In our last article in our series of money management software reviews we look some of the options that are available online.
Web 2.0 has transformed the internet. No longer is it just a place for browsing and reading. There are now some excellent web applications out there that allow for word processing, creating spreadsheets and other tasks that you would normally do with traditional software.
The last year or two has seen the emergence of some exciting web-based money management applications, and most of them are free. For browser-based applications they offer a surprising level of sophistication. And with applications like Portable Firefox that allow you to save all your browser settings to your thumb drive or your iPod, you can plug in and update at any computer with an internet connection.
So, here are were three of the most popular web-based money management applications around.
Mint.com
Mint.com is another excellent Web 2.0 money management offering that is absolutely free. Again, this is aimed mainly at the US market but it can have its uses, and it promises to add UK banks in the future. Mint.com has a much more attractive user interface than Wesabe.com and is more fully-featured. It already has a huge following in the United States.
This is not surprising as it allows you to track your spending, budget, compare your spending to others and find better deals, and have all your accounts in one place. It will also provide you alerts for certain situations, such as due dates for bills and low balances. This is a really exciting web-app so watch this space for the UK version.
Quicken Online
Quicken, which has produced the tried and trusted Quicken money management software for many years, has more recently launched its Quicken Online service.
Like the above web applications you can synch all your accounts and access them from anywhere, even from your PDA or iPhone.
It boasts some good features such as reminders, graphs, and budgeting. However, you have to pay for this service (about £1.50 a month) and, more importantly, it only supports US banks at the moment but this may change in the future.
Updated 20th September 2016
It looks like many changes have occurred to online money management products since this article was first published in 2008, so we will bring it up to date shortly.
Wesabe
Unfortuntely Wesabe, which had previously been mentioned in this article, shut down in 2010. This blog post explains why.
Of the three online money management applications mentioned above Wesabe wins hands down as it provides the best support for UK customers. However, Mint and Quicken are also very impressive, so hopefully it is just a matter of time before they offer full support in the UK.
Fergal – as this is primarily a UK centric finance blog, surely you want to mention Kublax?
They have been around for around a year now and are probably our best equivalent to mint.com.
Wesabe kind of works for UK banks, but somewhat awkwardly..
Cheers,
G
This post is really informative.
But I want to draw your attention to another informative and robust money management application i.e manageME
I like it due to its easy interface,can be used anytime,anywhere while traveling and it deals with the customers amicably and all my feed backs are properly dealt.
Also it is about to launch its fully loaded version manageME7.You may check the updates on http://www.manageME7.com/blog