Is This the Quicken Alternative YOU’VE Been Looking For?
Quicken has long been a popular choice for personal finance management, but for many users it has become bloated, slow, and tied to a subscription model that’s hard to justify. If you’re looking for a simpler, more affordable option, Actual Budget is well worth a look.
Actual Budget is a free, open-source budgeting and expense-tracking application available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It focuses on clarity and control rather than automation, making it faster and easier to use than Quicken for everyday financial tracking. Transactions can be imported directly from your bank using downloaded files, and the interface is clean and straightforward.
In this video, I walk through installing Actual Budget locally on Linux Mint, setting up accounts and spending categories, and importing transactions. I also explain how on-budget and off-budget accounts work, which is useful for handling things like property taxes or insurance savings. While Actual Budget doesn’t directly track investments, I show how to manually adjust balances using monthly interest, dividends, and capital gains to keep everything accurate.
Reporting in Actual Budget is designed for quick visual insights rather than printable reports, while the budgeting screen is excellent for planning and tracking progress month to month. Budgets can easily be adjusted and copied forward, making long-term planning simple.
What I like most about Actual Budget is its privacy and control. Your data stays local if you want it to, there’s no forced cloud service, and the open-source model means you can support development with a donation instead of a subscription.
This video is a high-level overview. For deeper features and documentation, the Actual Budget website has excellent resources to explore further.
The Actual Budget website can be found here: Your Finances — made simple | Actual Budget
