Hi everyone!
I have been using Grisbi for at least 15 years now to get around personal finances/expense tracking.
It is a very basic tool that tracks expenses, clearances, etc… Nothing crazy but it helps a lot to follow your budget, keep things on track. Everything is backed up through a file that I sync with Nextcloud.
For some reasons, I won’t be able to use it as easily in the coming months (new restrictions on my work laptop) so I’m looking for a Web-based selfhost-friendly alternative. I’ve already narrowed it down to 3:
- Firefly III which looks pretty nice (and PHP is kind of a plus in my case)
- Actual Budget which looks pretty cool too
- Kresus much more barebone but might get the job done eventually
Do you have some feedback on any of those applications? Do you know any other alternatives worth looking at? Have you had the same kind of experience going from Gnucash/Grisbi/other to Web-based app?
PHP is kind of a plus
That’s not something you hear very often.
I already have a lot of things using PHP (phpBB, Wordpress, FreshRSS, etc…) so that’s kind of a no-brainer for me. But I get the point, not very popular these days.
I have my own personal finance tracker, Keizai. I found mainly Firefly III as bloated and since I wanted a simple, straight-forward finance tracker, I created my own.
Please bare in mind that Keizai is not yet finished. The development is still on-going, but it’s a slow process. I have multiple projects in hand and with autism and other plans for a better, more healthier life, the development for all my projects tend to be slow.
And yes, you can self-host Keizai.
It would be awesome if you could Dockerise this!
I agree, but I don’t know how yet :( Need to read more about it. I love and prefer Docker in most cases, so I want to Dockerise my projects.
I have had a lot of issues setting up Firefly III on different systems so I never got to get it working.
Eventueel I ended upfinding Actual Budget, while not perfect it works really well and I have been using it for more than a year now
I find the DB sync system in Actual a bit odd. Don’t get me wrong it seems to work but I’m afraid it might corrupt in some corner cases.
Have been using it for a while on different systems including some pretty unstable test systems and I haven’t had any issues. It does have some issues with that you cannot trust the automatic import since AB might create extra transactions
FF3 is great, I have used it for years and I can’t complain
How do you get your data in? Do you use the third party import services plugin or set up scraping of your statements that needs you to pass the statements in explicitly? I’ve been wanting to get into using Firefly 3 but the question of how I should do the data import has been a hurdle that’s stopped me with indecision a few times.
I am considering FF3 too for my home host setup.
I have looked at simpleFin, which is a third party that provides the ability to link bank, credit card, loan and investment accounts into FF3. It’s cheap so cost isn’t an issue.
Does anyone have direct experience using this with FF3? The idea of having a comprehensive dashboard of my whole financial situation is appealing.
I am still bummed, that there is no easy way to pull the data from my bank automatically into these budgeting apps. They all rely on paid 3rd party tools for that and who knows what those do with my data
Assuming US, Open Banking is on the horizon. Will likely still take a few years before it’s fully implemented, but hopefully soon!
Unlikely at least in the near future. The remnants of Dodd-Frank and anything that Biden did are high on the list for Trump’s chopping block.
Actual let’s you import downloaded statements in qfx or whatever format
That’s how I used it anyway since I didn’t want any third party I would just download a months worth of transactions and import them into actual then start setting up automatic tagging or manual if it’s a one off transaction
I haven’t use any of these, but others could look at:
For reference, these are from Selfh.sh
