Best budgeting apps

Well,

Emma is not the only one in the market, so we might want to share what else there is on the market.

On my phone, I have:

  • Bankin
  • Tink - this is only available via testflight.
  • Yolt
  • Spendee
  • Cleo - she doesn’t get back to me, I think I am banned. :grimacing:

Hey @grant.m, what others do you use? :wink:

I dislike using more than one money management app. I’m only using Emma at the minute but have experience with:

  • YOLT
  • Money Dashboard
  • Cleo

I was using MD back in Uni and still haven an account tough.

What’s your experience with Cleo?

Hate the use of messenger. Also found it to be quite slow to update balances.

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Yes, they update once a day, but have now released an app. :open_mouth:

Cleo was a cool thing to try out but as soon as I found out about Emma I dropped it.

It had a strange bug where, if your bank auth failed, it would only ever reply to you saying ‘hey let’s fix your details’ - so it didn’t respond to ‘stop messaging me’ or ‘delete account’ or anything like that. It was a loop.

I guess some people might be in to having a conversational bot for budgeting but I much prefer a dashboard-style app. There’s only so much rich data you can share over a Messenger conversation. Having updates on your budget is cool but for me the best thing about Emma is simply being able to see all my transactions across all my accounts in one place in a list.

The truth about my relationship with Cleo is that the first thing I did after installing it was swearing, so I think I got blocked by the Facebook system and haven’t been able to use it ever since. :cry:

I do check their web dashboard from time to time and my opinion is that they don’t love product as much as we do.

I’ve got Yolt too. I really like it and the new notifications are an improvement. I did have to spend a lot more time training the categorisation in Yolt though. I’ve also had less connection issues with them. Think Amex and Barclays card are still requiring re-done in Emma

Tried MD and dropped it instantly for being crap.

Dropped Facebook so anything that uses that is a no go.

What do you mean?

I need to reconnect them (again)

Yes, TrueLayer was having a big issue with Amex last month, so we switched everyone to Saltedge and Barclaycard changed their authentication system by introducing a memorable word.

After September this year, we will need to ask consent every 90 days, meaning that this will become the norm. :cry:

I tried a number of account aggregators for several weeks last year: Emma, Yolt, MoneyHub, Money Dashboard, and HSBC Connected Money.

Of these, I prefer and have settled on Emma. I think the main reason is I like that attention seems to be given to providing rich transaction information in Emma (actual merchant names, logos, notes field, transaction history with merchant). This is not done as well, or at all, in other aggregators. I also found syncing in Emma to incredibly reliable and fast compared to the other aggregators. At least this was the case last year when I was directly comparing. This year, occasional syncing issues seem to have crept it to Emma with some banks. Hope this is just temporary.

Now I only use Emma and Yolt. I keep Yolt around simply to provide access to Sainsbury’s bank which is not supported in Emma.

Have just taken a look at Bankin after I saw it mentioned at the top of this thread. Have not tried it out thoroughly yet, but I have noticed it has one feature which I wish Emma had. I have a thread about that here.

What banks are you experiencing syncing issues with? :slight_smile:

None at the moment. But there was recently an issue with Amex and there was something else a couple of months ago, but I forget which bank. Last year I had zero issues.

Yes, we had to switch Amex from TrueLayer to Saltedge.

Are you getting syncing issues with Yolt? They have a few connections via open banking and those require authentication every 90 days.

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I only use Yolt for Sainsbury’s at the moment, and they use screen scraping for that. Seems to work fine. When I was directly comparing Emma and Yolt last year, Emma was more reliable. There were one or two banks I had issues with in Yolt, but can’t remember if they had started open banking connections back then.

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Yes, Sainsbury’s doesn’t support Open Banking yet.

The whole industry will have to shift to OB by September for the majority of banks, so re-connecting will be a routine unfortunately.

Tried them all mentioned here.
Using Emma and HSBC connect. I do like the first page of connect.
Added advantage of connect is… That it picked up it’s own loan accounts. This is no fault of Emma… Just lack of as API .

Funny bit about connect is that HSBC is scraping its own website… I think they use Yodlee.

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