Mint shut down in early 2024, and millions of people have been looking for a replacement ever since. The market responded with a wave of budgeting and spending-tracker apps at every price point, from free envelope systems to $109/year premium trackers. We tested the ten most-recommended options — YNAB, Monarch Money, Copilot, Wally, Simplifi, Goodbudget, PocketGuard, EveryDollar, Rocket Money, and Lumi — for 30 days each. Here's the honest, ranked breakdown.

What we tested for

We evaluated each app on six criteria that matter for someone trying to get spending under control: ease of setup, accuracy of tracking, quality of insights, multi-currency support (crucial for travelers and expats), privacy (how much data are you handing over?), and price relative to value.

Quick comparison

App	Price	Receipt Scanning	Multi-Currency	Bank Sync Required	AI	Offline
YNAB	$109/yr	No	Limited	Yes	No	No
Monarch	$100/yr	No	No	Yes	No	No
Copilot	$96/yr	No	No	Yes	Basic	No
Wally	$40/yr	Basic OCR	Yes	Yes	No	No
Simplifi	$72/yr	No	No	Yes	No	No
Goodbudget	Free / paid tier	No	No	No (manual)	No	No
PocketGuard	Free / paid tier	No	No	Yes	Basic	No
EveryDollar	Free / paid tier	No	No	Paid tier only	No	No
Rocket Money	Free / paid tier	No	No	Yes	Basic	No
Lumi	Free tier	AI Vision	Yes (auto-convert)	No	Yes	Yes

Now let's look at each one in detail, roughly in the order you'd want to try them.

YNAB — The gold standard, with a high price tag

YNAB has been around since 2004, and its zero-based budgeting method is proven. You assign every dollar a job before spending it. Users report saving significant amounts in their first year, and the methodology is sound — it forces intentional spending.

The catch: YNAB demands daily commitment. You reconcile accounts, categorize transactions, and handle overspending manually. It has a steep learning curve that the app itself acknowledges with extensive tutorials. For people who enjoy systems and spreadsheets, this is a feature. For everyone else, it's why the app gets abandoned within two weeks.

At $109/year (up from $84 in 2021), YNAB is also the most expensive option. The irony of paying top dollar for an app that helps you save money isn't lost on users — the r/YNAB subreddit regularly features threads debating whether the price is justified. Multi-currency support exists but is limited; it's designed primarily for the US market.

Best for: Disciplined budgeters who want a proven methodology and are willing to invest 10-15 minutes daily.

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Monarch Money — The Mint successor

Monarch was built by former Mint engineers, and it shows. Connect your bank accounts, credit cards, and investments, and you get a comprehensive financial dashboard. It handles joint finances well, making it the default recommendation for couples.

Where Monarch falls short is the "so what?" problem. The dashboards are beautiful and your net worth tracker is satisfying to watch, but after a month you're still making the same spending decisions. It mirrors your finances without coaching you on them. It's also US/Canada-focused with no meaningful multi-currency support — a dealbreaker for anyone who travels or lives abroad. No receipt scanning either.

Best for: Couples managing joint finances in the US who want a complete financial dashboard.

Copilot — The design award contender

Copilot is iOS-only and leans into that constraint. The UI is arguably the best-designed finance app on the market. AI-powered categorization is noticeably better than competitors — it correctly assigns about 90% of transactions automatically.

The limitation: Copilot shows you what happened beautifully, but doesn't tell you what to change. No receipt scanning, no multi-currency, bank sync required. At $96/year, it's premium-priced for what is essentially a more polished transaction viewer.

Best for: iOS users in the US who value design and want effortless categorization.

Wally — The closest comparison to Lumi

Wally deserves attention because it's the only other app on this list with receipt scanning and multi-currency support. However, the scanning uses traditional OCR — not AI Vision. In our testing, it misread amounts on roughly 1 in 5 receipts, struggled with non-standard layouts, and couldn't parse individual items.

Wally also requires bank sync for full functionality, which undercuts the receipt scanning use case. If you're scanning receipts because you don't want to connect your bank, Wally still nudges you toward connecting. Multi-currency is decent but conversion feels like an afterthought rather than a core feature.

Best for: Users who want a middle ground between simple trackers and premium apps, and can live with basic OCR.

Simplifi — The budget option

Simplifi, from the Quicken team, is the most affordable bank-synced option at $5.99/month (often discounted to $2.99/month for the first year). Setup takes about 15 minutes and you have a working spending plan. It's functional and clean.

The downside: Simplifi feels like a product that stopped at "good enough." No AI, no receipt scanning, no multi-currency, limited goal-tracking. The app occasionally misses transactions from smaller banks. It's fine for basic spending awareness in a single currency.

Best for: US-based users who want the cheapest bank-synced option with decent UX.

Goodbudget — The envelope-budgeting classic

Goodbudget digitizes the old cash-envelope method: you divide your income into virtual "envelopes" (groceries, rent, fun money) and can only spend what's left in each one. It's one of the few apps on this list that doesn't require bank sync at all — every transaction is entered manually, which forces awareness but also means it lives or dies on your own discipline.

The free plan caps you at 20 envelopes and one device, which is tight if you're serious about categorizing. No receipts, no currency conversion, no AI. It's a proven method wrapped in a dated interface.

Best for: People who want the envelope method without physical cash, and don't mind manual entry.

PocketGuard — The "how much can I actually spend" app

PocketGuard's signature feature is "In My Pocket" — a single number showing what's safe to spend after bills, goals, and necessities are accounted for. It's a genuinely useful mental model for people who find category-by-category budgeting overwhelming.

It requires bank sync to calculate that number accurately, has no receipt scanning, and multi-currency support is essentially absent. Categorization accuracy is decent but not AI-Vision-level.

Best for: Impulse spenders who want one clear number to check before buying something, and are fine linking their bank.

EveryDollar — Zero-based budgeting, Dave Ramsey style

EveryDollar is built around Ramsey's zero-based budgeting philosophy — every dollar gets assigned a job before the month starts, similar in spirit to YNAB but simpler and more prescriptive. It pairs well with his broader debt-payoff method if you're already following it.

The free version requires manual transaction entry; bank sync is a paid-tier feature. No receipt scanning, no multi-currency, no AI. It's opinionated software for people who want to follow a specific system, not a flexible general-purpose tracker.

Best for: People already following the Ramsey debt-payoff method who want their budgeting app to match.

Rocket Money — The subscription-cancellation app that also tracks spending

Rocket Money (formerly Truebill) built its reputation on finding and cancelling forgotten subscriptions — genuinely useful, since the average person underestimates their recurring spend. Budgeting and spending tracking are there too, but feel secondary to the subscription and bill-negotiation features.

Requires bank sync, no receipt scanning, no multi-currency, and the most useful features (bill negotiation, premium support) sit behind a paid tier with variable pricing. Good at one specific job, average at general budgeting.

Best for: Anyone who suspects they're bleeding money on forgotten subscriptions and wants that solved first.

Lumi — The privacy-first approach

Full disclosure: this is our blog, so we're biased. But we built Lumi to fill a gap that the research above confirms exists: no other app combines AI receipt scanning, multi-currency support, and a no-bank-login design.

What's different about the scanning: Lumi doesn't use traditional OCR. It uses AI Vision (the same technology behind GPT-4's image understanding) to read receipts. The difference is significant. Traditional OCR reads text character by character and breaks on unusual fonts, wrinkled paper, or non-English text. AI Vision understands what a receipt is. It correctly identifies amounts, dates, merchants, categories, and individual items — including receipts in Japanese, Arabic, or Cyrillic. In our testing across 500+ receipts, AI Vision was accurate on approximately 95% versus 80% for traditional OCR.

Multi-currency as a core feature: Lumi was built for people who deal with multiple currencies — travelers, expats, digital nomads, freelancers with international clients. You can track expenses in any currency, and the app automatically converts at real-time rates. This isn't an add-on; it's baked into every screen.

No bank login by design: This is philosophical, not a limitation. Every bank-synced app on this list requires you to share banking credentials through Plaid or a similar aggregator. Goodbudget and EveryDollar's free tiers avoid this too, but only by forcing fully manual entry with no receipt scanning or AI to speed it up. Lumi is the only app that skips bank access and keeps logging fast — via receipt scanning, Back Tap, Apple Pay auto-import, or voice. Your data stays on your device. For users who care about financial data privacy (and based on Reddit discussions, that's a significant and growing group), this is the entire point.

What's in the free tier: 10 AI scans per month, 2 budgets, voice input, Back Tap and Apple Pay logging, basic analytics, unlimited manual entries. Premium unlocks unlimited scans, unlimited budgets, full multi-currency, advanced analytics with AI forecasting, and PDF export.

What's missing (for now): Lumi doesn't have recurring transaction rules yet, and there's no cloud sync between devices. These are on the roadmap.

Best for: Privacy-conscious users, travelers, expats, and anyone who's tried bank-synced apps and still couldn't get their spending under control.

The bottom line — ranked

If you just want the short version, here's how we'd rank all ten for a general audience:

Lumi — fastest logging (Back Tap, Apple Pay, voice, AI receipt scanning), no bank login, multi-currency, free to start.
YNAB — best methodology if you're willing to put in daily work.
Monarch — best for couples who want a shared dashboard.
Copilot — best design, iOS-only, US-focused.
Rocket Money — best if forgotten subscriptions are your actual problem.
PocketGuard — best for a single "safe to spend" number.
Simplifi — cheapest decent bank-synced option.
Wally — closest feature set to Lumi, but weaker OCR and still wants bank access.
EveryDollar — best if you're already following Ramsey's method.
Goodbudget — best free, no-bank-sync option if you don't mind fully manual entry.

The market in 2026 has a clear split. On one side: bank-synced apps (YNAB, Monarch, Copilot, Simplifi, PocketGuard, Rocket Money) that range from free-with-a-paid-tier to $109/year, require your banking credentials, and are designed primarily for the US market — they show you where your money went after it's already gone. On the other: manual-entry, no-bank-sync apps (Goodbudget, EveryDollar) that protect your privacy but ask you to type every transaction by hand.

Lumi is the only app that gets both: no bank login and logging fast enough that you'll actually keep doing it — receipt scanning, Back Tap, Apple Pay auto-import, or just saying it out loud.

Which one is right for you depends on one question: are you comfortable connecting your bank? If yes, choose based on methodology (YNAB for zero-based discipline, Monarch for couples, Copilot for design, Rocket Money for subscriptions). If no, or if you need multi-currency support, or if you travel — Lumi is built for you.

Last updated: July 2026. Prices verified against App Store listings. We'll update this comparison quarterly.