I recently made the switch to Actual from YNAB after two years on it. I'd echo what most have said already in that it's a close as you'll get to a clone of YNAB. For someone who just wants to track their spending with the envelope method, I find it more than sufficient but I haven't dug into their reporting too much. They do offer another budget method that I did not mess with.
Without getting too in the weeds, I'll just add that for any questions with initial setup or functionality that were difficult to locate or digest in their documentation I asked ChatGPT and it gave me very simple outlines of the steps to take. I took the approach of setting up my own server, which was more complicated than I anticipated. I'd recommend most people use their Pikapods workflow with SimpleFIN so its not free but ~$30/yr. I found SimpleFIN setup to be quite simple.
Without getting too in the weeds, I'll just add that for any questions with initial setup or functionality that were difficult to locate or digest in their documentation I asked ChatGPT and it gave me very simple outlines of the steps to take. I took the approach of setting up my own server, which was more complicated than I anticipated. I'd recommend most people use their Pikapods workflow with SimpleFIN so its not free but ~$30/yr. I found SimpleFIN setup to be quite simple.
Statistics: Posted by parr4thecourse — Fri Jan 09, 2026 9:08 am — Replies 17 — Views 1273