Absolutely ! Here is a small personal description of the tools I used :)
- YNAB 4: Wonderful tool ! Simple, efficient, and locally available ! I was not a big fan of their budgeting strategies/options (especially when you go over the allocated envelopes) and I wanted more reports.
- YNAB 5: The interface was nice, but it was not self-hosted. It has the same negative points as YNAB 4. So I decided I won't pay for it.
- GNUCash: I don't remember testing it for a long time. It was self-hosted, and the reason I'm not using it today is probably personal taste.
- Ledger: Amazing. The CLI interface was too arcane for me.
And now, the bad experiences:
- Mint: Kept trying to sell me stuff. Not self-hosted. My financial institution was not available for linking, and I think they were using my transaction information to train their ML models on category assignments. Their automatic categorization was - of course - shitty.
- Buxfer: It started well, but then quickly degraded. I linked only one of the financial institution I use. They were accessing my personal account automatically without my approval (I had connection alerts in my bank's interface, and they were popping everyday at midnight). They kept accessing my bank account, even when I disabled the sync and deleted the bank account from the interface. Their automatic category assignment was - again - shitty (spoiler alert: IT'S ALWAYS SHITTY), but they offered rule-based category assignment ! Their account reconciliation was not accounting-ly correct (they changed the balance without adding a rectification transaction, so sum(transactions) == account_balance, would be false >< ). And finally : "Can I exclude certain transactions/accounts/tags from my Reports and Budgets?" "Buxfer does not support excluding transactions or accounts from Reports/Budgets. Excluding data can sometimes cause confusion and not lead you to see a complete view of your finances. (https://www.buxfer.com/help/reports)". Well, not-excluding my travel expenses from reports give me a completely inaccurate view of my finances and leads to even more confusion. Bonus : they were unresponsive to support and feature requests and I was on the PRO plan before they introduced the PRIME one.
Generally, online services are very bad at automatic category assignment. You will absolutely be exposed if they don't maintain a high-level security practice. They can be acquired by bigger companies, they can be terminated because they lacked funds. They will do "UI improvements" when you don't want that and they will clusterfuck a perfectly working version once in a while. They can also keep your data hostage, remove the "export" button, "reorganize" their pricing every 2 years and more.
