Since Mint shut down in January 2024, people have still been 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.
Five options, side by side
Full narratives on how people actually experienced switching to YNAB or Credit Karma after Mint live in a separate post. Here is the comparison, stripped down to what actually differs.
| App | Price | Bank connection | Best for | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| YNAB | ~$15/mo | Required | People ready to learn a real budgeting method | Steep learning curve, many quit around week three |
| Monarch Money | ~$100/yr | Required | Closest like-for-like Mint replacement | Uses a third-party data aggregator, same model Mint used |
| Credit Karma | Free | Required | Credit monitoring, not budgeting | Makes money recommending financial products |
| Copilot | Paid | Required | iPhone users who want a polished automatic tracker | iOS only, no Android version |
| Empower | Free (core) | Required | Net worth and investment tracking | Spending tracking is secondary, not the focus |
Every option on this list shares one thing in common: a bank connection is required to get the full experience. That is worth noticing on its own, since it is exactly the tradeoff Mint's shutdown put back on the table for a lot of people.
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?