When personal finance apps are built on sound principles of budgeting and they're convenient to use, they help people achieve their financial goals, whether that means getting out of debt or saving for retirement, or both. An online app called Mvelopes gets the first part right, adapting the tried-and-true envelope method of budgeting (in which money is set aside for expenses, in actual envelopes) to the digital world. But is it convenient? In my experience, not really. Its ease of use pales in comparison to that of Mint, PCMag's Editors' Choice for personal finance software.

Mint is adept at showing you where your money goes so that you can change your behavior going forward, and its budgeting tools are simple to use. Mvelopes has you estimate how much money you need for certain expense categories without providing any historical evidence of what you typically spend, which is an important part of helping people take control of their money. Between the guesswork that's required and an outdated interface, Mvelopes is time-consuming to set up and to maintain. The service also makes it hard to find its pricing and fees, all of which makes it hard to recommend.

Price and Plans
Mvelopes is free to use with some limitations, and it offers two upgrade options: Premium ($19.95 per month or $95 per year) and Coaching ($59.95 per month). Mvelopes' website has a comparison chart of the plans, but the pricing is not listed, which I find problematic. If you click to "learn more" about either of the plans, you still don't get to see the prices. The costs aren't revealed until after you've signed up for an account and given away some personal information, which is a big red flag for me. Online financial services need to be clear and upfront about how much they charge.

With the free version of Mvelopes, you can connect up to four financial accounts and dedicate up to 25 envelopes for your spending categories. With a Premium or Coaching account, those limitations are removed, and you get access to email support, as well as a host of financial literacy resources, such as budgeting ebooks and premium video content. With a Premium or Coaching account, you can also set up alerts so that you get an email any time a transaction over a certain amount clears. That's a standard capability of most banks and credit cards these days, however.

The big difference with the Coaching program is that you get monthly one-on-one financial coaching sessions. In these sessions, you can learn how to create and analyze a budget, maximize your retirement savings, live within your means. You can also get help building a three- to six-month emergency fund (also called a replacement fund).

LearnVest offers a similar coaching experience for a fee that it makes known before you enroll: $19 per month plus a one-time initiation fee of $299. That may sound like a hefty bill, but I'm still much more comfortable knowing what I'll pay in advance.

Let's further compare the prices of LearnVest's premium account to Mvelopes' Coaching program. The first year of LearnVest runs you $527. But the second year only costs $228 because you don't have to pay the initiation fee again. That's a two-year price of $755. Mvelopes Coaching, at $59.95 per month, works out to be $719.40 for the first year alone, which makes it more expensive than LearnVest from the outset. Two years costs $1,438.80.

Getting Started
Mvelopes has you start by optionally linking to some of your online bank accounts. Connecting your accounts gives Mvelopes real-time, read-only access to your financial information. That means it can pull information about your balance and line item transactions. But when you first set up, it only shows the balances. You'll only see line item transactions from the day you set up your account and thereafter.

Mint and LearnVest, however, show you a history of transactions from the get-go. They even categorize your history of expenses into categories for you. In effect, Mint and LearnVest give you a jump-start on analyzing your spending from day one. With Mvelopes, you start from zero.

That said, Mvelopes does a decent job of walking you through the rest of the setup process. It involves entering your income and estimating how much money you will need every month for various expenses—everything from rent and phone bills to shopping and entertainment.

As you continue to customize your account, you allocate money for various expenses. As time goes on and you track your spending, any leftover money in an envelope can roll over to the next month. For example, if you allocate $50 for shopping and you only spend $25, then next month you get $75 to spend. Likewise, if you overspend on restaurants this month, next month the amount of money in your restaurant envelope will be less.

You can allocate the same amount of money for each month to the same envelope or adjust it. You might spend more money on gifts in November and December than January, for example. The process is time-consuming if you want to make sure you get it right. It's well intentioned but tiresome.

Classifying my transactions in testing was a bore, and it took a lot of trial and error to figure out which categories I would need. Why should I spend all day doing this work manually when other personal finance websites can do it for me, the way Mint and LearnVest do? They guess the spending category for each line of expense and income, and flag the ones they can't figure out for my attention. Over time, if there's a category I need that doesn't exist, I can add it, and if a transaction is incorrectly classified, I can fix it. But the bulk of the heavy lifting for analysis and budgeting is done for me.

With Mvelopes, you can create rules for routine expenses to ease some of the pain of classifying them every time they occur, but even the rule tool feels outdated, requiring a lot of manual input.

In terms of its design, Mvelopes looks like the kind of site that would run best in Internet Explorer. In fact, when I first tested the site in 2013, it only worked in IE. In my retesting this year and last, I used it in Google Chrome. While support for today's browsers has been improved, the site remains ugly, looking more like an Excel spreadsheet from 1999 than a modern personal finance app.

Mvelopes has free mobile apps for iOS and Android, and these have a much more contemporary and simple look. I also found that the whole system of budgeting was much easier to understand when viewed on a mobile device because of the way the app laid it out. If you're going to use Mvelopes, I would highly encourage you to use the iPhone or Android app instead of the website.

Mvelopes in Action
Design complaints aside, there are some things that Mvelopers does well. There's no question that the guiding principles for why one might budget this way are solid. If you have to stare at and make decisions about each transaction you've made, you will become more conscious of your spending. And the larger principle of setting aside money to fund your expenses is as old as the day is long. If you're a true beginner at budgeting your money, this old-school method might make a lot of sense. But there are other old-school style tools, too, including YNAB (which stands for You Need a Budget) that are better.

Still, in light of how other online personal finance services work, Mvelopes is antiquated. For example, when you need to determine how much money you should set aside every month for fixed costs, such as your phone bill or home insurance, Mint simply tells you how much you have spent in the past. Mvelopes asks you to guess or look it up. If there's a category of spending for which you previously have not budgeted, Mint tells you exactly how much you have spent in the past, both month by month and on average. It even suggests a good number for setting your budget based on your previous spending. Mvelopes tells you to estimate how much you think you will need. But how will you know how much you need if you can't look at what you've spent in the past?

Mvelopes doesn't have a section for goals, either, which can be a little different than simply creating a monthly budget for savings. With Mvelopes, you can certainly do the latter. But with Mint, you can create complex goals, such as "buy a house," and get advice from Mint about how much you'll need for a down payment. Mint will also adjust how much you should save each month based on the date you want to achieve your goal. With Mvelopes, the best you can do is write down a number on an envelope and try to sock away that much money each month.

Previously, Mint did not support the concept of rollover budgeting, and Mvelopes has. But now Mint has that feature, too. If you don't spend all your coffee shop money in March, you get a little extra money come April.

Mvelopes Premium and Coaching are brimming with educational material designed to help you understand personal finances and budgeting better. But those paid tiers of service are much more expensive than competing options, which have a better core product anyway. I'll stick instead with LearnVest's Must Reads series of articles, which are free to access even without a LearnVest account.

Difficult to Recommend
Mvelopes has sound principles at its foundation, but it doesn't implement them in a way that helps users get started quickly and efficiently. Yes, there is a free tier, but how much time will it cost you to set up and maintain the service? The real red flag for me is the lack of information about how much the Premium and Coaching services cost until after you give up your personal information. You're better off with Editors' Choice Mint.com, a personal finance service that excels in all the areas where Mvelopes falters—one that is also free. If you'd rather have a more traditional budgeting experience, however, check out YNAB.