What is Reddit's opinion of Firefly III?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Offering a different approach: have you tried Firefly III?

It is a self hosted financial planning tool that has just enough complexity to be helpful without requiring an accounting background to use. It will probably offer more value than a generic spreadsheet too by making it easier to view how your finances move around over time.

Link: https://firefly-iii.org/

Firefly 3 is pretty good.

One design decision that might not be everybody's cup of tea is that it strongly discourages automatic data filing and instead promotes daily manual logging of expenses to help keep you mindful of your spending.

While it doesn't support OFX, Firefly III is a really good web-based personal finance application that I've learned to love over the last few weeks. You can install it manually or using Docker.

And instead of rolling your own, you could try to bring OFX support to Firefly III which would probably save you a lot of work and would benefit others as well.

I also use Firefly (https://firefly-iii.org). If you're comfortable self-hosting, it's a nice option. There are importer tools for things like YNAB or CSV files from your bank.

To auto-categorize, you can setup rules so that transactions matching certain criteria will go into a category.

A vote for Firefly, an open-source, self-hosted alternative. Might not be everyone's cup of tea but being able to ensure all the data is mine is very appreciated nowadays.

The dev, /u/JamesCole5, is super responsive and helpful too.

Tools used : Firefly-III for tracking, and SankeyMATIC for the visualization.

Numbers are in Euros. My gross yearly income sums up at around 38k€. I'm a Ph.D. in Chemistry working in a chemical manufacturing plant.

Legend :
- Food Tickets are a thing we get as a bonus in Belgium, usually 4-7€ per worked day.
- Transportation income, ditto, like food tickets. Depends on distance traveled to reach the workplace.
- House Budget is my half of what my SO and I split for the house : loan, utilities, anything related to our shared house we bought in 2014.
- TDRA is a Tax-Deductible Retirement Account, we can max it at 960€ a year for 30% tax deduction.
- HYSA is a "High"-Yield Savings Account, currently sitting at a measly 1% return. And it's the best I could find in BE.
- Em. Fund stands for Emergency Fund, self explanatory.

As I mentioned in a top-level comment, Firefly is modern and nice, and you can host it yourself so that it's accessible anywhere with a browser, but the data is still yours. The subreddit is /r/FireflyIII/ too.

Not automated like Mint, but that's what I like : the free and open-source GNUCash. Looks dated I agree, but powerful little piece of software. You're able to produce graphs and reports of your finances after inputing your day-to-day transactions.

A little more eye-candy and still open-source and free, Firefly is what I use now. Website-like layout with a responsive design so you can use it on your desktop and phone efficiently, to enter transactions on the go. Reports, budgets, categories and whatever you can imagine are there.

Both work on the concept of double-entry bookkeeping, so you have to understand that first, but it's dead easy. Basically, every expense account transaction (where you spend money) must have a revenue account transaction with an opposite value, so that their sum is always zero. e.g.: My work pays my salary of X$ to my checkings account = my WORK account shows a transaction for -X$ and my checking account show a transaction for +X$; I buy a sandwich with cash, my cash account shows a transaction for -Y$ and a "sub shop on the street" account shows a transaction of +Y$.

I use Firefly to track my finances. I installed it on a separate virtual computer that has no internet connection and is only powered on when I want to check or track my expenses.

It takes maybe 30min to 1h per month to do so but at least I'm sure my data is safe with me. No way I'd trust a random app or company with my financial data, let alone automated access to my bank accounts.

Firefly is open source and free: https://firefly-iii.org

Yep. To be straight all of those services are using aggregator networks to gather data from banks, and almost all of them will be playing with this data. There's no real proper way to take it out for such places as it's not meant to be taken out. The only thing you kind of choose is if the service itself will be doing anything bad or if it's going to store your bank credentials instead of more protected aggregator networks like Plaid...

If you're tech savvy, I would recommend locally hosted Firefly III with parsers of PDF bank statements (it's Canada, most banks can't even properly export CSV with all transactions...) https://firefly-iii.org/

Thanks for the shout-out! As the developer of Firefly III, I always appreciate it.

I must admit though that for this particular use case, Firefly III isn't really the best solution. Personally I use Portfolio Performance, as suggested by others.

People that want to know more about Firefly III though, allow me to shamelessly plug the website.

Firefly is awesome. It doesn't automatically pull in transactions for you, but you can import CSVs. I started using it thinking I'd want all of that to be automated. Having used it for a couple weeks, I find that entering transactions by hand 1) is not that time consuming and 2) really makes me think about how I'm spending my money.

I'd have a look and see if there's any open source web apps that allow you to do what you're doing - something with a mySQL backend. If you can find such a web app, you could host it in azure app service for relatively cheap and use the "mySQL in App" feature to keep costs down - as you're the sole user there wouldn't be need for huge performance.

something like https://firefly-iii.org/ would be a good web app to use, and would help you learn about app service in azure, and potentially some other features.

Me too, excel is not my coup of tea.

Firefly $0 but you need your own server / Raspberry setup https://firefly-iii.org Buckets $49 wich has an untimed trial https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/ Budgetwise $99 lifetime solution https://www.budgetwise.io/

There are more solutions out there, those above where the ones I found during my journey and they could be interesting to you depending on your needs. Two years of a YNAB subscription is more expensive than any of the above mentioned alternatives.

The awesome-selfhosted contains a list of self-hosted personal finance managers. I used Firefly III for a while, which also supports importing transaction data from financial institutions (the docs got some pages about the supported institutions). It seems to be the most complete open-source, selfhosted personal finance manager at the moment (the maintainer is on Reddit aswell, /u/JamesCole5).

Er is voor de wat meer 'tweakers-gerichte-redditors' ook een self-hosted applicatie, namelijk Firefly III. https://firefly-iii.org/ Gemaakt door een Nederlander die ook veel support levert op Tweakers. Ik ga 'm deze week eens proberen.

Firefly is /r/FireflyIII (Official site here), it's a money management software.

Nedata is a typo for Netdata, a server monitoring system.

Gitea is a git server.

+1 for Firefly III. The developer is super responsive and keeps it well maintained. Some folks might not like the emphasis on manually entering transactions, but I love that it forces me to really understand my cash flow.

Hi! I develop Firefly III.

The automatically integrated tracking that /u/SolFlorus is referring to is terribly hard to do on an open source platform because the resources just aren't there. I can't develop drop-ins for the 5000+ banks that exist nor could I maintain them.

However, I support Spectre which is the next best thing. They do it for me.

Personally though, if you want to manage your finances (and not just view your existing data as fancy charts) I would suggest to not any automatic tracking but entering transactions manually.

I've enjoyed GNUCash a lot, before transitioning to Firefly-III which is as full-featured and also beautiful to look at. Just to throw open-source alternatives a shout-out.