Adaptu Review

Updated February 1, 2013: Adaptu is closing down as of February 21, 2013. See alternatives for another online personal finance software, how to export your data and close your account in Help for Moving Your Adaptu Data and Choosing New Personal Finance Software.

Adaptu provides one place to see account balances, financial transactions, spending trends and budgets, just like most other online personal finance apps. But, Adaptu also offers helpful financial advice articles written by experts and relatively strong investment tracking features, both making this app worth a look.

Adaptu provides one place to see account balances, financial transactions, spending trends and budgets, and has a good number of budget categories to choose from so you can classify transactions for budgeting as income, expense, transfer or deferred. New categories can't be added by the user, but changing category names is supported, as is adding up to five subcategories.

Splitting transactions is easily accomplished, and is much easier to use than the same feature in competitor, Mint.com.

Bills can be viewed in Adaptu on a bills calendar so you can easily see upcoming bills and whether you will have the funds necessary to pay them. Click on a particular day of the month and you'll see scheduled transactions and a projected future balance.

Reports include cash flow, spending by category and budget vs actual spending. freedom more help with sticking to your budget, you can set up text or e-mail alerts so you know when you're getting close to meeting or exceeding spending goals. Another note on the budget feature: unused budget amounts do not roll forward to the next month.

Adaptu's Investor Center is great for keeping an eye on market news and investments, and the My Investments feature tracks your stocks, mutual funds and ETFs with various views.

Adaptu's separate Community area offers advice articles from expert coaches, with videos and discussions. You can send coaches questions about their specific area of Money management:

• Budget for Life - saving money, money management and budgeting tips from financial blogger David Ning.
• Love and Money - relationship and money issues from financial industry expert Kristina Kay.
• College Savings - tips for planning for the future from Dorethia Conner, president of Conner Coaching.
• 401k How To explains retirement plans and is coached by financial advisor Jeremy Vohwinkle, who also writes for About.com Financial Planning.
• Debt Relief - planning to eliminate debt, with coach Glen Craig, who publishes the personal finance site Free From Broke.

Adaptu's Community can be accessed from the financial tools by clicking on a link on the upper right. But, there seems to be some issues with moving between tools and community. When I moved from financial tools to the online community, then tried to get back to the tools, I was logged out. Another time, every time I clicked on Tools, the Community landing page reloaded. I had to log out and back in again. although this can be a little buggy, the Community is definitely worthwhile.

The eight accounts I set up in Adaptu seemed to take a little longer to update than some other online financial apps do, and there wasn't always a clear indication of when the accounts were actually updating. When I switched between report types, it occasionally took quite awhile for the report to load on the screen, and the Bill Calendar was sometimes slow to load, too. I tested this with both Chrome and Firefox to ensure the problem wasn't a browser issue, and had the same result with both.

If you can put up with some slowness and occasional issues when moving between the money management area and community, Adaptu is definitely worth a look for the strength of its financial tools. Decent investment account support is rare in personal finance software, and using the calendar to view upcoming bills is more helpful than a list for many people. I also suspect that Adaptu will continue to be developed and glitches will be ironed out, but this is not to suggest that the app isn't ready for prime time. Adaptu is fully functional and could give Mint and other online personal finance apps some serious competition.

There's also a mobile app that works in sync with the online app, called Adaptu Wallet. Learn more at Adaptu's web site.

Adaptu free online personal finance software was used in both Chrome and Firefox browsers in Mac OSX and PC Windows 7 environments for this review.