YNAB (You Need A Budget) charges $14.99 per month or $99 per year to help you track where your money goes. It is genuinely good software. But you are paying for the server that holds your financial data, the sync service that moves it between your devices, and the ongoing subscription that gives you access to the budgeting method that has been around since the 1990s. Actual Budget gives you the same method, a comparable feature set, and your data stored on your own machine, for nothing after the initial download. It has 27,833 stars on GitHub and an active community that ships releases on a consistent cadence. If you looked at Maybe Finance and missed that it was archived in July 2025 when its company pivoted to B2B, Actual Budget is the actively maintained open-source alternative to reach for.
| Fact | Value |
|---|---|
| What it is | Local-first envelope budgeting app |
| Built by | Actual Budget community (open-source) |
| License | MIT (free to use and modify) |
| Platforms | macOS, Windows, Linux (desktop app); web (self-hosted server) |
| Requires | Desktop app download or Docker for self-hosted sync server |
| Install method | Download from actualbudget.org or Docker |
| Verdict | Install if you want a YNAB-style budget with your data on your own machine. |
What Actual Budget actually is
Actual Budget is a personal finance application built around envelope budgeting. Envelope budgeting is a method where you divide your available money into virtual envelopes (named categories like Groceries, Rent, Car Insurance, and Entertainment) before you spend any of it. Each envelope holds a budgeted amount for the month. When you spend money, you record the transaction against the matching envelope. When an envelope runs out, you have a real choice to make: stop spending in that category, or move money from another envelope intentionally. That decision-making is the point. The method forces you to confront tradeoffs rather than discover them after the fact on a credit card statement.
YNAB popularized this method for the smartphone era, and Actual Budget replicates it with near-identical logic. The meaningful difference is architecture. Actual Budget is local-first, which means your budget data lives in a file on your own computer by default and never touches any external server. There is no account to create, no cloud backend receiving your bank balances or transaction history, and no vendor whose terms of service determine what happens to your financial records. You run the app, your data stays on your machine.
For multi-device access, you have the option to run Actual Server, a self-hosted sync server component that you run via Docker (software that packages an application so it runs identically on any server). Actual Server syncs your budget file between your devices through your own server rather than a third party's. You control the machine. You control the data.
What you get after installing it
The budget view is the core screen. You see your categories arranged in groups (you choose the groups and category names) with three columns: budgeted, spent, and remaining. At the top of the page, a "to be budgeted" number shows how much money is sitting unassigned. The goal is to get that number to zero before the month starts by assigning every dollar to a category. You work the budget view at the start of each month, adjusting amounts based on what you know is coming.
The account register lists every transaction in a given account. You can add transactions manually, import them from a CSV file (a plain-text spreadsheet format that most banks let you export), or connect to your bank for automatic imports. Each transaction gets assigned to a budget category, which is how spending flows from your register into your envelope totals.
Bank sync is available via two services: Plaid and SimpleFIN. Both are third-party bank connectivity services that use your online banking credentials to import transactions from your financial institutions automatically. Plaid is the more widely supported option in the United States; SimpleFIN is an alternative that some users prefer for privacy reasons. Both require creating accounts with those services separately. Bank sync is entirely optional. Many users run Actual Budget in fully offline mode, entering transactions by hand or importing CSV exports from their bank.
Reports give you a historical view once you have a few months of data. The built-in reports include net worth over time (the sum of all your account balances), spending by category (a breakdown of where money went each month), and income versus expenses over time. These are useful once you have three to six months of data to compare against.
Import from YNAB is a migration path for anyone switching from the paid subscription. Actual Budget can read a YNAB export file and recreate your categories, accounts, and transaction history. The import is not always perfectly clean, but it handles the bulk of the work.
The mobile-friendly web interface means you can access your budget on a phone through a browser when running Actual Server on your own machine. There is no native mobile app, but the web interface adapts to phone screens and covers recording transactions on the go.
The install experience
The desktop app download is the simplest starting point. Go to actualbudget.org, download the installer for your operating system (macOS, Windows, or Linux), run it, and you have a working budgeting app in under five minutes. No account creation. No internet connection required. Your data file lives on your machine at a path you can see and back up like any other document.
The desktop app runs entirely offline. You enter transactions, assign money to envelopes, and review reports. If you only ever use one device, this is the entire setup.
For multi-device sync or browser-based access, you add Actual Server. This requires Docker. Install Docker on a machine that stays on (a home server, a NAS device (a network-attached storage box, essentially a small always-on computer for file storage), a cheap VPS (a virtual private server, a rented slice of a remote machine you access over the internet), or a Raspberry Pi), then pull and run the Actual Server container using the configuration in the official documentation. Once the server is running, you point your desktop app or browser at the server address, and your budget file syncs between devices through your own infrastructure.
The realistic setup time for a first-time Docker user is 30 to 60 minutes. The documentation is thorough and the community on the project's Discord and forum is active. For someone who has run Docker before, the actual configuration is minimal: one compose file (a text file that tells Docker which containers to run and how to connect them), two environment variables, and a port to expose.
For a non-technical user who wants multi-device access without running any server, the practical answer is to run Actual Budget on a single machine you access regularly and back up the data file manually to cloud storage. There is a hosted version of the sync server available through some third-party services for a small monthly fee, but the fully self-managed path requires Docker.
Where it fits and what to compare it to
YNAB (youneedabudget.com) is the category leader. The product is polished, the mobile apps are excellent, the educational resources are extensive, and the community is large. At $14.99 per month or $99 per year, it is not expensive in absolute terms. The gaps: your financial data lives on YNAB's servers, there is no export-and-run-it-yourself path, and you pay indefinitely to maintain access. YNAB is the right choice if you want a finished, fully supported product and are comfortable with those tradeoffs. Actual Budget is the right choice if you want the same budgeting method with your data under your own control.
Mint shut down in January 2023 after Intuit discontinued it. If you are looking for a Mint replacement with a local-first philosophy, Actual Budget is one of the strongest available options.
Copilot Money is a polished subscription-based personal finance app with excellent design. It is Mac and iOS only, costs $13 per month or $95 per year, and stores data in its own cloud. Not a meaningful comparison on the privacy and control dimensions.
Firefly III is another open-source personal finance tool with self-hosted architecture. It takes a more accounting-oriented approach: double-entry bookkeeping (a method where every transaction has two entries, a debit and a credit, to maintain a complete record), detailed asset and liability tracking, and a structure built around accountants rather than general households. Firefly III is worth considering if you want more granular financial reporting and are comfortable with a steeper learning curve. Actual Budget is the better fit if you want the envelope method specifically and a lighter interface.
Actual Budget sits at the intersection of a specific method (envelope budgeting), a specific philosophy (local-first, your data on your machine), and a specific price point (free). There is no other maintained open-source project that covers all three at once.
Verdict
Install it if the combination of envelope budgeting and data ownership matches how you want to manage your finances. The desktop app download is low-friction: five minutes and you have a working budgeting tool with no account required and no data leaving your machine.
The caveats worth naming directly: Actual Budget is community-maintained open-source software. It does not have a paid support tier. If you hit a bug or an import issue, you are working through community forums and the GitHub issue tracker, not a support ticket queue. The mobile experience requires running Actual Server, which requires Docker. Users who want a native phone app for recording transactions on the go will find that gap meaningful.
That said, the 27,833 GitHub stars and consistent release history signal a project with enough adoption and contributor momentum to take seriously as a long-term tool rather than an experiment. The MIT license means you can run it indefinitely without negotiating with a vendor, and the local file format means your data is portable as long as you can access your own machine.
For someone currently paying YNAB fees who is comfortable with a desktop-first workflow and wants their financial data off third-party servers, the case for switching is direct. Same method, no subscription, complete data ownership.