I feel like I've tried just about everything - YNAB is still the best.

It's frustrating to have to pay for a third-party service to pull in European bank transactions, though. YNAB is expensive enough on its own.

I'm going to put in a third vote for YNAB.

Tracking is just looking backwards on what you DID spend your money on, my friend.

Look forward and start planning what you WANT to spend it on. Budgeting is so different from tracking.

I am personally a huge fan of YNAB (You Need A Budget) and I just found there's a (sub-lemmy?) for YNAB as well, here: https://lemmy.world/c/ynab

I've been using YNAB (You Need A Budget) and simply love it. I like that it's zero based budgeting, imports transactions with my banks, and allows me to track every dollar coming in and assign it to its proper category. While not the most helpful, I also like the net worth tracker and reports while on desktop.

Monarch Money can get very granular and you can make your own rules as to what box a line item goes into. https://www.monarchmoney.com/

I wrote my own! https://budgetmyway.com

• Really wanted weekly "reserve" based budgeting. If I am under budget one week, that amount will get added to the reserve. And if I am over budget another week, that will take money away from the reserve. I also have the concept of "reserve expenses", not regular weekly expenses but usually bigger/unplanned that pull directly from the reserve.
• Privacy: no ads, tracking, etc
• No actual banking connections/APIs. Manually enter expenses.
• A project I can improve over time. Been using it for over 10 years now.

I have had a subscription to YNAB (you need a budget) for years now. It's simple and straight to the point for exactly what we need. It pulls everything from my bank accounts smoothly. My partner understands it and is able to easily use it, which is extremely important.

I tried Mint and have suggested it in the past as a free alternative to folks who need help budgeting, but it tends to be too complicated for most that I've suggested it to. And that's even after setting it up for them and showing them basic usage.

I used the GNUCash for a while. As a manual option, it was good for when I was importing everything to Quicken.

I no longer use quicken or manually import anything.

There's not a lot of products that I'll recommend, but I can say that YNAB is worth every cent.

Been using Simplifi (by Quiken) for a few months now and it's not bad. Their web app is really good, and they just completely rewrote their mobile apps which work much better now.

I just use Excel, but I also don't track my spending at a very detailed level. I have a budget for the month, and I sort of adjust my spending as I go to make sure I meet that budget.

Big fun of Toshl https://toshl.com

I use Money Manager EX. The GUI may not look appealing and looks like it's been made in the 90s. However, all data is completely local, it is closer to real double entry accounting than Mint and the likes, and the data is stored as SQLite, which is very useful for running scripts to get custom reports.