Self-hosted budgeting: a private Mint and YNAB alternative
Your financial data is about as personal as data gets, which makes "a free app that connects to all your bank accounts" a genuinely uncomfortable trade. When Mint shut down, a lot of people learned the hard way that a budgeting service is only yours until it isn't. Self-hosting your budget fixes both problems: the numbers live on your server, and no company's business decision can take the app away. Here are the two self-hosted budgeting tools worth running.
Actual — fast, friendly envelope budgeting
Actual is the one to try first if you want something that feels like a modern, polished budgeting app. It's built around zero-based (envelope) budgeting — the YNAB philosophy of giving every dollar a job — and it's genuinely pleasant to use: fast, local-first, with a clean interface and good mobile support.
- Zero-based / envelope budgeting done well, for people who want to budget proactively.
- Fast and local-first — snappy, and it keeps working close to your data.
- Approachable — the gentlest on-ramp of the two.
Pick Actual if: you want a friendly, modern YNAB-style budgeting app you own.
Firefly III — the power user's finance manager
Firefly III is the serious, do-everything personal finance manager. Accounts, budgets, bills, categories, rules, reports, multiple currencies — it's less "gentle budgeting app" and more "your own private finance system." There's more to learn, and in return there's very little it can't track.
- Deep and comprehensive — accounts, budgets, bills, rules, rich reports.
- Multi-currency and highly detailed.
- An API and rules engine for automating imports and categorization.
Pick Firefly III if: you want total control and detail, and don't mind a learning curve.
Which one should you pick?
| If you want… | Run |
|---|---|
| Friendly, modern envelope budgeting (YNAB-style) | Actual |
| A comprehensive, detailed finance manager | Firefly III |
Most people who just want to budget are happiest on Actual. Reach for Firefly III when you want to track and analyze your whole financial life in detail.
A word on bank sync
Honest expectation-setting: automatic bank connections are the hardest part of self-hosted finance, because the bank-aggregation services that power them are region-specific and sometimes paid. Both apps support importing transactions (and have paths to automation), but if seamless one-click bank sync is your dealbreaker, test that part first for your bank. For many people, a periodic import is a perfectly good trade for keeping their finances entirely private.
The self-hosting reality
Both are an app plus a database behind TLS. Given what they hold, the "test your backups" rule is not negotiable here — a lost budget is annoying, a lost financial history is worse. Run it on a VPS, or deploy either in one click and keep the most private data you have on a server that's yours alone.
Deploy Actual → · Deploy Firefly III → — or see the full catalog.