DollarBreak goal is to empower readers to make better financial decisions. This post may contain affiliate links from our partners who share the same vision. Disclosure.
With the mass adoption of Budgeting apps, tracking our finances is easier than ever before. In fact, more and more people—particularly the younger generations—have begun managing their finances with hyper-precision.
According to Debt.com, 74% of consumers ages twenty-three to thirty-eight years old use a budget. That statistic can be attributed to the rise of FinTech and budgeting platforms like Mint and EveryDollar.
In this debate of EveryDollar vs. Mint, which one offers the most features and the best services? We’ll take a look at where each of these apps shine and how they stack up against each other, so you can decide which one is right for your needs.
An Overview of EveryDollar
Founded by the financial guru Dave Ramsey himself, EveryDollar is a budgeting service that’s based on Dave Ramsey’s financial planning method—particularly his 7 Baby Steps to Financial Freedom.
For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, EveryDollar is built to support a step-by-step approach to becoming debt-free. The process begins with saving $1000 as an emergency fund and the app helps users get there faster with visualized goals and helpful tips.
Using these 7 steps as a guide, EveryDollar offers valuable budgeting tools, feature-rich expense planners, and a visually appealing interface that makes managing your money easy and inspiring.
The app’s spend tracker helps you monitor and control your spending throughout the month. Users manually enter transaction data, and the system does the rest.
If you like what you’re getting out of the basic service, you can opt for EveryDollar Plus. But how much does EveryDollar Plus cost? The service is paid for at $129 per year and offers added perks such as syncing your credit card transactions and better customer support.
What Makes Mint Stand Out?
Leading the budgeting platform business for over a decade, Mint has provided arguably the most feature-rich budgeting services available in the app store since 2006.
The platform is owned by Intuit, the same company that owns other business-related platforms such as TurboTax and QuickBooks.
Mint’s features include visualized spend tracking, customizable alerts, bill pay options, recommended financial products, and east to set up budgets. The three most valuable services though are:
Information Across All Your Accounts
Mint provides a comprehensive analysis of your finances when users link financial accounts to the platform for easy tracking.
Debits and credits from all accounts are summarized in easy to read charts, and the platform will send you alerts when you near your budget thresholds for each account.
Mint doesn’t just cover your checking account and credit cards. The platform offers investment tracking and many bill pay features when you link your relevant accounts.
Smart Budgeting Services
Mint’s budgeting tools boast the ability to provide suggestions to improve your budgeting efforts. Based on your spending history, Mint will recommend deals, promotions, and financial products that will save you money.
The budgeting tools allow you to cap your spending, create savings goals, and “reserve” money for upcoming expenses.
Free Credit Score Tracking
An exclusive feature to Mint, the platform allows you to check your estimated credit score at any time.
According to Experian, the average American credit score is 703. If yours fluctuates, it can impact your ability to qualify for loans, mortgages, and even jobs. Mint helps you stay on top of changes and avoid fraud with frequent alerts.
To get started with Mint, simply sign up with your email address, and link your financial accounts to the app. Mint will securely retrieve your financial data and use it to analyze spending trends, provide budget breakdowns, and send you alerts, and more.
Comparing EveryDollar Vs. Mint
EveryDollar and Mint are both effective budgeting tools, but they offer different services for different sets of goals. To help get an idea of which platform is the best budgeting app, we’re going to take a look at some key features of these apps and see which one stands out.
It’s important to note that while one platform may be better in a certain aspect than the other, that does not make it objectively better.
Price
Both Mint and the basic EveryDollar service are free to use for as long as you want.
EveryDollar does offer a premium service for $129 a year, but users can leverage the app for free for life. While this added service may be a benefit to some, we’re only going to compare EveryDollar’s basic service and Mint’s free suite of features.
Features
Overall, Mint provides a lot more features for budgeting and budget analysis than the free version of EveryDollar, but each platform has its own benefits. Let’s take a look at the ones that stand out.
Budgeting Tools
If there’s one thing that both platforms have in common, it’s that they have a strong set of basic budgeting tools. You can add expenses and transactions manually, as well as planned costs for upcoming periods.
EveryDollar has presets for these transactions while Mint lets you fully customize your own categories.
Both apps offer bill tracking and “goals” that allow you to set money aside for the future. EveryDollar presents users with a series of challenges designed to put you in an ideal position to pay off debt, whereas mint is primarily focused on budgeting to get the most out of your money.
Automated Spend Tracking
Things start to differ between the two contenders when you take note of the other features, though. EveryDollar only supports linking of your credit card in the Plus version, while Mint allows you to link all your financial accounts for free.
Security
Mint is backed by industry leading security features which support a variety of other financial products.
While EveryDollar doesn’t boast the same history and security as Mint, the need for strong security measures is tempered by the fact that you will manually enter your transactions into EveryDollar. No account linking necessary.
According to InvestorJunkie, Mint’s 2 factor authentication process makes the platform reasonably safe for users.
Security is an important factor to consider when using any kind of financial technology product, but both Mint and the free version of EveryDollar employ strong measures to protect your data.
User Interface
Mint maintains visually appealing reporting features. You can look back on your expenses or plan your budgets with different visual graphs, like pie charts and bar graphs that make it easy to understand trends at a glance.
EveryDollar doesn’t have as many reporting features, but it does host a visual representation of your savings and progress toward your goals.
Advertisements
So, with all the features available for Mint, doesn’t that make Mint the best finance app? Well, not necessarily. Since both Mint and EveryDollar are free to use, the only other way for these apps to earn a profit is through, you guessed it, online advertisements.
Ads on Mint are very in-your-face and can be, at times, intrusive. Although the advertisements are tailored to offer services that are in-line with the goals of your budget, they’re still annoying, and unfortunately, you can’t pay your way out of these ads.
On the other hand, EveryDollar’s ad system is much cleaner. Instead of the usual torrent of ads you’d see on many other websites, EveryDollar endorses some of their local providers through blocks of pop-up text that look more pleasing to the eye than imagery and flashy text.
Support
Another caveat to an otherwise strong platform is Mint’s customer support. The support team offers mediocre assistance at best to those who request it, and in some cases, issues remain unsolved for extended periods of time.
EveryDollar only offers support via email for users of the free version, but you can get dedicated calls to their support team if you’re subscribed to Plus.
And, even if you won’t be springing for the extra service, the email support of EveryDollar is well rated and appears to solve problems with reasonable efficiency.
Your Goals Determine What You Need From an App
Even though Mint may offer more specific features than EveryDollar, it’s important to understand your driving purpose in using these budgeting tools. Coming to terms with what your goals are will help you decide which app best aligns with your needs.
If your overall goal is to see your money in a clearer and bigger picture, then Mint would be the better budgeting app for you. The rich set of features combined with it’s easy to understand reporting capabilities allow you to track your expenses easily and conveniently.
Alternatively, if your goal is to get yourself out of a debt problem and employing Dave Ramsey’s method, EveryDollar’s focus on the 7 Baby Steps will give you the direction you need for managing your finances.
The platform is designed to help people take control of their money, a feature lacking in Mint.
Dave Ramsey fans should also consider EveryDollar over Mint by default. The debt-payoff tips and suggestions offered by the platform are more relevant and easier to follow than Mint’s style of dumping information on users.
EveryDollar Vs. Mint—Which is right for you?
Mint and EveryDollar are both fantastic budgeting apps that can help you with budgeting and financial planning. Mint offers a more feature-rich experience with the downfall of ads and mediocre support, while EveryDollar provides simple yet effective service in their free version.
If you want easy to digest information on all your financial accounts and expenses, go for Mint. Otherwise, try EveryDollar if you’re in need of assistance with a debt problem or are just an avid Dave Ramsey fan.
No matter what platform you end up choosing, though, employing a budget is a huge step forward, and you should be proud of yourself for taking that first step to financial stability.
Looking for more budgeting apps? Check out 10 Best Budgeting Apps for Personal Finance [2020 List].
The post EveryDollar Vs. Mint: Best Budgeting Apps Review appeared first on DollarBreak.
