I just found this article from Kiplinger’s that caught my eye. I previously wrote about my favorite free budget software and 10 free budget spreadsheets that I found, but I try to keep an eye out for new budgeting tools that pop up.
The best budgeting website is…
No surprise, their favorite was Mint.com. But they didn’t like that there wasn’t an easy way to manually add transactions and also thought that the support forums were not very helpful.
Next they mentioned Wesabe.com and Geezo.com. Here is what they had to say about them…
If you’re more interested in an online community, we suggest Geezeo.com or Wesabe.com. The latter keeps your budgeting focused. Although you can manage credit and savings accounts on the site, we had trouble uploading that data and stuck primarily to tracking our checking. However, Wesabe lets you manually enter cash accounts and transactions. You can link all your accounts to Geezeo, but we experienced some difficulty when trying to add more than one account from a single financial institution. Also, its investment-account tracker is rather bare bones, listing only your holdings’ shares and market values–unlike Mint, whose investment tool tracks fund and stock performance and portfolio allocation. Like Mint, Geezeo automatically tags your expenses; Wesabe invites you to create your own labels.
For the people who are not comfortable linking their bank accounts to the budgeting site they suggested using BudgetTracker.com or BudgetPulse.com. (Craig from BudgetPulse is a regular reader of CPF, so I am sure he is loving this shout-out!)
They also mentioned Buxfer.com explaining that it, “specializes in group budgeting and IOUs among friends. Perfect for roommates or group vacations, you can invite contacts to join and track shared bills (you can even access Buxfer via a Facebook application).”
There has also been a long-running discussion in the forums about budgeting tools which provides some valuable information if you are interested…
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Buxfer is better than Mint in so many ways. See the forum topic for why I think that.
Mint is VERY nice to look at. It’s also very easy to use. But Buxfer is the only one that supports CSV format, which is the only format my brokerage money market account exports… So that’s what I use. As a bonus, buxfer is also very responsive to user requests; they don’t always make the change we ask for, but they always listen and often respond.
I really like “You Need a Budget”.
I have yet to check out Buxfer, I guess I should take a look at it…
Hey CPF: Thanks for the shout out! We were very happy to be added on Kiplinger’s list with the other great tools mentioned. They all have excellent resources to help those who want to better budget their money. We offer an alternative to those for those who strictly only want to budget better and can get a more full experience by inputting your own data. We also have a complete site redesign coming in early 2009 for all those who are interested.
http://crown.mvelopes.com/
I totally think like the envelope system. You have to pay for it, but to me it makes more sense and has more features than Mint