Meet Maggie, PCMag'sYNAB (You Need A Budget) helps you plan your spending based on your regular and occasional expenses and income. But you work with money you’ve already earned rather than guessing at your future finances, as you do with most alternatives. This innovative approach requires regular attention and has a steep learning curve (tons of help resources are available), but the eventual reward is a realistic monthly spending plan. A revamped mobile app is a welcome improvement since my last review, and you can now add photos to transactions and quickly access your most critical goal. YNAB is worth checking out if you like its philosophy, though Monarch and Quicken Simplifi are our Editors' Choice winners, as they offer a more intuitive user experience and a well-rounded set of financial tools.
YNAB costs $9.08 per month, billed annually or $14.99 per month. A 34-day trial is available without supplying a payment method. Why 34 days? After one month, you'll have just begun to understand your budget and spending patterns. So, YNAB gives you a few extra days to think it over. College students can apply to have YNAB waive the fee for one year, and you can invite up to five family members and close friends to share your account (they can create their own plans and share them if they want).
YNAB offers competitive pricing, especially given the support it provides (more on that later) and its more complex approach to budgeting. Monarch ends up just slightly more affordable at $8.33 per month, billed annually. Quicken Simplifi is now $6.99 per month, billed annually. Rocket Money, which offers a more traditional budgeting option and additional personal finance tools, lets you “pay what you wish,” as long as it’s between $11 and $13 per month. Credit Karma and NerdWallet are still free. They offer personal finance tools and education, but their budgeting capabilities can’t match YNAB’s.
Learning the mechanics of YNAB is one thing, but you’re not as likely to get a deep understanding of your spending habits and save money unless you understand the philosophy behind the app. Most personal finance sites have a fairly simple setup process. Basically, you connect your online financial accounts and import transactions. Then, you might change a few settings. You do all those things in YNAB, but it notable uses zero-based budgeting, which means you assign earned dollars to categories until all the money is gone.
YNAB has maintained four simple rules for years:
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Give every dollar a job.
Embrace your true expenses (turn large, infrequent expenses into manageable chunks).
Roll with the punches (if you overspend in a category, adjust).
Age your money (spend less than you earn, and eventually, you’ll be spending money you earned a month or more ago).
YNAB’s 20 years of experience have crystallized the company’s thinking on why the philosophy works. The key to stop worrying about your money is knowing what you will use your money for, which is the key principle behind the company’s first rule: Give each dollar a job. YNAB founder Jesse Mecham’s new book, "Never Worry About Money Again," which is set to release on August 11, 2026, distills the company’s philosophy into one core question: What is this money for? The answer will help users “spend with clarity and confidence.” The YNAB website and app will reflect this evolving philosophy after the book’s release.
Typical budgets, like those in Monarch and Rocket Money, rely on forecasts. You estimate your future income and expenses, and the apps show you where your actual inflows and outflows fall relative to your targets. This might be sufficient if you just want to account for your progress and don’t want to spend a lot of time finessing your budgets (you ultimately adjust your budget based on what you learn about your finances). YNAB is more reality-based, since it has you work with the money you have.
How does this all work in practice? YNAB starts by opening the home page, simply called Spending Plan, which at this early stage displays a starter set of spending categories based on your history. The Spending Plan page typically consists of three columns. Housekeeping tasks, including the bank accounts you connect, appear in the left pane. The middle section is where you spend most of your time. It includes a list of spending categories to get you started. Eventually, it will display other content as needed, such as reports and transaction registers. The right pane changes as you work with your Spending Plan.
Most other personal finance apps have a more traditional, toolbar-based interface or at least a series of links at the top of the page. You move from one page to another depending on what you want to do. In YNAB, you spend most of your time on the same page, which changes as you work. The central Spending Plan page makes all the data and tools you need available, rather than forcing you to travel around the site. This approach is unusual, but it works very well. Pages are attractive and understandable.
The only real setup you have to do is connect all of your online financial accounts so YNAB can import your transactions. You can always enter transactions manually to close any gaps. You should also carefully consider the structure of your categories and category groups. You have full control over these and can edit them as you go, but the site encourages you to be as comprehensive as possible at the start. It’s good to strike a balance between overly broad categories and overly granular ones.
YNAB knows that you will struggle at first, and it does a terrific job of providing guidance. It presents its educational tools in an entertaining, lively fashion. A searchable help system features well-written, understandable how-to articles. You can contact support by email and expect a response within one to two business days. The site’s chatbot is responsive and thorough, though a little slow. YNAB also has dozens of free workshops and webinars each week, along with a robust YouTube channel. You can also read Jesse Mecham's earlier book "You Need a Budget," which outlines YNAB’s philosophy. I encourage you to spend some time watching videos and taking a webinar or two before you even start working with the app.
YNAB delivers all the help you would need to learn how to use the app—and then some. Its friendly interface and navigation tools work together to make the budgeting process as easy as possible. But all of that is necessary. You can’t just sit down, plug in your accounts, and expect to understand the system like you can with other personal finance solutions.
The sole step that feels akin to a traditional budget is setting spending targets. How much do you anticipate needing for each category in a week, month, year, or a custom frequency? This will usually be a monthly total, but you can set targets for bills that are due at other intervals. Where appropriate, YNAB breaks the totals down into periodic increments. Default category groups include Bills (such as electricity and internet), Needs (variable expenses, such as groceries and medical expenses), and Wants (optional expenses, such as dining out, donations, and entertainment). YNAB even provides a category called “Stuff I Forgot to Plan for.”
The site lays out your Spending Plan as a spreadsheet with the following columns: Category, Assigned (the real dollars you’ve allocated), Activity (imported or manually entered transactions), and Available (what you can safely spend). These numbers change as you spend budgeted dollars, as do the colors in the Available column. Green indicates you’re OK and have money to spend. Yellow categories are underfunded. Red is bad. You’ve overspent in that category, and you should move money immediately from another category. And gray requires no action since the category is fully funded.
A vertical pane on the right shows your options for most categories, including the available balance, cash left over from the previous month and assigned this month, any spending you’ve done, and your preference for the next month’s handling of that category (often, allocate the same amount). You can have YNAB auto-assign categories based on what it learns. After you use the app for a few months, you get a running update of a category’s behavior as well as historical information about each.
It can take a while for YNAB to click, and you probably won't hit your target amounts the first time you set up your financial framework. You might not even succeed in the second or third month. And no matter how long you use it, you’ll probably always have to make adjustments occasionally. But the longer you use YNAB, and the more it learns about your money habits, the more accurate your target amounts are likely to be. Awareness of your monthly expense patterns can lead to more disciplined spending—and hopefully, more money left over.
YNAB has a single focus: to help you develop and maintain a realistic spending plan that gives you confidence in how your money works as part of your life. It doesn't include bill management or investment tracking features. Transaction management tools are minimal, though you can see the new transactions YNAB has imported in a register and assign categories. New since my last review is the ability to add photos to transactions. You can either snap them in the app or upload stored ones.
YNAB also doesn’t have a separate goal-setting tool, unlike some competitors. But your work with YNAB is all about meeting and setting all-encompassing financial goals. You don’t just say you want to save $3,000 for a vacation and let the app monitor your progress. You teach YNAB how your spending patterns align with your goals, and how your income and expenses ebb and flow over the months. So, its goal-setting tools are actually superior to the competition’s. The app calls them targets instead of goals. The latest version of the app lets you specify a Current Goal, a target you want to have prominently visible at the top of the app’s home page.
Unlike Quicken Classic, which offers numerous customizable reports, the browser-based version of YNAB has just five: Income vs. Expense, Net Worth, Spending Trends, Age of Money (measures how long, on average, your money sits in your accounts between earning and spending), and Spending Breakdown. You can filter these by accounts and categories and export them as CSV files. I don’t feel that YNAB needs any additional standard reports, considering its scope and the fact that its Spending Plan is one giant, interactive report.
YNAB's revamped mobile apps (available for Android and iOS) are intuitive and attractive, and their navigational tab system makes sense; some competitors make you guess at where you might find a particular feature. I don't expect a full reproduction of YNAB’s Spending Plans, but I was surprised at just how much carriers over (though you have to click around to see everything). The reports (Reflect tab) are available as well.
The new Home tab displays the information you are most likely to want to see at a glance. This includes your pinned categories (such as the ones you use most frequently), your Current Goal, a summary of the current month’s progress, a look at the month ahead, and a few targeted resources. The app also includes a handy link to support.
YNAB has been around for 20 years. The company promises to keep your information encrypted and secure and makes its full security policy publicly available. The policy is strong. YNAB uses bank-grade or better encryption, and it doesn't store your bank credentials. In addition, the app supports multi-factor authentication.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: YNAB)
YNAB
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
YNAB is more than a financial management application; it’s a philosophy. YNAB calls it “spendfulness,” intentional spending that helps you align your money with your priorities so you make smarter financial decisions (and, hopefully, save more dollars in the process). Yes, it takes time to learn, but there are more than enough support resources available, and the payoff can be worth it, especially if the philosophy speaks to you. That said, Monarch and Quicken Simplifi are our Editors’ Choices because they both provide more comprehensive personal finance tools and user experiences that make money management virtually painless.
STILL ON THE FENCE?
About Our Expert
I write about money. I’ve been reviewing tax software and services as a freelancer for PCMag since 1993. Along the way, I took on reviews of other types of business and personal finance technology. Prior to that, I had spent a few years writing about productivity and entertainment applications for 8-bit personal computers (my first one was a Commodore VIC-20) as a member of the editorial staff at Compute!
After working at Lawson Associates, now Lawson Software, I switched my focus to accounting but learned that personal computer applications were more progressive and interesting to cover than mainframe solutions. So I served as editor of a monthly newsletter that provided support for accountants who were just starting to use PCs. I still ghostwrite monthly how-to columns for accounting professionals. From there, I went on to write articles and reviews for numerous business and financial publications, including Barron’s and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine.
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