YNAB vs Buckets

Have you tried Actual Budget? I ditched YNAB for it when the price increase arrived, it was good, but not near as good as YNAB, I mean, it had some bugs and the dev, who is awesome I don't think he continued with the Android app at least, I think it went to open source and you can self host it? Not so sure as the app keeps working for me on Android.

Ooh I haven't used it but it does look promising, thank you for showing me this

I switched. I like buckets a lot but it isn't nearly as refined as YNAB. Still, it meets my needs. I use beta-bridge.simplefin.org for bank sync and I find it to be less buggy than YNAB used to be.

Pros: inexpensive/free, good bank sync (for me) Cons: not browser based, finding out average spending for categories isn't as intuitive, reports not as nice, etc.

I would consider switching to it but the syncing aspect doesn’t work for me…I use YNAB regularly on my iPhone & iPad apps and web version on my windows laptop. They instantly and seamlessly sync with iCloud. Wife and I worked on our budget at breakfast today and both were signed in on our iPads at the restaurant…just refresh and they both match in real time so we can work together. I usually add transactions on the spot using my iPhone and reconcile using two screens on iPad or laptop.

Sounds like as of now you have to manually back up or sync buckets or set up a server or something…no way.

I’m sure there are other issues but at current we are in a very critical place with our finances and this ease of use is very important in my household…

I switched from YNAB to buckets when they got rid of the grandfathered rate for YNAB. I am happy with buckets so far but I will likely look for another option when I start merging finances with my significant other.

Buckets works really well for my current use-case which is sitting down at my computer once every week or two to manually enter my expenses and adjust my budget. This is pretty much how I used YNAB4 and the web version of YNAB, other than occasionally using the mobile app, so I never really took advantage of all of the web YNAB features anyway. I have not tried the Buckets capability to sync with accounts automatically and I have not tried to sync my Buckets file between multiple computers.

Also, the import tool for Buckets worked great so I was able to keep most of my history. They have a free trial so there is nothing to lose in checking it out. I think they just put a $5 monthly savings for the license into your budget until you buy it.

Yeah. That would be a pain