Quicken Online vs. Mint.com
Both Quicken Online and Mint work well for those in their 20's and 30's, with one difference between the two being that Mint is free and Quicken Online costs $3 per month. The BusinessWeek article indicates that Intuit (Quicken developer and marketer) believes that Mint is less user-friendly because of the ads on Mint, while $36 per year is a small price to pay for ad-free software. I agree that $36 a year is a small price, and I agree that when someone pays for software it sure should be 100% ad-free. Yet, Quicken desktop, with a much higher price tag than Quicken Online, has some small ads at the bottom of account registers. What's up with that?
You won't see ads in the account registers or other financial management modules in Mint. The ads appear on one page that you have to select, and that page provides relevant alternatives for what you already buy. So, you can use Mint and never see an ad. And, Quicken Online's $3/month subscription is a great deal. It's just not fair to suggest that ads get in the way of using Mint - they don't.
Comments
I’ve used Quicken Online for one month
purely to Track Spending. While its
access of my accounts and initial
categorization of transactions is
excellent, it doesn’t support much
more than a pie chart and monthly sum
for each category — almost feature-nil.
I was expecting a lot more.
No sort/subcategorizations, very limited editing, no split-transactions, too bad.
What little there is is very nice –
there’s just too little so I’m
unsubscribing..
Why pay when you don’t have to. Mint.com is decent for basic budgeting and financial analysis. Sure it’s not perfect, but my theory is that if something is free, don’t expect an exact comparison to what costs a fee.