This big rivalry between Quicken and Mint has been going on for years! We’re comparing Quicken with Mint. Quicken’s value will also be discussed.
In terms of managing your money, there are a number of personal financial tools that may assist you in tracking your spending, creating a budget, and checking on your assets – all in one location. Numerous individuals are struggling with the same issue: Who Should You Choose Between Quicken and Mint?
Personal financial software or apps aren’t the most fascinating thing in the world to choose. A software or app that works for you, on the other hand, can transform the way you think about your money and the way you manage it.
We didn’t know where our money was going until we found a program that worked for us! It was impossible for me to tell you how much money we spent on each category of our budget until we started using a financial program to keep track of our spending.
A financial tool (read on to find out whether it’s Quicken or Mint!) helped us better understand our money over time. We were able to achieve our financial goals after learning more about our spending habits. To become a better money manager, use personal financial software like Quicken and Mint. You may keep track of your spending, your investments, your net worth, and your long-term objectives, among other things, with the help of the Spending Tracker.
Since Mint is free, it has become a new favorite since it provides you a wide perspective of your money. While Quicken has been a personal financial favorite for over 30 years, it’s not the only one.
However, digging a bit further reveals that Mint and Quicken are vastly different.
Mint is a free tool for tracking daily expenses and creating goals. With its state-of-the-art mobile app, it’s also excellent for those who want to manage their money on the go.
The Quicken program is better at evaluating long-term spending trends, tracking investments, and documenting costs for tax purposes. It’s vital to know what you need and what Quicken can accomplish for you before making a purchase.
Premier Edition of Quicken includes investing. Your investments’ performance compared to the market is shown in Portfolio X-Ray, which helps you make buy/sell choices. Aside from portfolio valuations, it also keeps track of capital gains and losses.
Quicken can also assist you decrease your investment’s tax burden. In addition, they provide a capital gains estimator that can assist investors maximize the after-tax profit on their securities transactions.
Mint. As a budgeting tool, Mint is the worst of the three in the investment area. However, they do not offer any instruments to assist you in your investment operations.
Mint Overview
Personal finance application Mint.com is used by over 15 million people. Free registration is available, as is the addition of additional accounts. We picked 10 personal accounts to test the service. In order to invest, we used a combination of bank and credit card accounts, as well as loans and brokerage accounts. Once Mint.com was set up, my financial data was retrieved quickly and easily.
Every time you visit the site, your financial information is immediately updated. Its user-friendly web interface, replete with stunning visuals, presents your financial data in a stylish manner. It is incredibly beneficial for budgeting, goal-setting, and combining all of your financial accounts into one place. You can get a quick snapshot of your personal money with Mint’s dashboard.
A personal financial website and mobile app for the United States and Canada, Mint (previously Mint.com) was established by Intuit Inc. in 2007. When Aaron Patzer created Mint.com, he partnered with Yodlee to aggregate accounts. After being bought by Intuit in 2009, Mint.com began using Intuit’s technology to link accounts. Mint.com was reduced to “Mint” in the end.
In addition to tracking bank, credit card, investment, and loan balances and transactions all in one spot, Mint also allows users to create budgets and establish financial goals for themselves. According to the company’s 2010 goals, Mint.com will link with over 16,000 financial institutions in the United States and Canada and support over 17 million individual bank accounts. As of November 2013, Mint.com claimed to have more than 10 million users. There were more than 20 million users on Mint.com in 2016.
When Intuit bought Mint Bills in 2014, the company combined it with Mint.com in March 2017. Check and Pageonce were the prior names for it. Mint.com’s bill-paying service was shut down on June 30, 2018.
Mint’s UI is both visually appealing and intuitive to use. You can’t get lost in it since it’s basic, bright, and clean. Another wonderful feature of Mint is the Overview panel, which acts as the program’s home screen.
On a single page, it gives you a comprehensive picture of your financial status. If you wish, you may set it to just display you the information that you desire. Taking a long time to explore around the site is required to see everything.
You can see the entire value of your bank accounts and assets in the left vertical window. There is a calculator on the site that sums them all up to determine your net worth. There is also a chart showing your cash flow over the previous six months, as well as credit card debt and net income.
Your content is completely within your control. If, for example, you want to exclude real estate from your net worth, you can do so. In your available money, you might opt to exclude a savings account. This account might be excluded from your personal budget as well.
In the right pane, you’ll see a list of upcoming payments, a chart of your spending, your current credit score, and a graph of your current budget against actual spending. Your progress and status will be seen here if you’ve established goals and linked them to your investment accounts. In addition to viewing data, you may manage your money and check for past-due payments from this initial screen.
Your banking, credit card, and other financial accounts will be requested for when you first establish an account with Mint. Without your agreement, the site is virtually worthless because it relies on this information for all it does. However, you may enter transactions manually.
A few additional setting options are available by choosing Profile from the toolbar. On that screen, you’ll see blank spots for your contact and demographic information. There are boxes for each of your accounts in the Settings section, as well as links to further setup tasks that may be performed.
The most important of all are notifications. With a simple click of the button, you may sign up to receive email or website updates, which will inform you of approaching payments and changes to your credit score, among other things. An alert can be requested if an account balance or credit limit is depleted.
Quicken Overview
For a long time, Quicken was a popular financial management tool. Quicken is available on both Windows and Mac. Before Intuit sold the program to H.I.G. Capital, Quicken for Mac received only infrequent updates. Because Quicken is now owned by a different company, the Mac side hasn’t been ignored nearly so much. Both goods have their own unique characteristics.
Quicken was formerly the only spreadsheet option. Personal financial software is available in a wide variety of formats nowadays. Despite this, Quicken is still a good choice, especially now that you can link to your bank and have the software update your accounts automatically.
When it comes to budgeting, you may be new to Quicken. In addition to being one of the oldest budgeting tools available, Quicken is also one of the most popular. Throughout the years, it has undergone several changes. However, despite the fact that it can still be intimidating for some, it’s gotten more intuitive and user-friendly, allowing it to satisfy the demands of both budgeting experts and beginners.
This program must be updated by hand in order to use Quicken. However, the product may also be used entirely online.
The Home tab is the first tab in Quicken’s UI. Your present financial status is summarized in this table. The good thing is that this screen can be customized. You have the option of displaying your expenditures first or displaying your investments in order of importance. Ultimately, the decision rests solely with you.
Following is a list of Quicken’s quick-start settings when you first launch the program. My bills must be entered into Quicken, as you can see. Using the built-in wizards, you may navigate through these procedures step-by-step as you get started.
It is on the second tab that you will see information about your expenditures. Quicken categorizes imported transactions automatically. You may, however, always reclassify transactions. Depending on how your budget is broken down, you can potentially alter the categories shown here.
On this screen, you can see your spending in different chunks, which is a good feature. Only particular accounts or specified periods of time may be seen by using the drop-down options at the top. The difference between your checking account and credit card can be shown, for example.
Please keep in mind that this data may not be correct when it is first received. You’ll be notified when Quicken detects uncategorized transactions. Nevertheless, you may wish to double-check the categories of each transaction as it is imported.. Quicken’s estimations can be incorrect by a large margin at times.
Our favorite feature of Quicken compared to other budgeting software programs is this one. If you use Verizon or AT&T as your billers, you may link it up with them. Syncing all of your bills takes some time. They will appear in a calendar view once you have selected them. According to your anticipated expenses, it will then calculate your account balance.
With scheduled income, you can accomplish the same thing. It’s important to let the system know when you’ll be paid and how much. A projection of your account balances is made using these same data points.
You can enter your bills manually if you want or if your bill provider is unavailable. We can, for example, enter how much daycare costs and when it’s due each month in the budget. A predicted balance for your account is calculated depending upon the upcoming invoices that appear on your calendar.
Budgeting, tax planning, and long-term planning are just a few of the choices available in Quicken’s extensive financial planning tool.
We delved into Quicken’s budgeting function. Like the rest of the program, this budget creator was not the most intuitive we’ve encountered. In order to select which categories to include, you must first build a budget. As a result of this, you may construct an incredibly thorough budget.
It is necessary to modify each category individually once it has been created in order to adjust its quantity. It’s a huge hassle.
We do, however, appreciate the fact that you can select at the beginning of the year how much you want to budget each month for each of the many categories. This is a wonderful choice if you prefer to plan well in advance. Few online budgeting programs allow you to create a yearly budget or plan so far in advance.
A debt reduction calculator is also available on this tab. Keep track of your bills and develop a repayment plan. It shows you how much you’ll have to spend in interest over time to pay off your obligations.
This similar functionality is available on the Savings Goals tab. As an example, you can set aside money for an impending trip, or to purchase an automobile. This area is for goals that are short- and medium-term. Retirement and financial independence are long-term goals for which the investment tracking option is best suited.
Quicken has a Tax Center as well. Tax information may be entered and a predicted tax return or taxes due will be calculated. Additionally, you may designate costs to different tax categories.. As a small company owner or someone who has tax-deductible costs, this may be quite useful. Also, it may be used to keep track of charity gifts.
As you might expect, the Lifetime Planner tool gives you a comprehensive perspective of your financial future. Quicken asks you a series of questions before allowing you to forecast your money over the course of several years or decades. In addition to being a high-level financial tool, it may also provide you with some extra insights into your financial life.
Use Quicken and consider adding some of its other services. The bill-paying services are perhaps the most useful. It is free for Premier subscribers and costs $9.95 a month for everyone else. Direct bill payment is possible using Quicken. Staying on top of your expenses becomes easier.
Quicken’s Social Security Optimizer and their premium assistance for Windows customers are other options to consider. You should search about, though, because there may be alternative online solutions that can replace these. This product offers the option to acquire the Quicken WillMaker application as well. For people with basic wills, this service has been evaluated elsewhere and is deemed to be acceptable.
What are the similarities between Quicken and Mint?
Both platforms have many common characteristics. Budgeting is available in all of them, allowing you to keep track of how and where your money is spent. Your numerous financial accounts may be linked, and transactions are automatically imported, allowing you to stay on top of your finances and stay on top of your investments. Your complete financial life may be synced on one platform with the help of this technology.
As a result, each may be used on a variety of devices. You can set up either account on your laptop, but you can also access it from a smartphone or other device, if you like.
Your credit score and frequent email or text updates are also available through both services.
Most users use Quicken since it’s the most complete financial app accessible. Actually, it covers a wide variety of financial operations, reducing the need for additional apps.
Information is kept on the user’s PC rather than Quicken or the cloud. Cloud data storage is becoming increasingly prevalent. While cloud storage poses security issues, storing the data locally avoids them.
It is a personal finance app that allows you to access all of your financial information from an one place. Your bank accounts are linked to Mint, and the information is immediately updated each time you log in. In addition to graphs and charts, it offers a visual representation of your financial information.
With Mint, you can keep track of all of your expenses on the same platform. There are also unpredictable expenditures like paying for a babysitter. As well as the due date, the app will also show you the payment amount required. You may also sign up to get bill reminders, which will let you know when and what bills are due. It is possible to receive bill reminders through text message on your mobile device
If your money are running low or if there is any questionable activity in your account, you will get notifications. So much so that the software will even tell the user how much money they’re spending on transaction costs, such as ATM fees.
As well as traditional brokerage accounts, Mint also allows you to enter information on mutual fund accounts, IRAs, and 401(k)s. If you want to evaluate how well you’re doing, you may even compare your account performance to other market benchmarks. A fee analyzer is also available, which shows the fees paid to investment advisors, brokerages, and even 401(k) providers. Your investment will be maximized by eliminating the ones that are deemed unneeded.
Mint vs. Quicken: Which is Better?
If you were to choose between two tools, which one would you choose? Let’s compare the two.
It’s free to use all of Mint’s financial features! That’s just too good to be true. The free tools are more than adequate for the typical person to successfully manage their finances.
Mint earns money by promoting additional financial items to keep the app free. If you use the platform, you’ll have to put up with some advertising. Besides collecting and selling customer spending and saving data, Mint also sells its own data.
While Quicken requires an annual subscription charge of $35.99 to $103.99, depending on the plan, Quicken does not. However, considering the tools you get, the pricing isn’t too awful.
Services such as retirement planning, financial reporting, company accounting, and real estate management are available at the upper tiers of the service. You could find that they’re worth it if you need them.
Mac users, on the other hand, are left out of Quicken’s capabilities. Currently, Windows Home & Business users are the only ones who can use it. Moreover, Mac users are unable to use many retirement and investment tracking services.
Mint is a mobile app and cloud-based online platform (download: Apple, Google Play). On both the web and the mobile app, your accounts are synchronized immediately. So, you can manage your funds in real time much more easily!
Quicken, on the other hand, is a desktop application that you must install on your computer. Your computer stores all of your info.
You can sync your data across the web and mobile apps using Quicken Cloud. Your transactions are also downloaded automatically. You may turn this off if you like.
Quicken’s desktop program appears to be out-of-date at this time. It may, however, appeal to individuals who are wary about having their information kept on the web or in the cloud. Despite being free, Mint excels at budgeting.
In both cases, you can:
- Each category should have a budget.
- Keep track of your expenditure in each of the different categories.
- Add transactions manually
- Specific costs should be excluded from your financial plan.
- Assumed revenue in the budget
Quicken does provide extra functionality if you’re prepared to pay for it. You’ll obtain a budget prediction, for example. So you’ll know how much money you’ll have left to spend based on your projected income and future expenses.
This view shows how much money you’ve spent so far in a given year. Additionally, it will provide a year-long budget estimate. This is quite useful for planning ahead of time, as well.
A debt-reduction tool is included in each of these programs. Mint’s goal-setting function includes a debt repayment planner. Create a new goal for “crushing credit card debt” to get you started.
Quicken Deluxe ($51.99/year) includes a Debt Reduction Planner that is quite comparable.
Automatic debt detection is included into both systems. To determine how long it will take to pay off your debt, you may input the amount of money that you can afford to pay each month into either program.
Change the payment amount and observe how it affects the payout.
With Quicken, you can also manually enter a debt.
Your monthly bills may be entered into Mint. Utilities (DirecTV, Verizon) may be linked, as well as offline bills (such as for rent, cleaner, babysitter, etc.). Your monthly bill total will be displayed in Mint, as well as your cash balance.
Quicken allows you pay your bills straight from the software, in addition to tracking them. The Bill Pay feature has been removed from Mint as of June 2018.
Only Quicken Premier users may pay bills online. Paying bills online is a free service offered by many banks, so it makes little sense to purchase Quicken solely for this function.
Investment tracking features are included in Quicken Premier and Home & Business plans. You are able to:
- See all of your investing costs and your real market returns in an one place.
- Create watchlists for your stocks.
- See your actual and target portfolio allocation (Windows only)
- Morningstar’s X-Ray tool allows you to evaluate your portfolio (Windows only)
- Reports on IRR and ROI should be generated.
- The performance of your portfolio compared to market benchmarks
- Tax preparation requires that you include both realized and unrealized profits
- What-if scenarios help you determine the tax consequences of selling.
- Buying and selling decisions might be aided by comparing the markets.
Mint, on the other hand, is a pure investing aggregation platform. It aggregates all of your accounts to show total performance, which is all that it does. View your top and worst performers, allocation breakdowns, and comparative data to the NASDAQ and SPY index.
(Windows only) Quicken includes a retirement planning tool called the Lifetime Planner. Your retirement funds might be affected by numerous “what-if” scenarios (buying a property, paying for your children’s college, etc.).
Your future Social Security benefits, projected yearly spending, predicted life expectancy, and estimated return on investment will also be considered.
Quicken will use these assumptions to create a retirement forecast for you. You’ll get an estimate of how much you’ll need to spend and whether or not you’ll run out of cash.
A retirement goal may be tracked in Mint, but that’s all it offers in terms of retirement planning functionality.
According to Mint, you may calculate your retirement target amount depending on your present age, your retirement age, and your expected yearly income during your retirement years Savings and investment accounts can be linked to the objective at that point in time. Savings are tracked by Mint.
TransUnion provides you with a free credit score and credit monitoring service through Mint. Nice little bonus.
This report provides you about the elements that impact your credit score, such as your on-time payments, credit utilization, the total number of accounts, and credit inquiries, among other things. As a result of this information, you will be able to monitor your credit situation and improve it.
You can also set up personalized notifications in Mint to help you keep on top of your money. Alerts include the following:
- If you have unexpected expenditure or are overbudget in a certain category, let us know.
- A credit score update is a change of credit information.
- if a particular amount is depleted from an account
- A specific amount of credit is no longer accessible.
- Any purchase that exceeds a particular amount is considered a significant buy.
- If you are charged a bank fee, please contact us immediately.
- Reminders about upcoming bills
There is a real-time view of your accounts available with this feature. As soon as something goes awry, you may take action or alter your budget.
Except for the weekly expenditure, investment, and net worth reports, Quicken does not provide notifications.
Real estate and small company management are not supported by Mint. This is where Quicken shines.
Home & Business plan subscribers get access to Quicken’s small business and property management features. All other plans do not. Attention: This only works with Windows.
Phone or email help is not available at Mint’s customer service department. They aim to make up for this by delivering a software that is rather straightforward, but if you have a fast query, you’re out of luck.
Their present assistance is restricted to the following areas:
- Online Help Center is available 24/7.
- Chatting online is a great way to 5AM to 9PM PT 7 days a week (Pacific Time)
- In terms of customer care, Quicken has a far better track record. It’s possible to speak to a live person by calling and requesting assistance. Aside from that, you’ll likely not have a long wait to speak with someone. As an added bonus, Quicken Premier subscribers get access to their own dedicated Premium Support team.
Quicken offers the following types of assistance:
- 650-250-1900 for phone support (5 AM to 5 PM PT, Monday – Friday)
- Support Center for Users Online
- Help with Online Chat Community
In terms of budgeting, both applications are top notch.
Each one allows you to keep track of your spending and manage your funds effectively. Any budgeter may use either program to eliminate overdrawing, pay off credit card debt in a methodical manner, build up savings, and control their spending. Unusual activity notifications are also available.
Recent enhancements to Quicken’s budgeting feature have made it even more powerful. This program is also very straightforward to use and has a pleasing visual appearance.”
Both have been around for long enough to be effective alternatives for basic budgeting purposes. Both applications are great budgeting tools, and they are similar in many respects to each other.
Your bank, credit card, and loan accounts are automatically synced across the two platforms and numerous financial institutions.
Because of the vast number of banks and financial services that are supported by Mint, it also appears to have a great number of technical difficulties with synchronization. You can see how frustrated people are by reading their comments on Mint’s forums. Apart from the fact that Mint seems to have a lot of synchronization difficulties, it also has a terrible reputation for not addressing them quickly enough.
However, because it uses Intuit’s web services, Quicken may have similar synchronization difficulties.
You can use the open standard to download your information if you cannot utilize the automated ways. It is possible to use Quicken’s QFX file format. Nothing prohibits you from manually inputting journal entries if Quicken’s synchronization fails. You cannot enter transactions in Mint if the synchronization stops. Definetly a superior experience with Personal Capital synchronization is what makes us suggest Quicken over Mint in this area.
Support on Mint’s website includes a list of frequently asked questions and concerns. For online assistance, you may either email the staff or click the chat icon. You had to wait a long time for Mint to respond to my question. On their website forum, consumers seem to have a consistent experience with sporadic customer assistance.
Quicken has a very bad track record when it comes to customer support. Many consumers have complained about the app’s issues, which we hope the new proprietors will fix. They do offer free technical support by phone 24 hours a day, seven days a week (how useful it remains to be seen). Typically, you’ll receive technical assistance from India, who will read scripts to assist you. Investor Junkie’s phone assistance, as stated in several comments, is ineffective for anything but the simplest difficulties.
In addition, Quicken (and Intuit before it) would undergo several software updates to correct different issues that, in some cases, should have been fixed before the new version was made available to users.
Anyone who uses a personal financial software must be concerned about security, since their whole financial life might be revealed.
For security purposes, Mint and Quicken are compared using an internet-based service vs locally installed software.
All of your information is kept on your computer using standard Quicken software. Quicken, on the other hand, protects your information when you utilize its online capabilities:
- Information is encrypted using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology and encryption during transmission over the internet.
- Servers protected by a firewall.
- To ensure that communications have not been altered in any manner between the sender and the receiver, integrity checks are carried out.
- Users may secure their accounts by using strong passwords to log in.
This includes the security of your personal information and stored data. Security measures for the site include the following:
- Mint protects your account using two-factor authentication, which requires you to confirm the device you’re using with either your email address or a text message sent to your smartphone.
- Touch ID sensor for the iPhone and iPod touch: In only a few seconds, your phone is unlocked using your fingerprint.
We’d have to choose Quicken over Mint if we were to choose between these two services. There are many more features in Quicken, and the program may develop with you as time passes. But for others, Mint may be all they need. You’re better off with Mint if you want a service that’s accessible online via a web browser or app.
How and where do you spend your money? That’s the goal of both Mint and Quicken! You may enhance your money management abilities and financial future by using any of these budgeting tools, which are easy to use. Both are now available as online services that are compatible with all devices.
Quicken’s cost, on the other hand, might be off-putting, especially to Millennials who are looking for a quick, free software to perform simple personal financial activities, specifically. Mint is a superior offer for this demographic.
Can Apps Help You to Manage Your Finances?
Financial technology can be a great thing. This does not mean, however, that technology is the ideal tool for you.
Mint or Quicken are two financial apps that can help you manage your money better. Take a step back and consider which approach of financial management is best for you overall. Those who enjoy crossing off items on a list, for example, may prefer pen and paper. Excel or Google Sheets could be a better fit for you if you want to create spreadsheets and fill in figures and variants yourself. A mobile app, on the other hand, is ideal for those who are usually on their phones and consider their applications to be their trusted sidekicks.
As a result, you may find yourself installing applications that you like the idea of but never utilizing them. This leads to dissatisfaction as you continue to download applications that aren’t suitable for your personality type. Examine your productivity style and preferences before committing to a certain approach.
To find out what makes you effective, examine your working habits. If so, how do you keep yourself organized? Created a document or a to-do list online? What about using applications to receive updates and reminders? It is important to know how to stay motivated in your career as well as in your money. It will be easier to make the good, motivated progress with your money that you’ve always wanted.