Quicken Online Loses Out to Mint
Welcome to wheresitworking? For my first post I’ll be reflecting on my recent experiences pursuing an onine personal finance management (PFM) solution. I’ve been a Quicken user since about 1999, using it entirely on my home PCs. Recently, I decided I wanted to transfer the process to my MacBook. I downloaded Quicken for Mac thinking it would be a fairly smooth transition. It wasn’t, I won’t go into the details completely, but the gist of it is you can’t import your data directly from PC to Mac in Quicken. You have to go through a few hoops and the data ends up messy.
Plan B, which is more inline with my recent obsession with putting all my data online, was to look for an online solution. I’m on my 5th notebook in 30 months; that’s a lot of installing programs and pushing data around. I am becoming a big advocate of just using online solutions for everything. So, Quicken Online was the logical first choice. I was hoping that I’d be able to just import my Quicken files from my PC, and I’d be up and running with Quicken online. Not the case, which didn’t surprise me after the Quicken on the Mac experience. After spending a bit of time tinkering with Quicken online, I decided the interface wasn’t great, and it was time to defect. Think about this; I have used Quicken for 9 years, and I had relatively little problems with it, I would have considered myself an advocate. Now, they’ve lost me as a customer. More time and research should have been put into Quicken online.
Where to next? Here are (most of) the players in the online PFM space: Thrive, Mint, Buxfer, Geezeo, Wesabe, and Moneytrackin‘. I created accounts on Thrive, Mint, Buxfer and Geezeo – I didn’t try out Wesabe because I couldn’t find any great reviews, and this review led me to believe it wasn’t worth trying. MoneyTrackin’ has no automatic interaction with institutions – so you have to manually enter all of your transactions. Thrive is young and obviously isn’t there yet – they didn’t have support for some of my accounts from major financial institutions.
The finals: Mint vs. Buxfer vs. Geezeo. Geezeo has some good reviews, and overall I was impressed. But it was inferior to Mint for several reasons. One big reason was I found the interface somewhat constricting; the ads take up a lot of real estate, making the register narrow. Also, the choices for account classification are also not as extensive as Mint’s; Geezeo offers only a handful of options, Mint offers upwards of 30. I can classify an account as a 529 College Savings account in Mint; it’s just “Other Assets” in Geezeo.
Buxfer is probably a good choice for those using Buxfer already for their other services, but it has a ways to go as a PFM tool. Mostly it was it’s inability to automatically pull data from institutions that turned me off. It requires that you manually teach it to pull export files from your accounts, using a Firefox plugin. Not a very smooth or easy-to-use system. I did like the Buxfer interface, it utilizes the most space making it easy to edit transactions in your registers. I am guessing they will get their relationships with these institutions dialed in, making the user experience much better.
Mint won me out. Mint is flush with VC money, and it looks like they have spent a decent amount of it on creating a fantastic user experience. Adding and editing accounts is easy. Editing transactions is smooth, and it does a great job of automatically classifying your imported expenses. The Overview page does a great job of displaying alerts, quotes for your stocks, and a summary of your debts and assets. One thing it doesn’t do, at least I haven’t learned how to do this yet, is allow you to add a physical asset, like your home. Geezeo tied into Zillow and tracked my home’s value as part of my net worth. It’s much less fun to look at your net worth with your mortgage as a liability, and no asset to offset it! According to their VP of Product, it’s coming.
That’s where I ended up. We’ll see how I feel about this in a couple of months, when I’ve had a chance to work with the program in greater detail. I’d love to hear others thoughts and experiences with this though.
7 Comments to Quicken Online Loses Out to Mint
Great post. I’ve been looking to make the switch from Quicken myself. Nice to see some research from someone in a similar situation.
Hey Adam,
Thanks for checking out Geezeo and for the very thoughtful review of our site and some of the others in our space.
It was good to hear your interest in more account classification. We don’t get that request too often but it’s certainly not a tough one to accommodate. Perhaps we add a field that allows you to customize completely. We will look into it more.
We’re working on some UI improvements that will open up the dashboard a bit while still accommodating our advertisers that help support the site.
Thanks again for the feedback!
Pete Glyman
Co-Founder, Geezeo
Nice to know you opened an account with us, Adam (especially since I take personal pride in all Oregonians, including my parents, that do).
The PF space is shaping up in interesting ways as people find their niches. Like Peter, I’ve never actually had someone request account categorization for Thrive, since we tend to focus on getting it right when it comes your bank and then using that information to give you accurate advice, rather than just report the data we can see.
I’d be interested in hearing more about your goals were when you started doing this project. That is, it seems like you were mostly just looking for information aggregation and reporting, rather than any advice or interpretation of that data. Sounds like you’re way ahead of the game, given that you’ve been using Quicken for so long!
Check back with Thrive periodically; we’re always adding new abilities based on our research and the feedback from users, so who knows – maybe account categorization is a future feature!
AdamNovember 3, 2008
Thanks for the feedback guys! Account classification is just another way to organize, and I suppose that is more important to some than others? I like being able to say, this is a 401k, or this is a 529, etc. I do feel like there are aspects to my decision that are based somewhat on aesthtics. Another person might find some of the other interfaces more comfortable than Mint. Finally, I felt like I underscored the importance of integration with institutions. Mint was able to connect to all of our institutions; no other program except Geezeo could do this with the 10 or so institutions we have accounts and loans with. That ended up being critical in my decision. Thanks again for the comments. I think you both have great products, and I’m eager to see this space grow.
Adam, just following up: how are things going with your PFM experience? I just saw your reply post: Mint and Thrive use the same aggregator (Yodlee), so if you can connect through one, you ought to be able to connect through the other. If you have trouble adding institutions, do let me know at matt@justthrive.com – we work actively with banks to make sure that as many of them as possible are abel to be a part of Thrive.
AdamMarch 25, 2009
Thanks for the follow-up Matt. I’ll have to take another look at Thrive when I have a chance. It looked like you all were really headed in the right direction, and I liked the interface and general usability.
I was impressed to see that Mint now allows users to track assets, like homes and cars. Is that functionality in Thrive, or part of your plan?
- Adam
Sticky question, Adam. In Thrive, we do our best to only use that is in someway verifiable, because we believe in giving you the best possible advice and to do that, we need the best possible data. So we’ll add home and car values when we have a reliable source of tracking how much those assets are worth over time. Which we’re working on doing: there is a little bit of business development that needs doing (in terms of being able to get access to the data) but I think we’re getting there. I’ll make myself a little note to let you know when we have it.
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November 2, 2008