Full Reviews of The Top Budgeting Apps in 2025
Cleo: Best for Fun Engagement
The AI-powered financial assistant that was founded in 2016 makes budgeting less boring. Get your recommendations in a light-hearted manner or go for the “roast mode” that humorously calls out overspending.
The app can help you track your spending, set budgeting goals and ultimately save money in an engaging way. Cleo connects to your bank accounts and provides real-time insights into your financial habits.
It can also help you build credit with its Credit Builder card. There’s no interest and no credit checks so you can feel confident in your ability to, as Cleo says, un*expletive* your credit.
Make your financial future a little more fun by downloading Cleo.
EarnIn: Best for Paycheck Advance
Earnin’s goal is to help people make any day payday. Instead of waiting two weeks for your paycheck, you can access up to $100 a day or $750 per pay period
The steps to get started are simple. Sign up and link your bank account, access your hard-earned money, then automatically repay Earnin when your check hits. Plus, you won’t have to worry about interest, mandatory fees or credit checks.
We love it for people who are struggling to pay bills on time, because you get your money as you earn it. And avoiding late fees means more money in your pocket.
Paycheck advances are not the only way Earnin improves your financial stability. It provides resources on financial goals, budgeting and paying off debt, as well as a credit monitoring tool.
Monarch: Best for Organization
Usher your money management into the modern era with an all-in-one personal finance app. Monarch lets you track your account balances, transactions and investments in one place, giving you a more complete view of your finances.
Having trouble monitoring your spending? You can track it by merchant or by category. The app also features bill sync, which allows you to see credit card balances, minimum payment due and other recurring expenses within Monarch. And with swipe to review, you can look over transactions with a quick swipe left or right. That way, you always know where you money is and where it’s going. It doesn’t get much more organized than that.
Saving for a big purchase? Get automatically notified when your savings get off track. Flex Budgeting is a new feature that lets you put expenses into fixed, non-monthly and flexible groups to better track how spending actually happens.
And if better budgeting is a family effort, Monarch also allows you to collaborate with your household. All with no ads, no data selling to third parties and a simple, intuitive design.
You can always try it for free for seven days before starting a paid subscription. But right now, you can get 50% off.
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Rocket Money: The Best Budgeting App
Known for trimming bills, Rocket Money, formerly Truebill, isn’t a stranger to The Penny Hoarder community as we’ve recommended the app before — and with good reason. Rocket Money offers tools for budgeting, managing subscriptions and negotiating bills.
Rocket Money is an excellent all-in-one app for those looking to get their financial world in better shape.
Rocket Money takes top billing for allowing you to calculate and create an allowance, so you know exactly how much money you have to spend each month. You can also set up goals for categories you want to watch, such as eating out at restaurants or shopping in general.
If you’re new to budgeting, Rocket Money is a solid option that walks you through the process. The app offers additional features — such as spending insights — that can help you build better budgets. You can see where your money is going each month and receive alerts if you are headed toward overspending.
We love Rocket Money’s subscription management feature, too, that checks your bank account for any recurring charges. It’s a great way to discover subscriptions you may have forgotten about or no longer require.
If you have a high cell phone or cable bill, Rocket Money can even negotiate it down to a lower rate. Rocket Money does take a cut of that savings for the first year if your bill is reduced.
While Rocket Money is free, you’ll pay $3 to $12 each month for premium features, which includes subscription cancellation. How much you pay is up to you.
Empower: Build and Manage Wealth
We’d be remiss not to include at least one budgeting tool that offers investment management services. Empower, formerly known as Personal Capital, is one of the most popular budgeting apps that allows you to add investment management services and financial planning tools alongside basic budgeting.
Empower lets you link bank accounts such as checking and savings accounts, credit card accounts, 401(k)s and IRAs and any mortgages and or loans. You can also create financial reports that track net worth and portfolio performance on your mobile device and desktop.
While Empower does support customizable spending categories, it doesn’t get into the weeds of expense tracking that many budgeting apps provide. Still, if you’re looking for a free budgeting app that also manages your personal capital, Empower fits the bill.
YNAB (You Need a Budget): A More Detailed Budgeting App
YNAB — also known as You Need a Budget — is a comprehensive, zero-based budgeting app that breaks down your spending and earnings into granular details. We love the features in YNAB, but the interface can be more intimidating than those of other budgeting apps that hold your hand throughout the process.
If you want to dive into the nitty gritty of your personal finances, YNAB is one of the best apps you can download — seriously, it could be life changing. YNAB connects to your bank accounts to automatically import your transactions and syncs in real time across multiple devices. You can start budgeting on your phone, then pick up where you left off on a tablet or computer.
The YNAB app offers the same features as our other recommendations, including the ability to set up and track goals or keep a close eye on your net worth.
YNAB is free for 34 days to give you a solid month of budgeting plus a few days for analysis. You don’t have to put in a credit card to sign up, so you won’t end up with a forgotten subscription if you decide YNAB isn’t for you. YNAB also offers a yearlong free trial for college students.
YNAB costs $14.99 a month or $99 a year.
Simplifi: The Budgeting Runner-Up
The Simplifi app isn’t nearly as popular as it should be. The simple layout and design of the app — one of our favorite features — makes budgeting feel approachable and less intimidating. But a simple design doesn’t mean a lack of features, as Simplifi packs in effective tools to help you establish a budget and stay on track.
With Simplifi, you can connect all of your financial data, including bank, credit card, loan and 401(k) accounts, so you can see everything all together. From there, you can set financial goals and budgets while keeping track of your spending. Your overall spending plan even gives you an overview of planned spending versus what you’re actually spending.
If you want to save for a big purchase, such as a car or a down payment on a home, Simplifi can calculate how much money you’ll need to set aside each month to meet your goal. If you update the goal or alter the time frame, Simplifi will recalculate everything for you — without you lifting a finger.
One of the reasons we like Simplifi is that the budgeting app is backed by Quicken, a finance giant with millions of customers. Simplifi builds on Quicken’s wealth of knowledge in the financial space.
Simplifi is easily worth the $2.99 a month to use!
PocketGuard: Budgeting at a Glance
PocketGuard is one of those finance apps that does the work so you don’t have to. The simple interface will sync bank accounts, calculate upcoming bills and manage your cash flow so you’ll always know how much you have to spend.
“In My Pocket” is another app feature that allows you to analyze your monthly income and expenses, showing the amount you have available to spend. With this feature, you can understand your spending capacity, and PocketGuard will notify you if your spending exceeds 50% or 75% of your budget.
If you decide to lean into the premium version, PocketGuard’s paid subscription comes with a personalized spending plan that can help pay off debt, save money and more closely track spending.
As budgeting tools go, there is a downside to PocketGuard’s place as one of the most popular budgeting apps. While it’s nice to have intuitive tools that manage how you’re spending money, that can mean less awareness about specific budgeting concerns.
Fortunately, most of PocketGuard’s functionality is wrapped up in a basic version that’s free to download in both the Apple and Google Play stores, so you can give it a whirl and see how it stacks up to other apps.
Buddy: Budgeting in Manual Mode
Buddy introduces itself as your new financial companion — aka the joyful budgeting app — and we couldn’t agree more. A little on the basic side, Buddy still helps you create budgets and track your expenses. You can even share your budgets with someone else, such as your partner or roommate. Buddy is our favorite option for people looking to handle their finances together.
While Buddy is a great budgeting app, you can’t link a bank account or card, which means you have to manually input each transaction. To some, this is a deal breaker. For others, it’s the power of a budgeting app but with more privacy because your bank account isn’t involved.
If you are OK with adding transactions, you’ll find a plethora of wonderful features within the Buddy app. In addition to creating simple budgets and tracking expenses, you can break down spending into custom categories and view insights into your current plan and spending history.
Buddy even allows you to personalize the app to put some fun in budgeting with custom colors and themes.
Buddy is free, but if you want everything the app has to offer, you’ll need a subscription. Select features require a premium subscription, which is $9.99 a month. Annual subscriptions are $49.99.
Honeydue: Budgeting With a Partner
Divide and conquer recurring bills with Honeydue, one of the best budget apps for couples. If you’re both trying to get a handle on finances and budget together, this might be the right budget app for you. Rather than having to get a joint bank account to manage money together, Honeydue allows couples to have separate views of their finances combined in one app.
One of the real advantages of Honeydue is it enables accountability if you and your partner are committed to better financial planning. Set up alerts when one of you is overspending in certain categories, and you can have a money chat and course correct to stay on track.
A clear disadvantage of Honeydue is that as much as it gives you a better handle on your current financial picture, the app doesn’t offer many proactive budgeting tools. Still, if you’d rather not plunk down money for a paid version of a budgeting app you may not use long term, Honeydue is worth a try.
Goodbudget: Best Virtual Envelope System
If shopping sprees and overspending are the culprits that cause your budget to crash and burn, Goodbudget might be just the ticket. Similar to the cash envelope system, Goodbudget is a way to promote a zero-based budgeting system with virtual envelopes.
You can get unlimited envelopes with the paid version of Goodbudget, but this budgeting app does have a downside. There’s no automatic syncing of bank accounts, so you’ll have to enter amounts to be assigned to each virtual envelope manually.
Goodbudget also has some features that allow you to sync and share your budget with someone else. This functionality makes working on a shared savings goal like an emergency fund or affording that dream vacation easy.
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