Quicken Classic is the oldest, most capable, and most feature-rich personal finance app available today. Its depth can be intimidating to new users and those who aren't trying to micromanage their finances, but it is by far one of the best budgeting and personal finance apps you can get. Quicken Classic is an Editors’ Choice winner alongside Quicken Simplifi, which is better for people who aren't power users. Read our in-depth article on the differences between Quicken Classic and Simplifi if you're unsure which one is right for you. If neither of those options seems like the right fit, try YNAB. It's an Editors' Choice winner, too, that makes you think about money differently.
How Much Does Quicken Cost?
Quicken Classic is very reasonably priced, considering its depth. It comes in three tiers: Deluxe ($71.88 per year), Premier ($95.88 per year), or Business and Personal ($131.88 per year). Deluxe lets you create budgets, manage your debt, plan for retirement, and organize your finances for tax filing. Premier adds investing tools, tax reports, and the ability to track and pay bills. Business and Personal adds tools for managing a small business and rental properties. This review focuses on Quicken Classic Premier.
Quicken Simplifi ($47.88 per year) is another product by the same company. It's exceptional, and it costs about half as much as Premier. It's more suited to people who aren't trying to micromanage their finances and want a mobile app and web app rather than desktop software. It's simpler than Quicken Classic, though we recommend it just as highly.
Mint used to be the personal finance app many people used because it was free, but it's no longer available. The only free personal finance apps we recommend now are Credit Karma and NerdWallet, which are specialized and don't have the same depth and broad feature set as Quicken. Other personal finance apps cost more, including YNAB and Monarch Money. Both charge $14.99 per month, though they're more affordable if you pay annually (both charge $99 per year).
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Quicken Simplifi
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Empower
Getting Started With Quicken
Getting started with Quicken Classic is similar to how you do it in most apps for budgeting and managing your finances. First you create an account with Quicken and then you log into your online financial accounts within Quicken and give it permission to get data from those accounts so it can import transactions. For example, you connect to your credit card accounts and Quicken can see where and when you use your credit card and how much you spend. All that information goes into charts and lists in Quicken's terrific dashboard.
Because Quicken has so many features, there are other steps you may want to take while setting up, like choosing options in the Preferences and visiting the View menu to see additional options, like Use Large Fonts—some fonts in lists and menus are exceptionally small.
New Quicken users can now take advantage of Quicken 1-2-3, a free service that helps you get started by screen-sharing (no faces on the video call) with an expert. This is a much-needed and welcome addition to the service.
Transaction management, the heart of your income and expense records, is especially robust and flexible, more so in Quicken than in any other budgeting and personal finance app. You can customize each register’s columns to get the view you want, add or edit categories, and use the tools in the transaction menu to add notes, flags, attachments, and split transactions. That's all par for the course. But Quicken goes further, allowing you to, for example, assign tax lines, which means you can run reports to use as you prepare your tax return.
How Do You Budget in Quicken Classic?
Quicken’s budgets, like all budgets, work like giant calculators. They add income and subtract expenses, keeping track of how much money you’re spending in different categories and showing you where you are in relation to the goals you’ve set. Quicken isn’t as innovative as YNAB and Simplifi when it comes to budgeting. Its tools are fairly basic, not unlike Mint’s used to be.
You can choose your own categories or let Quicken do it based on your past transactions. The more time goes by and the more transactions get fed into your budgets, the better you get at analyzing your spending and making adjustments. Quicken uses color-coded bars to illustrate your budgets so you can see at a glance when and where you’re in trouble. If you want to micromanage your budget, you can use Quicken’s annual spreadsheet-like table.
Get Rid of Debt, Plan for Your Future, and More
Besides budgets, Quicken includes a whole suite of tools that help you plan financially. Other features in this section help you reduce debt, make a lifetime financial plan, track and project income taxes, and establish savings goals. These interactive tools combine fill-in-the-blank fields with sophisticated calculators and reports. They feed your responses back to you as graphs and tables. No other personal finance app I've tested offers such detailed planning tools overall.
Quicken Bill Manager is included free with Quicken Classic. You can connect to your online billers (more than 11,000 are supported) to see each bill’s due date, amount due, and last payment made. If someone you owe doesn’t have an online presence (like a gardener or babysitter), you can add them manually and mark them as paid. Quicken is the only personal application I've tested that actually lets you pay bills through the software. Most others simply have a reminder with no ability to send money. Quicken, however, sends electronic payments to online billers and paper checks when necessary.
Quicken’s investment tracking tools surpass those offered by every other personal finance app. Besides offering an extraordinarily customizable portfolio view, Quicken includes Morningstar’s lauded X-ray analysis of your holdings and numerous other ways to evaluate the strength and possible future performance of your portfolio. You can get real-time quotes (unique to Quicken), but you have to keep refreshing them manually. Portfolios also support cryptocurrency holdings.
The Reality of a 'Mature' App
Quicken is a sometimes-uncomfortable blend of old and new. Some elements of the software look like they haven’t been touched in years, while others look refreshed and modern. Quicken Classic still uses a Windows File menu in addition to a newer toolbar, and you really have to use both to see everything. Even if you enable Use Large Fonts from the View menu, some of the lists can be hard to read. The application is so feature-rich that it takes some time to discover everything it does. But none of this gets significantly in the way of managing your finances.
Other than its age, a lot sets Quicken apart from other apps for budgeting and managing your money. It has the most advanced Investment tracking tools of all the apps I've reviewed, though Empower has an innovative set of free investing tools as well as paid advisory services. As mentioned, only Quicken Classic lets you pay bills directly from the software. Its free planning resources are unmatched. And Quicken is the only app to offer a variety of tax planning tools.
Using Quicken Classic When Away From Your Desktop
Though Quicken Classic is desktop software, you have two ways to access your financial information when you're not at your computer. One is by using Quicken on the Web (app.quicken.com) and the other is the Quicken mobile app.
Quicken on the web is a website that pulls data from desktop Quicken and supports two-way synchronization. You get abbreviated versions of the data you would most likely want to see when you're away from your own computer, including account balances, monthly and annual budgets, and transactions. The site also has very basic investment data and your top spending categories. You can do limited work with bills and income. New filters have been added to the spending report, and a new calendar view has links to transactions and projected balances. You can now create 12-month charts and download the three reports as XLXSs, CSVs, and PDFs.
Quicken’s mobile app for Android and iPhone is good but not exceptional. It also has an abbreviated set of tools, including transaction and investment tracking, a handful of reports, and limited budget and bill management.
Customizable Reports
Quicken has tons of highly customizable reports. Every element of your finances is covered, including spending, tax, and investing. None of the personal finance apps I've tested comes near to providing that kind of robust reporting. I like the software’s EasyAnswer reports, which show a list of common questions and their corresponding answers, like, “Did I meet my budget?” There’s also a new Income by Security report, which gives you a detailed overview of dividends, interest, and other income earned from securities.
Help and Support
Over the years, Quicken has built up a tremendous amount of support resources. The software’s in-program help files are massive, and you can easily switch to online help. There’s a guide to getting started, a series of how-to videos, and a community of users. You can also call or chat with program experts. And the free Quicken 1-2-3 screen-sharing option mentioned earlier is excellent for new users.
YNAB, too, has a generous amount of help available (the developer wrote an entire book on its budgeting philosophy and tools), but it’s not as easy to get started with as Quicken.
Is Quicken Safe to Use?
Online components of the software use multi-factor authentication, and Quicken securely transmits data from your bank servers using standard 256-bit encryption. You still need to be vigilant about keeping sensitive data safe on any financial app by, for example, never accessing your financial accounts on a public Wi-Fi network. We also always recommend taking basic security precautions, like using a unique and strong password generated and stored in a password manager, and other simple steps to protect yourself online.
It's Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online
Verdict: The Most Powerful Personal Finance and Budgeting App
Quicken Classic is an Editors’ Choice winner for budgeting and personal finance apps. We recommend it without reservation to anyone who wants to micromanage their finances. No other app supports personal finance management as comprehensively, and at a modest price. Quicken Simplifi is also an Editors' Choice winner and a better option if you'd rather have a newer, web- and mobile-based budgeting and finance app that isn't for power users. Finally, if neither of those options seems like the right fit for you, we recommend trying YNAB, which uses a different approach altogether.
Quicken Classic has more tools than any other budgeting and personal finance app, making its Premier version a top choice for power users who want the most feature-rich software available.
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