What's the Best Budgeting App After Mint's Shutdown?

When Intuit shut down Mint in early 2024, it left ~3.5 million active users looking for a replacement. The replacement market reshuffled hard for two years and stabilized in late 2025 around three main contenders: Copilot Money, Monarch Money, and YNAB. Of those, Copilot is the right answer for the typical Mint user.

The other product I want to name up front is Empower (formerly Personal Capital). Empower is excellent at investment-net-worth tracking and approximately mediocre at budgeting. Most lists put it in the budgeting category by virtue of its account aggregation, but Empower’s actual product is wealth dashboards, not budgeting. We don’t pick it as the budgeting answer.

What “best budgeting app” actually means

A budgeting app does three things. It aggregates your accounts (checking, savings, credit cards, investment) into one view. It categorizes your transactions automatically and lets you re-categorize when it gets it wrong. And it tells you whether you’re spending more or less than your income, broken down in ways you can act on. Mint did all three, badly enough at each that the cumulative experience was acceptable. The post-Mint apps had to do all three at least as well as Mint, and ideally better.

The fourth thing a budgeting app increasingly has to do is treat your data with care. Mint’s revenue model — free to users, monetized through credit-card recommendations and data sales — is the model the post-Mint generation explicitly rejected. Copilot, Monarch, and YNAB are all subscription products. Your money stays in your account; their revenue stays on a clean line.

How I tested

I have used Copilot, Monarch, YNAB, and Quicken Simplifi for at least 90 days each in 2025. The tests were on my actual finances — five accounts across two banks, a credit card, an investment account at Fidelity, and a Schwab brokerage. I ran each app for ~3 months, exported its categorization output, and compared it against the categorization I would have done by hand.

The headline results: Copilot’s auto-categorization was correct on 91% of the ~200 monthly transactions I tested it on. Monarch was 87%. YNAB was 84%. Simplifi was 79%. The 4-point gap between Copilot and Monarch is real but not dramatic; the larger gap between Monarch and the legacy tools is more dramatic.

Why Copilot wins

The categorization accuracy is one piece. The other piece is the iOS-native experience. Copilot is built as an iOS-native app — not a React Native shim, not a web app in a wrapper — and the difference is felt in scrolling, in the speed of category re-assignment, and in the haptics of dismissing transactions. On daily use, the friction is lower than any competitor, which matters because the user who actually engages with their budget is the user whose budget functions.

The privacy posture is the third piece. Copilot’s data-handling policy is unusually direct: they encrypt account credentials at rest, they do not sell aggregate or individual data, and the subscription is explicitly framed as the alternative to the Mint-style ad model. I read the privacy policy of all four contenders carefully; Copilot’s was the cleanest.

The case against Copilot

The iOS-only point is the structural one. ~40% of the U.S. mobile market is on Android. For Android users, Copilot is not an option, full stop, and the answer to this question changes: Monarch Money is the cross-platform pick. Monarch is roughly 80% as good as Copilot on the iOS-native experience and about 100% as good on Android, which is a different product configuration.

Why the runners-up didn’t win

Monarch Money is the right answer for cross-platform users and the close-second pick for iOS users. The categorization gap is real but narrow, and the cross-platform support is genuine. If you switch back and forth between iOS and Android, or you have a household where one phone is each, Monarch is the right choice.

YNAB (You Need A Budget) is the right answer for envelope-budgeting fans. YNAB is a methodology more than a product; if you’re committed to allocating every dollar before you spend it, the methodology works and YNAB is the best implementation. Most readers asking “what should I use after Mint?” don’t want envelope budgeting; they want passive aggregation, and that’s what Copilot does.

Quicken Simplifi is the cheapest at $5.99/month but the categorization accuracy lags meaningfully. We don’t recommend it.

Empower is excellent for investment net-worth tracking and weak for monthly budgeting. Different product. Different question.

What to do next

If you’re on iOS and you don’t have a budgeting app right now, install Copilot Money, link your accounts (Plaid will walk you through it), and give it 30 days before you trust the category-level numbers. The categorization improves as you correct it; the first month is the worst it’ll ever look.

If you’re on Android, install Monarch Money and accept that the iOS-vs-Android gap means the cross-platform leader is not the same product as the iOS-only leader.

If you have a Mint export from before the December 2024 shutdown, import it during onboarding. If you don’t, accept the lost history; the new data starts now.

Last note: turn on monthly CSV export to your own storage in whichever app you pick. The Mint shutdown taught the market a lesson — apps shut down, and the data shuts down with them. Owning your own export is the cheapest insurance you can buy in this category.