Pros & Cons
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- Exceptional user experience
- Excellent transaction management
- Flexible, effective budgeting tools
- Customizable, insightful reports throughout
- Superb mobile apps
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- Spending Plan has a minor learning curve
- Savings goals don't link to live accounts
Simplifi by Quicken Specs
| Android App | |
| Free Credit Report/Score | |
| Income/Expense Tracking | |
| iOS App | |
| Web Interface |
Simplifi comes from the company that makes Quicken, but it's designed for a different market, younger users who want to track their financial accounts, budgets, and day-to-day spending. Simplifi has a fresh user experience, a concise and helpful dashboard, and innovative views of your data, making it one of the best budgeting and personal finance apps. Because it now has features that Mint used to, like credit scores and budget rollovers, it’s an Editors’ Choice winner and the app we recommend most for budgeting and managing personal finances. Two other Editors' Choice winners are Quicken Classic for those who like to micro manage, and YNAB, which is best if traditional ways of thinking about money have never worked for you.
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.
(Credit: Quicken/PCMag)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.
(Credit: Quicken/PCMag)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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(Credit: Quicken/PCMag)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.
(Credit: Quicken/PCMag)Managing Your Saving Goals, Investments, and Shared Finances
You can track savings goals in Simplifi, but you have to move money yourself for contributions and withdrawals. Credit Karma has a bank partnership that lets you open a branded savings account (Credit Karma Money Save) that, as of this writing, has a very good interest rate. You can set up automated savings plans and watch your money grow in Credit Karma.
Simplifi fares better where investments are concerned. You can import your brokerage holdings or manually enter them and view them in four charts: portfolio (with 15-minute delayed quotes), balances, performance, and transactions. Quicken Classic and Empower are more advanced where securities data are concerned.
(Credit: Quicken/PCMag)If you’re sharing finances with a partner, you can give them access to view and modify all your accounts, transactions, and anything else within Simplifi. Monarch Money also allows this.
Customizable Charts and Reports
Simplifi has more (and more customizable) reports and charts than other personal financial apps, except for Quicken Classic. In addition to standard visuals giving you an overview of things like spending, income, and net worth, you can now see your credit score. This requires your Social Security number and is updated once per month. Finally, the Refund Tracker report gives you the status of any refunds you’ve asked Simplifi to track.
(Credit: Quicken/PCMag)Help and Support
Simplifi has the most robust help and support of any personal finance app I've seen. Beyond the voluminous detailed how-to in-app articles, there’s a chatbot and live chat help. You can request a callback for phone support. You might also find useful info on the Simplifi online community.
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.