Pros & Cons
- Exceptional user experience with a handy dashboard
- Excellent transaction management
- Flexible, effective budgeting tools
- Excellent reports
- Terrific mobile apps
- Modest subscription fee
- Savings goals not linked to live account
Specs & Configurations
| Name | Value |
|---|---|
| Free Version | |
| Free Credit Report/Score | |
| Web Interface | |
| Income/Expense Tracking | |
| iOS App |
How Much Does Simplifi Cost?
Simplifi is usually $47.88 per year, billed annually, although it’s sometimes discounted to $35.88. That’s less than Quicken Classic Deluxe ($71.88 per year) and Monarch Money ($14.99 per month or $99.99 per year). Although Simplifi and Quicken Classic are owned by the same company, they’re different in the amount of depth they go to in helping you manage your finances. Simplifi is best for most people, while Quicken Classic is for power users.
Two personal finance apps that are totally free are NerdWallet and Credit Karma, but their financial management features aren’t as strong as Simplifi’s. Put plainly, Simplifi gives you the best value overall, considering its tools, comprehensive mobile apps, and exceptional user experience.
Getting Started With Simplifi
Like its competitors, Simplifi has only two setup requirements. First, you must create a Simplifi account. Second, you connect to all your financial accounts, like your checking account, credit cards, and brokerage accounts, by entering your usernames and passwords for them. You’re not required to add them all, but your total net worth number won’t be accurate if you don’t.
If you’re coming to Simplifi from Mint, Simplifi makes it easy to get started with step-by-step instructions for importing your Mint data.
The Simplifi Experience: Lively and Intuitive
Simplifi is attractive and easy to understand. Its dashboard is especially well-designed. The app makes it easy to log in, quickly find what you need, and get on with your day. It’s easy to see your account balances, net worth, the current status of your budget (called Spending Plan and Watchlists), recent spending, and upcoming bills—including subscriptions.
A series of colorful charts let you see at a glance what your top spending categories are, how you’re doing on your savings goals, and what’s happening with your Watchlists. You can move or remove elements from the dashboard, too.
Simplifi’s Android and iOS apps are as good as it gets for budgeting and personal finance. They replicate the tools and data found on the browser-based site, and they’re a pleasure to use because they look and work great. The dashboard contains the information you’d most likely want to access quickly to get an overview of your finances. You can even see the details of your investment holdings and their (nearly) current prices, which are delayed 15 minutes, just like on the web version.
Managing Your Financial Transactions in Simplifi
Simplifi has some of the strongest transaction management tools. As transactions come into the app from your financial institutions (meaning, for example, individual charges to your credit card and line items from your checking account), Simplifi puts them into registers and assigns a category to each one (like groceries, auto expenses, salary), which you can modify. Transactions flow into multiple areas of the app, including your Watchlists and Spending Plan. If your spending categories are always accurate, all the feedback and insight you get from Simplifi will be too.
Beyond details like payee, account, and amount, each transaction has a homepage with fields for follow-up flags, notes, tags, and attachments. You can divide transactions among multiple tags or categories. So, for example, if you buy both groceries and personal items in one trip to Target, you can categorize your spending accurately. You can also exclude transactions from reports and the Spending Plan if you want and earmark them as one-time bills or set them up as recurring. Expecting a refund for a product you returned? Simplifi can track it for you. It has reminders of upcoming recurring transactions.
In addition, you get tools for importing additional transactions, such as from Mint, Empower, your Apple card, or a CSV file. You can also export transactions to CSV files.
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How to Budget With Simplifi
Simplifi doesn’t have traditional budget tools like Rocket Money and others do. Most other budgeting and personal finance apps let you designate targeted spending limits in different categories. Instead, Simplifi has Spending Watchlists and a Spending Plan.
Within your Spending Watchlists, you can view and track your spending based on categories but also by payees and tags, which is unusual—and useful! The same information from your categorized transactions shows up in your Spending Watchlists, where you can see your year-to-date total and monthly average.
Data from your transactions also show up in Simplifi’s Spending Plan, a unique and innovative tool that keeps a tally of how much you have left to spend in any given category for the month. This tool takes your income after bills, subscriptions, transfers, and savings are deducted and subtracts planned spending, which can be one-time purchases or monthly expenses that fluctuate, like groceries and gas. The Spending Plan is more effective for people with full-time salaried jobs (W-2 employees) than self-employed individuals who can’t always precisely predict their monthly income, but it continues to adjust as income is added throughout the month.
Simplifi’s Spending Plan is by far its most innovative and useful feature. No other budgeting and personal finance app has anything like it, though YNAB probably comes the closest. Simplifi’s tools are easier to understand compared with YNAB.
Is Simplifi Safe to Use?
Quicken, the maker of Simplifi, has been in the business of securing online financial data for three decades. It’s safe to use as long as you take security seriously on your end and guard each of your financial accounts, including your Simplifi account, with a strong and unique password. Simplifi uses multi-factor authentication, too, which helps make it more secure. It transmits data from your bank servers using 256-bit encryption, which is standard. The information downloaded from your banks is confidential and used only to update your accounts. You still need to be vigilant about keeping sensitive data safe on any financial app by, for example, never accessing your financial accounts on a public Wi-Fi network.
Is Simplifi Right for You?
Simply put, we think Simplifi is the right choice for many people. It puts the financial information you need front and center while letting you dig deeper for details when you need them. Whether you’re accessing it through a web browser or on your phone, Simplifi’s usability and overall user experience are top-notch. And its modest pricing won’t put a big dent in your budget. All of this earns it our Editors’ Choice award. If Simplifi doesn’t sound like the right fit, look at our two other Editors’ Choice winners: Quicken Classic if you like to micro manage your finances, and YNAB if traditional ways of thinking about money have never worked for you.