Quicken is the long-running personal-finance app for budgeting, tracking accounts and investments, and watching net worth over time, with bank-download and auto-categorization that pull years of transactions into one place. The pain is that it moved to a subscription where your access is tied to paying - let the plan lapse and you lose the connected features that make it useful - and it stays a Windows or Mac desktop product whose data lives in a proprietary file that is awkward to move anywhere else. The open source options here put money tracking back under your control: self-hosted or local-first, with your financial history in open formats on your own machine or server, readable whether or not you ever renew anything.
Actual Budget is a local-first personal finance app built around envelope budgeting. It runs entirely on your device, so it keeps working regardless of your network connection, and your data stays on hardware you control rather than a hosted account.
Firefly III is a free personal finance manager you run on your own server to track income and expenses. It is fully self-hosted and isolated, and it will not contact external servers until you explicitly tell it to, so your records stay off the cloud.
Ghostfolio is open source wealth management software for tracking net worth across cash, stocks, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies on multiple platforms. It replaces spreadsheets with a single personal finance dashboard and runs as a mobile-first progressive web app.
Sure is an all-in-one personal finance app for tracking, managing, and growing your money. It is a community fork of the now-abandoned Maybe Finance project, kept alive and self-hostable so the codebase stays available.
Wallos is a self-hostable web app for tracking personal subscriptions and recurring payments. It replaces spreadsheets for keeping due dates, categories, and spending visible, with financial data kept on your own server.
Wealthfolio is a local-first portfolio tracker for investments, net worth, spending, and simulations. Your data stays on your device with no cloud database and no account required, and manual tracking and CSV import are free forever.
TaxHacker is a self-hosted accounting app for freelancers, indie hackers, and small businesses that want to automate expense and income tracking. Upload photos of receipts, invoices, PDFs, or bank statements and it recognizes and extracts the data you need, so documents do not have to be entered by hand.
Ledger is a double-entry accounting system accessed from the UNIX command line. There is no UI: you write account names and transactions into a text file, then run Ledger with options to specify the input and the reports you want. It reads the files and generates output, with no other database or stored state.
Beancount is a double-entry bookkeeping language for recording financial transactions in plain text files. It reads those records into memory and generates a variety of reports, so your accounting data stays in a format you can inspect, version, and manage directly rather than locked in a closed app.
Direct File is the IRS service that lets taxpayers electronically file federal tax returns for free, directly with the agency. It interprets the Internal Revenue Code as plain-language interview questions, translates the answers into standard tax forms, and transmits them to the IRS Modernized e-File API. The web experience is built to work on a phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop and is offered in English and Spanish.
hledger is lightweight, cross-platform accounting software for tracking money, investments, cryptocurrencies, invoices, time, inventory, and more in a plain text data format. It uses double-entry bookkeeping and keeps data in a file you control, with full version control and privacy.
Cashew is a budget and expense tracking app for managing finances, purchases, and spending plans across devices. It supports custom budgets, flexible time periods, goals, categories, and multiple accounts and currencies, with tracking for upcoming, subscription, repeating, debt, and credit transactions.
GnuCash is double-entry accounting software for personal and small business finances. It tracks accounts and transactions in a desktop application and is freely licensed under the GNU GPL. The current stable series is GnuCash 5.x.
UsTaxes is a free, open-source application for filing the US federal Form 1040. It runs as a web app or a desktop app and can also be self-hosted. All tax calculations happen in the browser and data is saved to localStorage, so no personal information ever leaves your computer.
budgetzero is a free zero-based budgeting system for envelope-style planning without ads or trackers. It works offline first and stores data locally in the browser, so budgets stay on your machine and can be self-hosted on your own server.
SubTrackr is a self-hosted subscription management application built with Go and HTMX. It keeps subscription tracking on your own server, with optional authentication and a privacy-first approach for people who want to manage recurring costs without handing data to a third party.
Kresus is a libre, self-hosted personal finance manager you run on your own server. It brings all your bank accounts into one interface, shows your balance at a glance, and helps you see where money goes by tagging and categorizing transactions.
OpenFisca-France encodes the French tax and benefit system as a model for the OpenFisca engine. It lets analysts and developers run microsimulation calculations, work with legislation as code, and query French rules without writing the model themselves. The working language of the rules is French.
OpenFisca Core is the engine behind OpenFisca, a microsimulation framework for modeling tax and social benefit systems as code. It supplies the shared rules and computation machinery that country packages, such as OpenFisca-France, build on top of, so a national tax-benefit model does not have to be written from scratch.
Start by separating the parts of Quicken you actually depend on. Some households use it as a checkbook with categories, while others rely on scheduled bills, account reconciliation, investment lots, tax reports, and years of memorized payees. An open source replacement should be judged against your hardest workflow first, not the longest feature matrix. Pay close attention to how it models transfers, split transactions, cleared versus reconciled status, multi-currency accounts, and historical category changes. Those details determine whether your reports still make sense after the move.
Expect gaps around the pieces Quicken has tuned for mainstream personal finance users. Bank downloads may require different connection methods, manual imports, or CSV cleanup. Investment support often varies by asset type, especially for lots, reinvested dividends, cost basis, and retirement accounts. Mobile apps and web views may not match Quicken's polish or sync assumptions. Bill reminders, attachments, tax line mappings, and saved reports may need to be rebuilt. The tradeoff is usually more control over the data model and hosting, but less hand-holding around financial institution connectivity.
Migration works best when treated as an accounting close, not a one-click app swap. Make a backup of the Quicken data file, reconcile accounts, remove obvious duplicates, and export account history through QIF where possible. CSV exports from reports can be useful for audit trails or manual imports, but they usually lose structure such as transfers and splits. QXF is mainly useful inside the Quicken ecosystem and should not be your only exit plan. After import, verify opening balances, category mappings, transfers, securities, scheduled transactions, and recent reconciliations. Keep the old Quicken file and key reports read-only for reference.
Start with the workflow that would be most painful to lose. If you mainly track checking, credit cards, and categories, a register-focused app may be enough. If you depend on investment lots, tax reports, scheduled bills, or multi-account reconciliation, test those paths with a copy of your real data before committing. Quicken covers many personal finance habits in one file, so your replacement should match your actual usage.
Many are free to download, but that does not mean the total cost is zero. You may pay for hosting, backups, mobile access, bank data aggregation, or the time needed to clean imports. Review the license if you plan to modify or deploy the software for others. For personal household use, the bigger cost is usually migration effort and ongoing maintenance rather than the application itself.
A simple cash and credit card file can often be tested in an afternoon. A long-running Quicken file with investments, closed accounts, transfers, split transactions, and years of category changes can take several evenings to validate. Plan time for a parallel run. Import the data, reconcile balances against Quicken, compare a few important reports, and keep Quicken available until the new system produces trustworthy numbers.
Usually not. Quicken's native data file is not the normal migration path. Most replacements expect QIF, OFX, QFX, or CSV exports, depending on what they support. QIF is often the closest match for transaction history, categories, and accounts, but it still may need cleanup. Attachments, saved reports, reminders, online connection settings, and some investment details often do not survive as usable imported objects.
Do not assume the same connections will carry over. Quicken uses its own supported connection paths for many institutions, and replacements may rely on OFX, file downloads, CSV import, or a separate bank aggregation service. Some banks expose good export files. Others only offer awkward CSV formats. Test your most important accounts before switching, because ongoing transaction import friction is what usually sends people back to their old workflow.
Some can, but investment migration is where expectations need to be careful. Basic brokerage transactions may import, while cost basis, lots, reinvested dividends, splits, options, retirement account behavior, and historical price data may need manual correction. If tax reporting depends on Quicken investment history, keep Quicken and brokerage statements as references. Validate holdings and cash balances at several dates, not just today's totals.
Transaction data may carry over, but reports usually need to be recreated. Saved report layouts, tax line assignments, custom filters, and category groupings are application-specific. Before migration, export PDFs or CSVs of the reports you rely on for taxes, reimbursements, rental property, or household review. After importing, rebuild equivalent reports and compare totals by month, account, and category before trusting the new system.
It depends on the architecture. Desktop-first tools usually work well offline because the file or database is local, but mobile access may be limited or require manual sync. Web-based tools can be convenient across devices, but offline entry may be weaker unless they provide a dedicated mobile client. If you enter receipts on the go, test the phone workflow separately from the desktop import and reporting workflow.
Self-hosting can be a good fit if you already know how you will handle updates, HTTPS, user accounts, backups, and recovery. Personal finance data is sensitive, so a poorly maintained home server can be worse than a local desktop file. If more than one household member needs access, look closely at permissions, audit history, and whether shared access creates duplicate edits or reconciliation confusion.
Your safety net is the data format and export path, not the project name. Prefer tools that can export full transaction history, accounts, categories, payees, securities, and prices in documented or widely readable formats. Keep periodic exports outside the application database, plus normal backups. If development stalls, you should be able to run the existing version long enough to export and move again without losing accounting history.
