Ask HN: Any nicer alternatives to Mint for personal budgeting?

Do you want it browser based? Standalone - mobile, desktop, both?

Does it need auto-import of transactions from your financial institutions?

Do you need budgeting or accounting or both?

EDIT:

I've used Mint for a long time, I like them for tracking my accounts but never quite got the hang of using it for budgeting.

I liked YNAB (standalone) for putting my inflow/outflow in terms of a monthly view, and their general financial philosophy is really good for people trying to get out from under debt (even small amounts) and move towards being more financially stable. It's useful if for nothing other than that. Their reports were also nice ways to view my money over time, to see where I could cutback on spending to make room for savings or other planned spending. It doesn't do auto-import, but does handle importing CSV files if you can download them from your bank/cc company. Other pros, it works on mobile and desktop using dropbox as the syncing mechanism. This is nice since that means syncing isn't tied to YNAB (though does require Dropbox to continue operating, safe for a few more years I imagine).

I tried their web version and was left dissatisfied. Lacked reporting, but gained auto-imports. So tradeoffs, also cost $5/month (discounted if you pay for the whole year).

I like ledger as an accounting tool, but I haven't got the hang of its budgeting mechanism. It's a CLI tool, but uses a plaintext file for managing your transactions. ledger-mode in emacs is solid, and it plays well with org-mode. I won't say this is "nicer" than Mint. It is, however, a good bit more powerful. It's a full-featured accounting system that's fairly approachable for programmers (IMO). There are some variants like hledger which are mostly compatible, but also offer some extra niceties like a self-hosted web interface.

I tried GnuCash, but found its interface on OS X particularly unpleasant and buggy so I didn't get far. More feature complete for accounting, I did setup budgets and thought I'd like it. But, again, the glitchy interface on OS X drove me away from it before I got far enough to really decide.

    > I tried their web version and was left dissatisfied. Lacked reporting

However, if you absolutely need it, there's a browser extension called Toolkit for YNAB: https://github.com/toolkit-for-ynab/toolkit-for-ynab. Besides reports it adds some more essential features like search.

YNAB recently got the ability to automatically pull your bank transactions, but I would actually recommend against this for a few reasons.

1. This the same problem mint has, there's a delay on the order of DAYS a lot of the time. Makes it hard to tell how much of a given category you have left.

2. Actively recording expenses the second you spend the money is easy, and a really good habit, because you'll be more in touch with where your money is going, with fewer surprises.