The highest-rated budgeting app in your app store might not work with a single one of your accounts, and nothing on the listing page will tell you that. You find out four screens in, after you've made an account and handed over an email address, when you type your bank's name into a search box and nothing comes back.
If you're in the US, the UK, Canada or Australia you can mostly ignore that warning. Everywhere else it's the first thing I'd check, and almost nobody tells you to.
What you probably want, if that's you, is an app that doesn't ask to link a bank account at all, because it expects you to bring the data yourself. There are more of those around than the store charts suggest, and they're not all the same.
First, my bias
I build Arco, which is one of the apps this post could send you to. So read the rest knowing that. I've tried to write the guide I'd have wanted while shopping, which means the honest answer for a lot of readers is "buy YNAB," and I've said so where it's true. If you finish this and install something else, that's a fine outcome by me. A wrong recommendation costs me more than a lost sale does.
Almost every famous budgeting app works the same way
Pick any well-known budgeting app and look at what it asks you to do on day one. It wants you to log in to your bank — not to Arco, not to YNAB, to your bank — through a middleman that holds a read-only connection and pulls your transactions across every night. In the US that middleman is usually Plaid, and Europe and Australia have their own equivalents doing the same job.
That one decision quietly settles three things you probably think of as separate.
It sets the price. The connection isn't free to the app, and somebody bills them for it every month, forever. That's why these apps are subscriptions rather than a one-off purchase, and why the prices cluster around the same figure:
- YNAB is $14.99 a month or $109 a year, with a 34-day free trial that doesn't ask for a card. (Checked on ynab.com/pricing, 9 September 2026.)
- Copilot Money is $95 a year, which they show as $7.92 a month billed yearly, with a one-month trial. Worth checking before you get attached: their pricing page lists iPhone, iPad, Mac and Web, and there's no Android app. (copilot.money/pricing, same day.)
- Monarch Money is the one I won't put a price on, because I couldn't find one published on its own pages, and a number copied out of somebody else's review is worth nothing. What Monarch's own help pages do say: it covers the United States and Canada only, and it does no currency conversion at all, with no plans to add it. So if your accounts aren't in dollars, the price is beside the point. (Checked on help.monarch.com, 9 September 2026.)
Mint used to be the free one, and Mint shut down in 2024 and folded into Credit Karma. A fair number of people shopping for a budget app right now are only shopping because of that.
It sets the countries. Bank aggregation has good coverage in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and parts of Europe. Across most of Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, coverage runs from thin down to nothing at all. That often means zero rather than merely fewer, and the e-wallet where half your money actually sits is rarely on the list even in the countries where the banks are.
App stores don't regionalise any of this. A glowing review written in Ohio ranks perfectly well in Manila, so the app installs, the trial starts, and then you meet the search box.
It sets what you hand over. A read-only feed is still a company you didn't choose holding a live key to your transaction history. That might be a perfectly acceptable trade, and millions of people make it happily. I'd just make it on purpose, and go and read who the aggregator actually is first, because the app's own privacy policy isn't the whole story.
Four questions, before you install anything
- Does it work with my bank? Find the app's supported-institutions search and type your bank in before you create an account. Do your credit card issuer and your e-wallet separately. If two of the three are missing, no feature list is going to rescue that app for you.
- What does it want from me? There are really only three answers: your bank login through an aggregator, a file you export yourself, or your thumbs. Each one fails in a different way, and the marketing won't tell you which you're signing up for.
- What happens when the connection breaks? Feeds break for boring reasons — you change your password, you get a new phone, the bank redesigns its login, the bank's own security gets stricter. The question that matters isn't whether it breaks, it's whether the app tells you loudly that a feed has gone stale, or just quietly shows you a March that's missing nine transactions. A silent gap is worse than no data at all, because you'll believe it.
- What do I do when I fall behind? Everyone falls behind, and week three of any budgeting system is usually where it dies. So before you commit, work out what catching up on eleven days would actually involve. If the answer is typing in eleven days of receipts, you already know how that goes.
There's a fifth question, less urgent but worth a moment: can you get your data back out? Look for a CSV or JSON export you can run yourself, without emailing support. Mint's users learned that one the hard way.
Two families of app
Once you've asked those questions the whole market splits cleanly in half: apps that fetch your data, and apps you feed.
| Automatic bank sync | You supply the data | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the data comes from | A nightly feed from your bank via an aggregator | You type it, import a CSV, or import a statement |
| Where it works | Wherever the aggregator has coverage | Anywhere |
| Typical cost | $95–$180 a year | Free to cheap; the recurring cost is your attention |
| What you hand over | Bank access, through a third party | A file, or nothing at all |
| Effort in week one | Twenty minutes of connecting accounts | Twenty minutes, then a bit every week |
| Effort in month three | Nearly none, when the feeds hold | Real, and it never quite goes away |
| How it fails | A feed dies and you don't notice | You skip a week, then two, then you stop |
| Cash and e-wallets | Usually invisible | Same as everything else, because you enter it |
Automatic sync is better, if you can get it
I want to be very plain about this, because I sell the other kind.
If your bank is supported, a working bank feed will beat anything you do by hand. It doesn't get bored, and it doesn't miss the Tuesday you were off sick. Checking your app against your real balance takes seconds rather than turning into a small monthly argument with yourself, and the categorisation rules get better the longer you use them. If that's available to you, go and pay the $109.
Anyone telling you that manual tracking is spiritually superior, that the friction builds character, is usually selling you friction. There's a real version of that argument and I'll make it in a minute, but it's a consolation prize and it ought to be sold as one.
The catch is that "if your bank is supported" is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. For a lot of people reading this it simply isn't true, and no amount of wanting it changes that.
Budget apps that don't need a bank connection
If that's where you've ended up, you're choosing between three ways of feeding an app, and they aren't equally good.
Typing it in as you spend is the one everybody dismisses, and it's also the only method where the tracking changes your behaviour rather than just recording it, because you notice the $3 coffee while you're buying it instead of four weeks later in a pie chart. If an app makes that take more than about five seconds it's the wrong app, and you can test it from the store screenshots by counting the taps from opening the app to a saved expense.
A CSV export from your bank, once a month, is unglamorous and probably the most reliable thing on this list. Your bank already offers it, buried in a menu somewhere. It's exact, it's complete, it takes about ten minutes a month, and nobody has ever enjoyed doing it.
Statement import means handing the app a PDF or a photo of your statement and letting it read the transactions out and file them. When it works it's comfortably the best of the three, and it's also the newest and least dependable, so I'd judge it by what happens when it fails rather than by the demo video.
Where Arco fits
Arco won't ask you for your online banking password, because there's nothing in it that could use one. If you've read this far hoping for a hands-off nightly feed, Arco isn't that, and I'd rather you knew now than after installing it.
What you get is all of it, free, with no account and no internet needed — unlimited accounts and transactions, budgets, spending insights, multi-currency with real exchange rates, recurring transactions, a PIN or biometric lock, CSV export, and a full local backup you can restore from. It isn't a trial, and it isn't a stripped-back tier that nags you to upgrade. You can install it from Google Play, download it for Mac where it keeps itself up to date, or get it from the Microsoft Store on Windows.
Then there's statement import, which is really why Arco exists. Give it a PDF or a photo of a bank or card statement and it pulls out the transactions and suggests a category for each one, using your category names rather than inventing its own. The honest caveats: it's in beta, it needs an account and an internet connection because the document goes to an AI provider, Anthropic, to be read, free accounts get one import a month, and some statements come back unreadable. If a statement PDF is password-locked, Arco asks you for the password, uses it once in memory on your own device to unlock the file, and never sends it anywhere.
Arco Pro is optional and adds syncing between your devices, unlimited statement import, and automatic cloud backup. There's a seven-day free trial on the annual plan, you can pay monthly or annually, and the store shows you the price in your own currency. Sync is the boring part and it's deliberately the paid part, because it's the bit that costs me money to run.
Where Arco is the wrong choice
Four cases, and I'd much rather say them here than in a refund request:
- Your bank is supported and you want automation. Go and pay YNAB, Monarch or Copilot. You'll stick with it longer than you'd stick with anything manual, and sticking with it is the entire game.
- You're on an iPhone. There's no iPhone version yet, and I'm not going to give you a date I'm not sure of.
- You want real investment tracking. Arco has investment accounts, but the balance is a number you type in yourself. There's no brokerage feed and no live market prices.
- You and your partner want one shared budget. Sync keeps your devices in step; it doesn't join two people's accounts together. It's on the list and it isn't built.
Do this before you install anything else
Open whichever app you're leaning towards, find its supported-banks list, and search for your bank. Then your credit card. Then your e-wallet. It takes about two minutes and it happens before any signup, so it costs you nothing.
If all three are there, start the free trial today, connect them tonight, and stop reading comparison posts. If none of them are there, you've just saved yourself an evening and a subscription, and your real decision is which of those three feeding methods you can honestly keep up with in week three.
If you landed on the manual side
Arco is free, works with any bank on earth because it reads the statement you already get, and logging what you spend needs no account.
Also on the Microsoft Store. Free to use, and logging what you spend needs no account.