I've been so picky over the years and tried so many different services, but I always ended up back in a spreadsheets. Infinite configurability, but more manual.
That said, I found a middle ground about six months ago. The spreadsheet tracks the budget, brokerage contributions, statistics, and savings (think monthly money being set aside for yearly payments and such), and then I use Monarch Money for tracking transactions.
Manually tracking my transactions in the spreadsheet was just so tedious and having Monarch handle that via Plaid and the three-ish other services that fill the same space has been nice.
One issue I have that isn't the fault of any app or service is that there are still plenty of banks that don't support OAuth for reading data. The big ones I use all support it no problem, but my primary, smaller (not tiny) bank and even Discover want you to use your _same_ username and password along with a checkbox in the settings to "allow third party access". They don't tell you what is limited via that third party access either, so I can't tell if it allows read-only when there's no MFA involved or what. In those cases, I still manually input transactions, but it's the vast minority of my transactions.
Monarch will give you notifications for transactions, overages on budgets, etc, but I bet any half decent service will do the same at this point.
That said, I found a middle ground about six months ago. The spreadsheet tracks the budget, brokerage contributions, statistics, and savings (think monthly money being set aside for yearly payments and such), and then I use Monarch Money for tracking transactions.
Manually tracking my transactions in the spreadsheet was just so tedious and having Monarch handle that via Plaid and the three-ish other services that fill the same space has been nice.
One issue I have that isn't the fault of any app or service is that there are still plenty of banks that don't support OAuth for reading data. The big ones I use all support it no problem, but my primary, smaller (not tiny) bank and even Discover want you to use your _same_ username and password along with a checkbox in the settings to "allow third party access". They don't tell you what is limited via that third party access either, so I can't tell if it allows read-only when there's no MFA involved or what. In those cases, I still manually input transactions, but it's the vast minority of my transactions.
Monarch will give you notifications for transactions, overages on budgets, etc, but I bet any half decent service will do the same at this point.