Mint shut down in March 2024. Intuit pushed everyone toward Credit Karma, which turned out to be a credit-score product with a transactions tab bolted on, not a budgeting app. Two years later a lot of people are still using a spreadsheet they meant to be temporary.
This is a comparison of what actually replaced it. We make one of the tools on this list, so read it with that in mind — but the honest answer is that Pare is the right pick for a specific kind of person and the wrong pick for most Mint refugees, and this post says so plainly.
#The quick answer
| App | Best for | Bank sync | Price at last check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monarch Money | The closest Mint replacement | Automatic (Plaid/MX) | ~$14.99/mo, ~$99.99/yr |
| YNAB | Changing habits, not just tracking | Automatic | ~$14.99/mo, ~$109/yr |
| Copilot Money | iPhone and Mac users | Automatic | ~$13/mo, ~$95/yr |
| Actual Budget | Free and self-hosted | Manual or import | Free, open source |
| Pare | Avoiding bank logins entirely | Statements you download | Free self-hosted; $8/mo hosted |
| Empower | Investment and net-worth tracking | Automatic | Free (sells advisory) |
Competitor prices move; check their sites for current numbers.
#First, the thing nobody tells you
Mint was free because you were the product. It ran ads, it pushed credit-card and loan offers, and Intuit used the aggregate data. That's what paid for the automatic bank syncing, which is genuinely expensive to run — aggregators like Plaid charge per connected account, every month.
So when people ask for "a free Mint alternative with automatic sync," they're asking for a business model that no longer exists. You now pick which cost you'd rather pay: a subscription, your own labour, or your data. Every app below is one of those three answers.
#Monarch Money — the closest replacement
If what you want is Mint, maintained, this is it. Automatic bank connections, a proper budgeting layer, net worth tracking, and — the feature that genuinely separates it — real support for two people sharing one budget. Partners get their own logins against the same household finances, which almost nothing else does well.
It's around $99.99/year at last check, and it uses aggregators to hold a connection to your accounts. If the subscription is worth it to you and you're comfortable with that connection, stop reading and go get Monarch. That's not a grudging recommendation; for most people leaving Mint it's the correct one.
Where it disappoints: the automatic categorisation still needs regular correcting, and connections break more often than anyone would like. That's an aggregator problem, not a Monarch problem, and it affects everything in this category.
(We wrote a longer head-to-head in Pare vs Monarch.)
#YNAB — if you want to spend differently
YNAB isn't really competing with Mint. Mint told you what happened; YNAB makes you decide what will happen, by assigning every dollar a job before you spend it. It's a method with a real learning curve, and the people who stick with it tend to be evangelical about it because it changed their behaviour rather than just their reporting.
Around $109/year at last check. Pick it if your problem is "I overspend and I want to stop." Don't pick it if your problem is "I'd like to see where my money went" — you'll resent the ceremony.
We went deeper on why these are different paradigms in Pare vs YNAB.
#Copilot Money — the best-looking one
Copilot is the nicest piece of software in this category. The interface is genuinely excellent, the categorisation is smart, and it feels native because it is. It's also iPhone and Mac only, which is either irrelevant or disqualifying depending on what's in your pocket.
Roughly $95/year at last check. If you're an Apple household and you want the app that's most pleasant to open, this is the one. Pare vs Copilot has the longer comparison.
#Actual Budget — the best free option
Open source, envelope-style budgeting, and it runs locally with an optional sync server you can host yourself. No subscription, no company that can shut down and take your data with it. It's the answer for people who want YNAB's method without YNAB's bill, and who don't mind doing setup work.
The cost is your time. Bank syncing takes configuration (and often a third-party bridge), and you're the support team. For a technically comfortable person that's a fine trade.
#Empower — if it's really about investments
Empower (formerly Personal Capital) is free and very good at net worth and portfolio analysis, and mediocre at day-to-day budgeting. It's free because it's a lead generator for their wealth-management service, so expect a call if your balances are large enough. Use it alongside something else rather than as your only tool.
#Pare — the one we make
Pare doesn't connect to your bank. You download your own statements — a PDF, or an OFX/QFX export — and drop them in. It parses them locally, categorises the transactions, and builds the spending trends, subscription detection, budgets and cash-flow forecast from there. Uploaded PDFs are deleted the moment they're parsed.
It's open source and free to self-host, in which case your data sits in one SQLite file on your machine and nothing leaves it. Hosted is $8/month, with a free tier.
The other thing it does that nothing else on this list does: it ships an MCP server, so you can ask Claude questions about your own spending in plain language instead of clicking through dashboards.
Who should not pick Pare: anyone who wants balances that update themselves. Statements lag the calendar by a few days, so Pare is a retrospective tool, not a live one. It's also single-user — no shared household budgets. And it's a manual step every month, which some people will find disqualifying. That's a fair reaction. (There's an opt-in SimpleFIN sync if you want automation later, where you pay the bridge directly and your bank login still never touches Pare.)
The reasoning behind the whole approach is in why we don't connect to your bank.
#How to actually choose
Answer one question: what annoyed you most about Mint?
- "It broke constantly and nobody fixed it" → Monarch. Same model, actually maintained.
- "It showed me the damage but didn't help me change" → YNAB.
- "It was ugly and slow" → Copilot, if you're on Apple.
- "I don't want to pay a subscription forever" → Actual Budget.
- "I never liked handing over my bank login" → Pare.
- "Nothing — I just want it back" → Monarch, honestly.
#Moving your data
Whichever you pick, do this first: export whatever history you still have, and download the last 12 months of statements from each account directly from your bank. Statements are the durable record — they don't expire when an app shuts down, and every tool here can ingest them one way or another.
Our switching guide covers the export paths for Mint, Monarch and Copilot specifically, and the statement download guides cover where each bank hides the file.