Mint Alternatives for 2026: Best Desktop and Free Picks

Intuit shut Mint down on March 23, 2024 and pointed its users to Credit Karma, which tracks spending and net worth but never got Mint's monthly budgets or custom categories. Two and a half years later, people are still searching for Mint alternatives because the replacement never quite replaced it. This guide covers what Mint users actually miss, what to look for in a Mint replacement, six alternatives (including free and desktop options) with honest pros and cons, and how to recover your old Mint data if it still exists.

What happened to Mint

Mint launched in 2007 as a free, ad-supported dashboard that pulled in all your accounts and sorted spending into categories. Intuit bought it in 2009 and, in late 2023, announced it would fold Mint into Credit Karma, another Intuit property. The service closed on March 23, 2024 (Clark.com).

Users who migrated kept account balances, net-worth history and up to three years of transactions inside Credit Karma. What they did not get was the budgeting layer. As NerdWallet put it at the time, spending and net-worth tracking carried over, but setting monthly budgets and customized categories did not make the cut (NerdWallet). Credit Karma is a credit-monitoring product with spending views attached, not a budgeting app.

What Mint users miss most

Talk to former Mint users and the same features come up every time.

• Monthly budgets per category. Set $600 for groceries, watch the bar fill up, get a nudge when you hit 90%. Credit Karma shows what you spent; it does not let you set a target.
• Custom categories and rules. Mint let you rename categories, create subcategories and build rules so "SQ *COFFEE PLACE" always landed in Dining Out. That is the difference between a report you trust and a pile of "Uncategorized".
• Trends over time. Spending by category this month versus last month, income versus expenses by year, net worth over five years. Mint's trends view was basic but it answered the questions people actually ask.
• Bill and subscription tracking. Upcoming bills in one list and a view of recurring charges, which is how many people discovered the $12.99 subscription they forgot to cancel.
• Free. Mint cost nothing. The ads and offers were the price. Most polished replacements now charge $70 to $110 a year, which is the single biggest shock for former users.

What to look for in a Mint replacement

Mint did one thing extremely well: it aggregated everything automatically. That convenience is exactly the feature that is hardest to get for free in 2026, because bank-sync data costs money and the ad-funded model that paid for it is gone. So the first decision when weighing Mint alternatives is this: do you need automatic bank sync, or are you willing to import CSV files and enter a few transactions by hand to keep it free and private?

From there, check the rest of the list:

• Real budgets, not just spending reports. Targets per category and a visible "left to spend" number.
• Custom categories and payee rules. Non-negotiable if you want the reports to mean anything.
• Trends and reports. Category spending, monthly trends, income versus expenses, savings rate.
• Where the data lives. Mint's shutdown is the lesson here. A cloud service can close and take your history with it. A desktop app that stores data on your own PC cannot be switched off by someone else.
• Price. Free, or a subscription you would actually keep paying for.
• CSV export. Make sure you can leave the next app as easily as you had to leave Mint.

The best Mint alternatives in 2026

1. BudgetForge AI (free, desktop, offline)

BudgetForge AI is a free budgeting app for Windows 10 and 11 that stores everything in a local database on your PC. No account, no subscription, no ads, no in-app purchases, and nothing is uploaded anywhere. It is the "Mint alternative desktop" answer for people who decided, after March 2024, that they never want their budget to depend on a company's business plans again.

It covers the Mint features people miss: category budgets with "left to spend", monthly planning, recurring bills, and reports for spending by category, monthly trends, savings rate, net cash flow and income versus expenses. Transactions come in through CSV or QFX import from your bank or manual entry, with payee-based categorization. On-device "AI insights" flag unusual transactions, overspending categories and unused subscriptions, which is the closest thing on this list to Mint's old subscription alerts, except it runs locally. You can export to CSV any time.

Pros: free, private, offline, zero setup, envelope and zero-based budgeting built in. Cons: Windows only, no automatic bank sync, no mobile app, no net-worth tracking across investment accounts. Full comparison: BudgetForge AI vs. Mint.

2. Actual Budget (free, open source, desktop)

Actual Budget is free, open source (MIT) and local-first, with desktop apps for Windows, Mac and Linux. It uses envelope-style zero-based budgeting, which is a bigger shift from Mint's passive tracking than most people expect, but the reports and category rules are solid. Bank sync is possible through SimpleFIN or GoCardless bridges, but only if you run your own sync server (Docker, PikaPods at about $1.40 a month, or Fly.io).

Pros: free, cross-platform, your data stays local, active community. Cons: more technical setup for sync; the envelope method takes getting used to if you only ever tracked in Mint.

3. Monarch Money ($99.99/yr)

Monarch is the app many Mint power users moved to, partly because Monarch published a browser extension around the shutdown to export Mint data in bulk. It is a cloud service with bank sync, net-worth tracking, flexible budgets and shared household access, at $99.99 per year for Core or $199.99 per year for Plus. If the thing you loved about Mint was seeing every account in one place, Monarch is the closest modern equivalent, at a price.

Pros: most Mint-like all-in-one dashboard, reliable sync. Cons: $99.99 a year minimum, cloud only, account required.

4. Quicken Simplifi ($71.88/yr)

Simplifi is Quicken's web and mobile app: $5.99 per month billed annually ($71.88 per year), often promoted at $3.99 per month. It has bank sync, a spending plan, watchlists and reports, and it is cheaper than Monarch. For a Windows desktop option, Quicken Classic Deluxe (roughly $35 to $50 per year) stores data locally on your PC but still requires the subscription for bank sync; if it lapses you can view data but features stop.

Pros: cheaper than Monarch, polished, Quicken Classic offers a true desktop option. Cons: subscription either way; Simplifi is cloud only.

5. EveryDollar (free tier or $79.99/yr)

Ramsey's EveryDollar is a zero-based budget: plan every dollar of income at the start of the month. The free tier is manual entry only. Premium ($17.99 per month or $79.99 per year) adds bank sync and paycheck planning. It runs on the web and mobile, in the cloud.

Pros: free tier exists, simple and guided. Cons: no desktop app; free tier means typing everything; the Ramsey framing is not for everyone.

6. GoodBudget (free tier or $80/yr)

GoodBudget is a digital envelope app with manual entry and CSV import, no bank sync on any plan. The free tier allows one account, 10 regular envelopes and two devices; Plus is about $10 per month or $80 per year. Web and mobile, cloud-based.

Pros: simple envelopes, free tier, works for couples. Cons: no sync, free limits are tight, no desktop app, and it is a budgeting tool rather than a Mint-style overview.

Mint alternatives compared

How to get your old Mint data (if it still exists)

Whether you can recover your Mint history depends on what you did in early 2024.

• You exported before the shutdown. Look for a file named something like "transactions.csv" in your downloads. Mint's own export was capped at 10,000 transactions per file, so you may have several; Monarch's Mint Data Exporter extension produced a single file. Either format imports into every app above.
• You migrated to Credit Karma. Up to three years of Mint transactions moved with you. Credit Karma's transaction views are limited compared with Mint, so check what you can download from your account, and expect to fill gaps from bank statements.
• You did neither. Intuit said that users who did not join Credit Karma could request a copy of their Mint data through the data privacy section of their Intuit account (My Money Blog). It is worth trying, but do not count on it this long after the shutdown. The reliable fallback is your bank: most US banks let you download 12 to 24 months of transactions as CSV or QFX, and a few go back further on request.

Importing your history into the new app

Which Mint alternative should you pick?

If you want the free, everything-in-one-dashboard feeling of Mint and you are willing to pay for it, Monarch is the closest match and Simplifi is the cheaper one. If you took the shutdown as a sign to keep your money data on your own computer, BudgetForge AI (Windows, free, zero setup) and Actual Budget (cross-platform, free, more technical) are the two desktop choices, and both import your old CSV files. EveryDollar and GoodBudget are good if you specifically want a zero-based or envelope discipline rather than a passive tracker.

Whichever of these Mint alternatives you choose, do the one thing Mint users wish they had done sooner: export your data regularly. A CSV in a folder you control outlives any app. For a broader look at free options on Windows, see our roundup of the best free budgeting apps for Windows.