by payee/trends reports, and those are pretty important to me.

YNAB was a bit overwhelming for me and a bit expensive, but I love Actual. It's the same envelope-style budgeting system which is amazing for me, and it's super simple and has everything I need. It's also $4 a month, so much cheaper than YNAB. (Just putting it out there for someone who likes the idea of YNAB but not the cost.)

https://actualbudget.com/

I use Actual Budget, which is extremely similar to YNAB except cheaper and more lightweight. It doesn't have all of the features of YNAB (e.g. no syncing with your bank - but I do everything manually anyway) but it's close enough that it was worth the switch for me.

Are you sure you are looking at the same thing? It's only $4 a month. Pretty sure thats even cheaper than the grandfathered sub price.

https://actualbudget.com/pricing/

Ik heb YNAB4 - enorm het geld waard wat het toen gekost heeft. YNAB zoals het nu is zou ik zelf niet doen - redelijk duur en je betaalt o.a. voor functies die in Nederland helemaal niet te gebruiken zijn, en ze hebben geen tiered pricing voor degenen die de sync functie niet gebruiken kunnen (en waar hij wel te gebruiken is hapert het al 6 jaar aan alle kanten..). Plus ze kwamen net met een enorme prijs verhoging tijdens een pandemie, vlak voor de feestdagen.. (waar iedereen dus ook enorm pissig over was)

https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/

https://aspirebudget.com

https://actualbudget.com/

lijken goede alternatieven te zijn, buckets heeft een unlimited gratis trial :)

Some other budget apps you may consider are:

• Actual Budget. Zero-based budgeting (and no forecasting) like YNAB. It's $4/mo for now (the developer may - or may not - increase that price, when direct import of account data is up and running). I haven't used it yet; waiting for the direct import feature to become active to demo it. Has mobile apps for iOS/Android.
• Budget with Buckets. Also zero-based with no forecasting. Free to try (unlimited trial time) and $49 to buy. I'm trying it out, but haven't gotten far. Setting up the accounts has been a chore, since the process is not intuitive and there are a lot of clicks needed to set up an account. I don't even want to look at setting up the buckets themselves right now, since the process has been convoluted in setting up the accounts. Mobile apps in development. However, it would be an ideal day to grind for a few hours with a glass (or four) of wine, and start a real test.
• Aspire Budget. Another zero-based with no forecasting, has mobile apps (iOS/Android). Free (not "if you aren't the client, you're the product" free - real free and accepts donations). Another one that I never got past the setup stage to actually use. If I didn't use YNAB, I would probably have made more of an effort to grind through setup.

I've been in love with YNAB since I started using it two years ago. The subscription model doesn't bother me; it paid for itself in perpetuity the day I quit smoking (I couldn't stomach having to budget in advance for cigarettes anymore). Zero-based budgeting is the only method that has kept me engaged longer than a few months, so if I ever move on from YNAB, it will be for a similar system.

Check out Actual Budget! The developer is still working on building out some important features like auto-importing and more custom reports, but it's really promising and I switched over from YNAB back in March and haven't looked back.

Currently, the short answer is "hard", but feel free to take the code and try.

On the Using the API page, it says "Currently, the API requires Actual to be running locally because of this. In the future, the client will contain all the code necessary to query your data and will work by itself. Right now the primary use case is custom importers and exporters, so running Actual first is natural."

Fellow YNAB4'er here.

There are some interesting alternatives to YNAB4 now. Actual Budget and Budget with Buckets are the ones I hear mentioned the most.

Actual budget seems to be the closest to YNAB4 as it has a month-by-month view (although it was only 3 months last time I checked). That's what I'm watching most closely.

nYNAB just does not do it for me. You lose so many things. And at some point in the future YNAB4 will die one way or another. So at some point we'll all have to move on :(

I used YNAB for several years but ditched it the end of 2021 after the price hike. Just far too expensive for what is basically a glorified spreadsheet for Aussies (as the bank sync doesn’t work for us).

At the moment I’m trying Actual and Buckets (iOS app came out for testing yesterday!). Both worth trying! But if a mobile app is important to you then Actual wins at the moment.

I’ve also just built my own basic site and database to track everything so I don’t lose data when switching / testing apps.

hi /u/amdz23!

I do have a couple of recommendations: 1. First of all, please feel free to reach out to YNAB support to inquire about them changing the platform they use on the back-end for your specific account. They utilize multiple providers and some of them work better than others. 2. You can also out seek assistance on the forums which may be more fruitful.

If you are truly considering switching away from YNAB (which I totally understand), you can find some recent posts on this subreddit related to third party options. I've been hearing great things about Actual Budget and Aspire Budget - though in full transparency, I haven't used either of them.

Know that you have a very supportive community here that is more than willing to help you with any other issues and I hope you have a great day!

~TheFriendlyBudgeter

Thanks for the recommendation! I'm currently in search of a budgeting app and two I've seen recommended recently are Actual and Buckets. I'll take a look at that one too.

Legacy user since YNAB3 ($45/yr.). I’m incredibly grateful to YNAB for educating and helping me over these years to go from a net worth of -$50K to over $100K. I was going to stay and had even adjusted my budget for the increase, but then I paused to think. Now I’m leaving. YNAB educated me out of using their product at this new price point—the extra features I’m being charged for I don’t need or use. For the features/functions I use this tool for I’ve decided to go with Actual. Just finished setting up my Fresh Start there. Having loved YNAB4, it’s a natural transition and is basically at the price point I‘ve been paying for nYNAb before the increase. So now for the tool I get to keep those other $40 doing their job: working for me by investing them 🚀 instead of giving them to YNAB. The education YNAB gave me stays with me (TBH a lot of that is still accessible here and on their website for free anyways). Moving forward, there’s no anger/bitterness for me. I can be as cold and calculating as a customer as they can be as a business. But I’ll keep an eye on them. If the ROI ever becomes worth it in the future because of new must-have features I’m not opposed to switching back to them.

Check out Actual Budget if you don’t like YNAB4. I’m using YNAB4 still obviously but Actual is the closest I’ve found to a true YNAB experience plus it is supposed to have auto bank import.

I'd add actualbudget.com to this list and put it near the top. As a YNAB4 user who could never make peace with the idiotic feature-stripping in the transition to nYNAB -- and as an aside, why are folks so shocked at YNAB for doing what they just did, when they've done this before! -- I searched for an alternative. Actualbudget is hands down the best alternative I've found. Some points:

1. It preserves many of YNAB4's useful features like multi-month view, walling off months so that you can truly live on last month's income, right-red arrow to carry overspends at the category level to help with reimbursement categories.
2. It has a flawless YNAB4 importer as well as a nearly perfect nYNAB importer.
3. It has a web interface AND a local desktop client. It also has a fully-featured mobile application.
4. It has scheduled transactions.
5. Its $4/USD a month.
6. It feels just like YNAB and is FAST.

Disclosure: I get no compensation or ANYTHING for writing this. I'm just happy to spread a useful tool for those like me who really value one. I have long been dissapointed in the direction YNAB has taken, and it seems like they are doubling down on deserting the folks it seemed ostensibly made for.

I stopped working on it because I found https://actualbudget.com/ shortly after and got addicted to wow classic lol. I didn't actually switch to it back then as it was in its infancy, though I haven't looked at it recently and checking their front page, it seems like its changed a lot.

I use Actual Budget, which is more or less identical to manual YNAB (can't link to banks as of now but I think they're working on it) but cheaper. I used YNAB for a few years but switched over like half a year ago and am pretty happy with it.

I use Actually, which is like a more basic version of YNAB and it is the only thing that has worked for me. It's seriously been a lifesaver and saved me so many problems and mental breakdowns.

I do like the "YNAB way" of budgeting, but I'm not particularly fond of their apps and having all my financial data unencrypted on their servers. I'm sure there are advantages to running your own servers, but I would prefer having the data locally and synced via a service of my choice. Or alternatively end-to-end encrypted. I guess https://actualbudget.com/ would be a good alternative, but AFAIK you can only get transactions out of YNAB, not the budget data, so making the switch has a fairly high barrier for me. (Especially if you have years of data in YNAB already.)

Hi, have you by chance read the how to yet?

https://actualbudget.com/docs/budgeting/how-it-works/

James gives a pretty good overview on how envelope budgeting in actual works, also how money „rolls over“.

It does not have bank connectivity (as far as I know, although I'm not interested on that), but I'm very happy with Actual. Great UX, available on every platform (including Linux), focused on privacy, and the pricing is very reasonable.

https://actualbudget.com

In case it helps - Further notes regarding back ups (for the desktop app) can be found here):
https://actualbudget.com/docs/overview/loading-a-backup/

It's only available on the desktop app right now, which you can download here: actualbudget.com/download

This isn't super clear, sorry. The web version is relatively new and the whole signup/download flow needs to be changed to make it clear which options are available.

Automatic backups probably won't ever be available on the web because browsers don't like it when apps take up too much space. However, the app should still allow you to manually download the db and manually re-import a backup, but that's not implemented yet.

Cashflow tracking and net worth tracking are different things and trying to shoehorn them both into the same spreadsheet just makes it worse for both. I have budgeting software (Actual Budget) for day to day use, it doesn't know about my retirement accounts and doesn't need to. Likewise, my spreadsheet doesn't know how much I spend, just a total balance at the end of the month.

Actual is a privacy focused budgeting app with a similar zero-based system, but is much simpler to use. And not only does it support syncing across devices, your sensitive financial data is totally safe while it does that. (Also a small monthly fee, but a few bucks a month to support a lifestyle that saves thousands is totally worth it.)

I use Actual, an envelope budgeting system. It's not FOSS but it is privacy-focused. It's really a desktop app with an android app for entering transactions on the go. There's also a pretty inactive subreddit /r/actualbudget.

Yeah, for sure, budgeting needs to come first before emergency funds/savings, which is in turn before investing.

I used MoneyWell for at least 5 years to do envelope budgeting, because it did exactly the sort of envelope budgeting I want - allocate incoming money into buckets based on a prioritised plan, charge all outgoing money to buckets, if buckets go negative they stay negative, and I get to decide when and how I'd like to move money between buckets to balance them out. It's a bit different from YNAB because it has the concept of Income Buckets where I can park money before I decide to allocate it, and it has explicit Bucket Transfers where I can reason about "oh look the money i saved on not buying so many bubble teas can be moved towards my travel savings" vs the more abstract allocating less money to the category next month kinda thing in the YNAB style.

Unfortunately, MoneyWell's basically been in maintenance mode for several years so I can't recommend it. It's also Mac/iOS-only and I switched primarily to a PC some time ago and there's just been no great replacement. I've been using Actual (USD 4/mth) recently which is super cross-platform and has some interesting ideas, and it does kinda work for me, but it's really still too raw and unfinished to recommend to anyone. The developer also found that he just couldn't get enough subscription revenue for him to work on it full-time so he got a job and development has slowed accordingly.

While we all hate paying recurring fees (like the new YNAB -- USD 7/mth, crazy), I think it's really difficult to sustain software on a one-time license fee. But yet they need to fund ongoing customer support and bugfixes, until there's no money left to actually build the next major release. Oh well.

Shortly before Christmas my laptop (with YNAB4 on) broke and I had no plans at the time to buy a new one.

I was looking at Actual Budget (https://actualbudget.com/) which looked decent and pretty much the same thing.

Unfortunately, at the time, they didn't have a Android app so I can't vouch for it's quality.

Actual (subreddit) is an envelope budgeting tool built around privacy and a local first philosophy. Syncing across devices is supported too and they even built a custom end-to-end encryption system to do it.

It's really easy and even fun to use, once you figure out how envelope budgeting works. Fortunately the method is similar enough to YNAB that you can read the YNAB subreddit and blog for tips and motivation.

Hey! Thanks for the kind words!

There is currently an API: https://actualbudget.com/docs/developers/using-the-API/. So yes, you could definitely export it into whatever format you like.

I want to add the ability to export from the transactions screen to a CSV file. On top of that, there could be a bulk export which exports everything. What are you most interested in? Would all the transactions plus budget data be enough?

https://actualbudget.com/ - new and a bit rough, but it allows you to encrypt a file that's synced between your devices rather than have them sitting on the server ready to be data-mined, which is nice.

I saw that, didn't realize it was based on an API. I don't like compiled binaries though, I prefer scripts and http

I admit I was being lazy posting this

You're absolutely right. Sorry about your problems. The syncing problem is solved in the beta, if you are willing to run it. You can find links to download at the bottom of this post: https://actualbudget.com/blog/cloud-files

That is a very big change, and a big part of it is explaining it to users and updating all of the documentation. I wanted to get it out earlier but then the holidays hit so things slowed down. I will work on releasing it by next week.

I am actively searching for other people to be involved in Actual so things aren't totally blocked on me. Stay tuned.

About scheduled transactions, you are right. Part of my recent focus has been launching automatic transaction downloading, which I think is a bigger blocker for most people. I realize that it's common for people who use something like Actual to be more detailed in managing their transactions though, and scheduled transactions would be a big help.

I understand it doesn't work for you right now - please do keep an eye on it though!

Yes yes! This is coming, been juggling a couple big features recently. (This took up a bunch of time: https://actualbudget.com/blog/cloud-files)

I am also actively spending time trying to recruit others to be involved in Actual. I don't want my schedule to block progress and it will be more sustainable if I can get others involved.

This and other improvements to the transaction page will definitely happen though, a bunch of stuff should land by the end of the year.

It's just getting off the ground, (no scheduled/repeat transactions yet) but Actual shows real promise. Right now there's a problem with the sync-to-mobile option for new users, but it should be fixed soon.

You can try it for free, and it has the ability to upload YNAB4 files. In my case that was nearly flawless: only two split transactions involving categories and a transfer had to be fixed to reflect that happened.

https://actualbudget.com/

It will create the "sync group" when the other device successfully downloads and sets up the file. Sorry about your problems! (and the delay, been traveling)

The recent version has some problems setting up syncing, and I've since completely refactored how syncing is setup. This new version does it entirely differently and you can read more about it here: https://actualbudget.com/blog/cloud-files

I'm going to release it this week!

You're still treating that payoff as an expense. Are both of your credit card and checking account "on budget"? They should be - and then you can convert the payoff transactions as a transfer. In that case the transfer won't be categorized and is simply a transfer between accounts. (See creating a transfer: https://actualbudget.com/docs/accounts/transfers/)

With the new API, everything already exists for this to happen! I just added a task to track this though, because it would be nice if there was a single button or menu item somewhere to export everything into one blog. All it would do is call all the "getX" function for accounts, payees, transactions, budgets, and everything and stick it into a single JSON file.

Thanks for recommending Actual!

Part of r/personalfinance Wiki Step 0 is to do Budgeting.

The more you enter data (transactions) the more you can be aware of what your money is doing.

Like some said, YNAB yung suggestion nila. YNAB is based on the envelope method of budgeting.

You can find alternatives na free here /r/Zer0budgeting/ and https://actualbudget.com/differences/

I'd recommend you https://actualbudget.com/

It has a free tier (that removes multi-device synch) and basically it seems to be based around YNAB4.

Or you could try to find a YNAB4 license key only and use it

For me, I've been using YNAB4 since Jan 2014, and I see no reason to update to the subscription version for now.

Hey, I'm the founder of Actual (https://actualbudget.com) and I'd love for anybody to try it. Hope it's OK to bring it up in here - my goal is to build a zero-based budgeting system that's not overly complicated. Custom reporting is also going to be a focus and will be launched soon. It's a simple way to setup a solid way to track your money. (mobile only supports iOS right now but Android will be worked on)

If anybody tries it, I'd love any feedback!

For those wondering:

• https://actualbudget.com/pricing/

Downloadable local app, with a monthly fee if you need multi-device syncing.

For me this is promising, as I'm currently using YNAB4, and do not want to switch to a subscription service.

I'm happy to pay, once, for useful software--as well as for major upgrades--but have no desire to rent software and access to my own data.