Eighteen months after Mint shut down, people are still searching for a replacement.
There is no shortage of options. Every personal finance publication has published a roundup. Most of them list the same apps and rank them by features. That is a reasonable thing to compare. It is not the most useful place to start.
The more useful question is: what was Mint actually doing for you? Because the answer varies more than most people realize, and it determines whether any given replacement will actually feel like one.
What Mint was good at
Mint did three things reasonably well. It showed you where your money went last month. It told you roughly how much remained in each spending category. And it put everything on one screen.
What Mint was not particularly good at was helping you plan ahead. It was a rearview mirror. You could see where money went, but the app did not help you decide where it should go before it left.
Many people used Mint for years without noticing this distinction, because the rearview view felt like enough. When it shut down, some discovered that what they missed most was just the clarity of that single screen. Others discovered they had been missing forward-looking planning the whole time.
Which describes you matters a lot when evaluating replacements.
YNAB
YNAB has a devoted following for good reason. The methodology is sound. The idea of giving every dollar a purpose before it moves is one of the more effective personal finance frameworks around.
It also costs about $15 per month, requires connecting your bank accounts, and has a learning curve that takes most people a few weeks to climb. For someone who just lost Mint and wants to get back to basics, that is a significant ask upfront.
Many people who try YNAB after Mint start strong and fade around week three, when the novelty wears off and the discipline required becomes clearer. That is not a knock on YNAB. It is just a realistic picture of how the transition tends to go. If you are serious about changing how you budget and willing to invest the time, it is worth trying.
Monarch Money
Monarch is probably the closest thing to a direct Mint replacement in terms of how it works. It syncs accounts, tracks spending by category, and presents a clear picture of your finances. The interface is polished.
It costs around $100 per year. Some people find that acceptable given what they get. Others find it hard to pay for something that used to be free.
Like most apps in this category, it uses a third-party data aggregator to connect bank accounts. That is standard practice, but worth understanding before signing up. Your transaction history flows through infrastructure you do not control.
Credit Karma
This is where Intuit pointed Mint users when it shut the app down. Credit Karma shows your credit score, account balances, and flags changes. It is well-designed for what it does.
What it does not do is help you plan. It is a monitoring tool, not a budgeting tool. Credit Karma makes money by recommending financial products. Knowing your credit score and knowing whether you can afford next month are different problems. Credit Karma is built for the first one.
Copilot
Copilot is an iOS app with thoughtful design and solid automatic categorization. Reviews from people who use it consistently tend to be positive. It is Apple only, which rules out a portion of people. It costs money and requires bank connections.
If you are on an iPhone and want automatic transaction tracking with a clean interface, it is a reasonable option to try.
Empower (formerly Personal Capital)
Empower is primarily an investment and net worth tracking tool. The free version includes spending tracking, but that is not the focus of the product. If you have significant investment accounts and want to see your full financial picture in one place, it handles that well. For day-to-day spending tracking, it is more than you need.
The question underneath the question
Most of the apps above are built around the same core assumption: connect your bank accounts and let the software do the work. That was the Mint model too, and for most people it worked fine.
Mint's shutdown prompted some people to think more carefully about what that connection actually involves. When you link an account to an app, your transaction history moves through a data aggregator and into a database you do not control. If the company is acquired or shuts down, that history goes somewhere you did not choose. That happened to Mint users in 2024.
This is not an argument against bank connections. Plenty of people decide the convenience is worth the tradeoff. It is worth making that decision deliberately rather than by default.
A different approach worth considering
One pattern that works for a lot of people is splitting the problem instead of trying to solve everything with one app.
Debt and spending are related, but they are not the same problem. Debt has a specific math to it -- balances, interest rates, payoff timelines -- that benefits from focused tools. Spending is about what happens between paychecks, which is a different kind of clarity.
Some people find that keeping those two things separate, with simple tools for each, actually works better than one comprehensive app that tries to do everything.
The right replacement is probably the one you will actually open next week, not the one with the most features.
What would that need to look like for you?