Apps

Empower offers a complete investment advising solution, a hybrid robo-advisor, and human advisor service in one. Without paying a cent, you can access Empower’s free money tracking dashboard, which includes some handy budgeting features. 

Best for building wealth & tracking  spending

Zeta is one of the few free budgeting apps designed specifically for couples, joint finances or not. The app caters to all types of couples, including those who are living together, engaged, married, or new parents.  

Best for couples

Mint has been the gold standard for budgeting tools for some time, and the app takes a top spot here for a few reasons: It automatically updates and categorizes transactions, creating a picture of spending in real-time. 

Best for saving more and spending less

PocketGuard boils budgeting down to the only thing many users want to know: how much they have for spending. It crunches the numbers to show how much money is available after accounting for bills, spending and savings goal contributions. 

Best for a simplified budgeting snapshot

Quicken Simplifi is more than a budgeting app, it's an online bank account that replaces your old checking account and has tons of useful budgeting features built-in.  

Best for managing cash flow

You Need a Budget has a unique approach compared to other budgeting apps. Rather than relying on traditional budgeting buckets, you build your budget based on your income, giving every dollar a job in your budget. 

Best overall for budgeting

This app is a stock trading mobile app that offers a commission-free trading platform. They offer intuitive stock charts with plenty of technical indicators and tools for customizing your charts.  

Stash is designed to help beginners make their first foray into investing. It caters to these beginners with its ample educational content and its Stash Coach feature. Stash Coach is part game, part educational tool, and it’s designed to help you better understand investing.  

Acorns is a mobile-first brokerage and banking app. This app makes it easy and fun to contribute to your investment account with creative funding options, including recurring transfers and round-ups for purchases made with connected cards. 

SoFi is great for beginners because it includes investment education and allows you to start small with fractional shares, which it calls Stock Bits. 

Robinhood is an easy place to get started investing because it has no minimum balance, a simple-to-understand interface, fractional shares and doesn’t charge commissions or fees. 

Chime, a mobile-only bank, hopes its app’s automatic savings features may just help you beat the status quo and make it a little less painful to finally build up your emergency fund.  

Best for saving an emergency fund

Acorns is an investing app popular for letting its users invest the spare change from their daily transactions with its Acorns Core option.  

Best for saving money for retirement

With Qapital, you can set customizable autosave rules for just about anything, so you can save money simply with the actions you take living your life. 

Best for saving money for a car

Marcus helps you save by setting rules for how often and how much you want to automatically stash away for goals, like paying for next semester’s tuition or funding your child’s college savings account. 

Best for saving money for college