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If you have ever considered using a money budgeting app, you may have already narrowed it down to the two most popular choices, Mint vs You Need a Budget (YNAB). If you made it to this page, you are probably wondering what are the pros and cons of each budgeting app and which one should you start using. This post will hopefully clarify the purpose and intent of each budgeting app as they both hold different competitive edges in the highly competitive personal finance industry.
What is the main difference between Mint vs. YNAB?
Mint is known to be a free, automated solution in which you can connect your financial property on their platform, to automate and get a bird’s eyes view of all the money coming in and out. Whereas, YNAB takes a different approach. YNAB encourages the idea of putting thought into each spend by taking a more manual approach. Although YNAB has recently incorporated financial imports, most of the budgeting decisions will take a more less automated approach to inspire better financial motives and habits. Mint is a free budgeting solution with no hidden fees. YNAB requires a $6.99 monthly subscription in order to use their budgeting software.
Mint features
- Mint offers online synchronization to ensure your banks can be linked to the platform to get automated updates
- Mint is supported across all popular devices and browsers
- Mint has a mobile app that supports SMS, Email, and, push notification alerts to monitor your financial properties
- Credit score tracking
- Investment and overall personal net worth tracking
- Great statistical graphs to easily visualize where spend is
- Ability to categorize and label purchases to enable users to have a more manual approach if they like the zero-sum budgeting approach better at their disposal
- Mint is free and has no hidden costs
- Software is backed by Intuit’s experienced team of security experts who run popular personal finance tools like TurboTax.
YNAB features
- YNAB is zero-sum budgeting at its finest and puts into perspective the financial consequences of poor budgeting
- The platform has great UX/UI design to make budgeting categorization and visualizations easy to read
- The Inspector feature forecasts money coming in and out, which may be helpful to see where your budget is currently.
- YNAB offers online synchronization to ensure most bank transactions are up-to-date and can be imported
- YNAB will change how you spend your money and rationalize expenses by changing bad habits
How to use Mint
How to use YNAB
Which budgeting app should you use?
Mint and YNAB is tailored towards different target audiences within the personal finance community. The decision between which budgeting app to use is dependent on how discipline you are. Mint is more of a passive approach in which you are constantly monitoring your finances but due to the convenience of the app, you may not look into the nitty-gritty details (but you can with better habits). However, with YNAB you are doing manual checks in your budget most of the time. Thus, each purchase coming in and out has a utility purpose is a more proactive approach. In other words, Mint is automated and quick. YNAB on the other hand is a zero sum budgeting app that may be more time intensive, but helpful for those who are less disciplined and need to be put on financial track.
Which budgeting app am I currently using?
I am currently using Mint the most, but that is not to discredit YNAB. YNAB has many pros and cons to their software budgeting app. In short, the approach and amount of personal discipline should be the ultimate deciding factor in which budgeting app to use.
Reviewed and edited by Albert Fang.
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Article Title: Mint vs YNAB Review | Best Money Budgeting Apps
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