Monarch Money Alternatives: Cheaper, Free and EU-Ready

Of the subscription apps that sync US bank accounts, only Quicken Simplifi is clearly cheaper than Monarch Money: about $383 over five years against $500 for Monarch Core at $99.99 a year. The free options are Empower's dashboard and self-hosted Actual Budget. Outside the US and Canada, Monarch supports only USD and CAD accounts, so UK and EU readers need YNAB, Lunch Money or a manual tracker.

Copilot Money and YNAB both cost more than Monarch, and Lunch Money comes out about even. If you pay Monarch's $14.99 monthly plan, moving to annual billing saves $79.89 a year. Canada is a middle case, because Monarch works in Canada but bills in USD, and its help centre warns that certain Canadian banks can be hard to keep synced.

The short answer: which Monarch alternative fits your reason for leaving

The manual tracker in that table is My Financial Freedom Tracker (MFFT). Disclosure: I build this one. Its net worth tracker for manual, multi-currency accounts has no bank sync in any country. You type balances or upload PDF and CSV statements, and it converts EUR, USD, GBP, CZK and other currencies into one total. MFFT has no free tier. Once the 14-day trial ends (starting it requires a payment method), it costs €49.90 a year, €4.99 a month or €299 once. If live bank feeds are the reason you used Monarch, skip it. If you're open to going without them, read tracking net worth without bank linking.

What you pay Monarch for (and what's hard to replace)

Monarch's Core plan costs $99.99 a year or $14.99 a month, after a 7-day trial that needs a payment method. The Plus plan is $199.99 a year. It adds forecasting and lets you track several income streams, a small business for example. The pricing page also promises a no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

Two Monarch features are harder to find elsewhere. The first is that you can invite a partner or a financial professional at no extra cost and run one shared budget. The second is that Monarch pulls bank data through three providers, Plaid, Mastercard Data Connect (formerly Finicity) and MX, so when one connection breaks you can sometimes re-link the account through another. If you're still choosing among the big names instead of leaving one, see the YNAB vs Monarch vs Rocket Money comparison.

Monarch's help article on currencies says all data is shown with the $ symbol and recommends connecting only USD or CAD accounts. It adds that there are no plans to expand currency support in the near future (Monarch help).

5-year cost: Monarch vs every alternative

Monarch Core comes to $499.95 over five years on annual billing, while YNAB and Copilot (at its current offer) both come to $545.

Data: vendor list prices checked 28 October 2026, billed yearly unless a row says otherwise; trials, sales tax, VAT and future price rises excluded; MFFT converted at the ECB reference rate of 1.1150 USD per EUR.

Simplifi's $3.99 a month is a first-year price. It applies to orders placed directly with Quicken by 26 November 2026, billed annually, and after that you renew at the full $6.99 a month. So the yearly bill goes from $47.88 to $83.88, a 75% jump in year two. Simplifi also has no free trial, only a 30-day money-back guarantee, and annual plans only. Even at full price for all five years it costs $419.40, still about $80 under Monarch.

Lunch Money lets you pick your own price. The default is $100 a year, so your total can land a little above or below Monarch's. If you pay for Monarch Core monthly, it comes to $899.40 over five years, which is $399.45 more than the same plan paid yearly.

Monarch alternatives for Europe, the UK and Canada

Empower's help and pricing pages don't list which countries' banks or which currencies it supports.

Source: each vendor's help and pricing pages; "Not stated" means those pages don't confirm it.

UK. YNAB's Direct Import now covers at least one bank in 18 European countries, the UK among them, and a single YNAB account can hold North American and European connections side by side. According to Lunch Money's import guide, its native Plaid sync skips the UK. British accounts come in through Lunch Flow or Synci, which are paid third-party services, and Lunch Money then treats them as manually managed. Copilot is explicit that it only supports US institutions and only sells in the US App Store, and Quicken says its products "are not designed to function outside the U.S. and Canada".

EU. Lunch Money syncs "some or most" banks natively in 17 countries, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Poland included, and handles over 160 currencies with daily historic exchange rates, so a euro salary and a dollar brokerage account can sit in the same Lunch Money account. YNAB syncs selected banks but keeps one currency per budget. Actual Budget reaches European banks through Enable Banking, which its docs label experimental. Setting it up means registering your own production app with an HTTPS redirect address on a domain you control. GoCardless, the older route, is not accepting new accounts.

Canada. Monarch, YNAB, Simplifi and Lunch Money all work here. Quicken added connections to the five largest Canadian banks in 2024. Simplifi handles CAD or USD accounts, though only one currency at a time, while Monarch bills Canadians in USD. Copilot doesn't operate in Canada at all.

If your money sits in a Czech, Hungarian or other bank that none of these apps list, a manual tracker that takes statement uploads works with any bank, at the cost of typing balances or uploading statements once a month. For more net-worth-first options in that situation, see the Kubera alternatives guide.

Free and open-source Monarch alternatives

Actual Budget is open-source software that costs nothing. You either run it on your own machine or pay a managed host to run it for you. For non-technical users its docs point to PikaPods, which charges from $1.80 a month with $5 of starting credit. Part of that fee goes to the Actual project. If you want bank sync, North American banks connect through SimpleFIN at $15 a year for up to 25 institutions, and European banks through Enable Banking as described above. Actual does not support multi-currency. It also budgets in envelopes, so it feels closer to YNAB than to Monarch's dashboard. For setup steps, see the free YNAB alternatives post.

Empower Personal Dashboard costs nothing; Empower's own FAQ says the dashboard and tools are "completely free". The business model is the advisory service next to it, with minimums of $100,000 for Investment Services and $250,000 for Wealth Management. Empower is strongest on investments and net worth and lighter on day-to-day budgeting. If those two are your shortlist, see Empower vs Monarch.

A spreadsheet costs nothing and needs no bank login, but you lose automatic transactions and categorisation entirely. It works best for a monthly net-worth snapshot rather than for tracking every purchase.

How to switch without losing your history

Monarch's help centre says you can download transactions and balance history as CSV at any time, even after a subscription or trial ends. Download everything before you cancel anyway:

1. In Monarch, go to Settings > Data and download all transactions. One file holds up to 10,000 transactions and Monarch recommends staying near 5,000, so split long histories by year.
2. Download balance history per account as well, since transactions alone won't rebuild your net-worth chart.
3. Write down today's balance for every account, including manual ones such as property or a car. This snapshot becomes your opening balance in any new app.
4. Import the transaction CSV where the new app allows it: YNAB, Actual Budget (CSV, QIF, OFX, QFX or CAMT) and Lunch Money all take files. Expect to remap categories to the new app's own list.
5. Run both apps in parallel for one month, then cancel Monarch through its settings.

MFFT's manual net worth tracker has a free live demo, where you can test whether updating balances by hand once a month suits you before the paid trial.

If you're a US household whose banks connect fine, staying on Monarch and moving to annual billing cuts the bill by $79.89 a year. Switching to Simplifi would save only about $23 a year on top of that. If you're in the UK or EU, start YNAB's 34-day trial, which needs no card, or Lunch Money's 30-day trial, and check that your own bank is on their lists before paying anyone.