Money Manager EX

Every tool in this category has a barrier: GnuCash wants double-entry knowledge, Beancount wants a command line, Firefly III and Ghostfolio want a server, Actual Budget wants you to adopt envelope budgeting.

Money Manager EX is the one without a barrier — install it, create a few accounts, start recording, and the charts appear on their own. 2,251 stars, GPL-2.0, maintained for well over a decade.

Coverage of everyday needs:

• Multiple accounts: checking, credit cards, cash, loans and investment accounts managed separately with a consolidated net worth view.
• Transaction recording with categories and subcategories, notes, attachments and split transactions across several categories.
• Budgets set monthly or annually per category with progress tracking.
• Recurring transactions generating pending entries for rent, subscriptions and repayments.
• Reports and charts: income and expense trends, category shares, cash flow, net worth curves, plus a custom report feature allowing arbitrary analysis if you write SQL.
• Multiple currencies, converting correctly for foreign holdings and travel spending.
• Import of CSV, QIF and OFX bank statements.
• Investment tracking for holdings and cost basis — fairly basic, with serious return analysis belonging to Portfolio Performance.

Data lives in a local SQLite file that can be password-encrypted, stored and backed up however you like.

There is an Android app for jotting an expense on the spot and syncing with the desktop file — a real advantage over GnuCash and HomeBank, since the hardest part of bookkeeping is recording the transaction at the moment it happens.

To be clear about:

• It is not double-entry. It uses an ordinary income-and-expense model with no balancing validation. The upside is needing no accounting knowledge; the downside is that it will not tell you when you have made a mistake, unlike GnuCash. Ample for households, unsuited to real business books.
• The interface is traditional wxWidgets desktop styling — clear, but not modern or elegant.
• Sync is your problem. There is no official cloud sync between phone and desktop; the usual approach is placing the data file in Syncthing or your own storage. Do not edit on both ends simultaneously or you will create conflicts.
• Investment features are weak; do not expect allocation analysis from it.

How to choose among the peers: want to learn nothing and need a mobile app → Money Manager EX; want double-entry rigor → GnuCash; want serious control of monthly spending → Actual Budget; only analyzing investments → Portfolio Performance.