Mint Alternatives: 6 Budgeting Apps Worth It in 2026

The best Mint alternatives in 2026 are Monarch Money, YNAB, Copilot Money, Rocket Money, and Credit Karma, and which one fits depends on whether you want a budget you actively steer or a dashboard that just tells you what happened. Mint has been gone since March 2024, and nothing that replaced it is free in the way Mint was.

Quick Answer: Intuit shut Mint down on March 23, 2024 and moved users to Credit Karma, which tracks spending but does not do monthly category budgets. Most Mint alternatives now cost roughly $95 to $110 per year. Pick based on whether you want automation, hands-on budgeting, or actual human guidance.

What happened to Mint?

Intuit discontinued Mint on March 23, 2024 and folded its users into Credit Karma, which Intuit also owns. Mint had been free since 2006, funded by credit card and loan referrals rather than subscriptions, and that model stopped paying for itself.

The part that caught people off guard was the feature gap. Intuit's own migration notes said the Credit Karma experience does not let you set monthly and category budgets, and instead helps you build awareness of your spending. If you were a Mint user who lived inside the budget tab, the official replacement removed the exact thing you used. Migrating users could bring over account balances, net worth history, and about three years of transactions, but not the budgets themselves. CNBC Select covered the shutdown and the scramble that followed.

So the honest framing for 2026: you are not looking for a free Mint clone, because one does not exist. You are deciding what you actually want the software to do.

What should you look for in a Mint alternative?

Four things separate these apps, and only one of them is price. Sort by which of these you care about and the choice gets easy fast.

• Connection reliability. Every one of these apps syncs your accounts through an aggregator like Plaid or MX. Broken connections are the single most common complaint across all of them, so read recent reviews for your specific bank, not the app in general.
• Active budgeting vs. passive tracking. Some apps ask you to assign every dollar before you spend it. Others just categorize transactions after the fact. These are genuinely different products aimed at different people.
• Whether a human is involved. Software can tell you that you spent $640 on restaurants. It cannot tell you whether that matters given your raise, your student loans, and the house you want in three years.
• Total cost against what you save. At roughly $100 a year, an app needs to change about $9 a month of behavior just to break even. That is a low bar, but it is not zero.

If you have never built a budget from scratch, the tool matters less than the method. Our guide on how to create a budget that actually works covers the structure first, and any of these apps can hold it.

What are the best Mint alternatives in 2026?

Here is the current field, with what each one is genuinely good at and who it frustrates.

Monarch Money

Monarch is the closest thing to a spiritual successor to Mint, and its CEO was Mint's first product manager. It does net worth tracking, custom budgets, goals, and investment accounts in one dashboard, and it supports shared household access, which matters if you and a partner are budgeting together. Monarch Core runs $14.99 per month or $99.99 per year, with a higher Monarch Plus tier at $199 per year and a 7-day trial. It is the safest default pick if you want breadth.

YNAB

YNAB is the opposite philosophy: zero-based budgeting, where you give every dollar you already have a job before you spend it. It is the most effective app on this list for people who overspend, and the most annoying for people who do not want a system. It runs $14.99 per month or $109 per year, making it the priciest option here. The learning curve is real, so budget a couple of weeks before you judge it.

Copilot Money

Copilot is the design-forward option, with strong automatic categorization and the cleanest interface of the group. It costs $13 per month or $95 per year, the cheapest of the premium tier. It was iOS and Mac only for years and added web access in December 2025, so if you do your money work on a Windows laptop, check that the web app covers what you need before committing.

Rocket Money

Rocket Money is less a budgeting app than a bill and subscription killer. It finds recurring charges, cancels the ones you forgot about, and will negotiate some bills for you. It keeps a real free tier, which none of the three above do, plus a paid Premium tier. If your actual problem is $180 a month of subscriptions you stopped using, this solves that specific problem better than a budgeting app will.

Credit Karma

Credit Karma is where Intuit sent Mint users, and it is free. It shows balances, net worth, credit score, and spending categories. It does not do monthly category budgets. If all you wanted from Mint was a free place to see everything in one view, this is fine and costs nothing. If you wanted to budget, it is not a replacement.

Planned

Planned is the option built around the gap the others share: none of them tell you what to do. You get an AI-built financial plan across saving, debt, investing, and taxes, plus 1:1 coaching with a CFP® professional who knows your actual numbers. If you are 29, just cleared $95,000, and cannot tell whether to max the Roth IRA or kill the 6.8% loan first, that is a judgment call, not a categorization problem. We recommend it when your question is "what should I do next," not "what did I spend."

More on that distinction in our breakdown of budgeting apps with human coaching and how a financial coach differs from a financial advisor.

Is a free Mint alternative good enough?

Sometimes, and it depends on one question: are you tracking or deciding? Credit Karma and Rocket Money's free tier both handle tracking without charging you, and a spreadsheet handles it for free forever.

Free breaks down when you need the tool to shape behavior. Nothing free enforces a zero-based budget, and free products monetize through referrals to credit cards and loans, which is exactly the model that made Mint unprofitable and gave it an incentive to show you offers. The CFPB's free consumer tools are a genuinely unbiased starting point if you want to avoid that entirely.

Here is the practical test. If you already save consistently and just want visibility, take the free option. If you have been meaning to fix your spending for six months and have not, a $99 subscription that actually changes the outcome is cheap. And if your money is fine but your plan is missing, no tracking app of any price fixes that.

How do you switch without losing your history?

Mint's data is gone, so there is no export to rescue at this point. What you can do is rebuild fast, and it takes about an hour.

Start by connecting your checking account, primary credit card, and savings first, and stop there for a day. Most people connect eleven accounts on night one, drown in uncategorized transactions, and quit. Once those three are clean, add investment and loan accounts. Most apps will pull 90 days of transaction history automatically, and some pull up to two years, which is enough to see your real averages.

Then set your categories before you set your budget numbers. Look at three months of actual spending, find your true average in each category, and set the budget slightly below that instead of at the number you wish were true. A budget you miss every month teaches you nothing. While you are in there, check whether your cash cushion is where it should be using our guide on why you need an emergency fund and how much.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a completely free Mint alternative?

Credit Karma is free and shows balances, net worth, credit score, and spending categories, but it does not offer monthly category budgets. Rocket Money keeps a free tier focused on subscriptions and bills. For real budgeting features, expect to pay roughly $95 to $110 per year. No current product matches Mint's old combination of free and full-featured.

Can I get my old Mint data back?

No. Mint shut down on March 23, 2024 and the data is no longer accessible. Users who accepted the Credit Karma migration before the cutoff kept balances, net worth history, and roughly three years of transactions inside Credit Karma. If you did not migrate, you start fresh. Most alternatives pull at least 90 days of history when you connect an account.

Which Mint alternative is best for couples?

Monarch Money is the strongest pick for shared finances, since household access is included in the Core plan at $99.99 per year rather than sold as an upgrade. YNAB also supports multiple users on one budget. The bigger factor is agreement on method: pick the app after you agree on which expenses are shared, not before.

Is YNAB or Monarch better for a Mint user?

Monarch feels more familiar, because Mint was a tracking dashboard and so is Monarch. YNAB is a behavior change tool that asks more of you and gives back more if you stick with it. If Mint's budget tab was aspirational and you never followed it, that is an argument for YNAB, not against it.

Do budgeting apps hurt your credit score?

No. Connecting accounts to a budgeting app is a read-only link through an aggregator like Plaid, and it does not create a hard inquiry. Checking your own credit score inside an app like Credit Karma is a soft inquiry, which never affects your score. Applying for a card an app recommends to you is what creates a hard inquiry.

The takeaway

Mint is not coming back, and chasing a free replacement is how people spend two years without a budget. Decide first whether your real problem is seeing your money, controlling it, or knowing what to do with it, then pay for the tool that solves that one. The right choice is the one you still open in six months.