Instead YouTube gives me literally nothing but AI spam. :/
I scrolled down a bit more and got this: https://i.postimg.cc/fJcPhG45/Screenshot-20251118-150802.png
Scrolled down some more and this: https://i.postimg.cc/v1khnhRp/Screenshot-20251118-151325.png
I kept scrolling until I ran out of relevant results. Not a single video was legit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much AI slop in one search term and by the gods there is a lot of crap on YouTube.
Anyone have a good comparison video? I’m just wanting a decent comparison of Actual, Firefly III and possibly HomeBank. Feel free to also give me your 2 cents on whatever you use :)
Just FYI, take a look at how YNAB works — which is a paid app, but with a great approach: you track your spending for a while, and then basically always know how much you can spend on various categories of things. Idk what the workflow is in modern budgeting apps, but back in the day YNAB was rather different from the more typical accounting-type software like GNUCash. One of its tenets is that you don’t spend money which you don’t actually have, i.e. the credit card dept.
Actual Budget is a straight FOSS clone of YNAB. It’s very, very good IMHO, but their big selling feature was bank import with PSD2 APIs across the EU and they’ve backed away from that as you need to be a commercial provider to use APIs directly and their dependency on GoCardless is getting nerfed.
Thanks, but as a non-quite-EU person I’d like you to know I understood your comment fine until a bit after the second comma in the second sentence, following which my grokking declined sharply to just the surface level when met with a bunch of peculiar terms forming a mighty wall of obstruction to my comprehending.
The EU has instigated the Payment Service Directive 2 (the previous one being PSD1). This requires that all EU banks over a certain size provide APIs to access transactions and other data.
However banks are required to set strict requirements to use their APIs, including requiring lots of knowledge and a documented approval chain that pertains to each user. In practice this means only other big companies have access and most have solved it by buying the “access account and transaction data” service from a third party company.
GoCardless is one such company. They previously had a developer tier that you could sign up to, which would provide you an access token that you then provided to Actual Budget so they could access your accounts on your behalf.
GoCardless have however limited what their free developer accounts can do, which means Actua Budget can no longer get real time access to your acccohnt data.
Thanks again! This is very comprehensive and much more comprehensible.
I would avoid YNAB. They had an offline version years back that was really nice until they did a rug pull and disabled it in order to get people to buy their subscription service.
I still have the offline version in my Steam library. It still works, just no syncing to cloud.
As do I. I don’t really recall why I just stopped using it - it could just be because I didn’t feel ok feeding my personal finances into software controlled by a shady company.