Quicken Review 2023

Bottom line: As far as desktop-based personal finance software goes, Intuit’s Quicken is one of the best in the business. Intuit is well known for its outstanding finance products, and Quicken is no different. You’d be hard pressed to find a more comprehensive money management tool, including Intuit’s other personal finance tools like Mint.

But in a market of mostly free personal finance apps, Quicken's subscription-based pricing is a hard sell. Still, the software itself is good enough that its low monthly fee might be worth it for you. Business.org's Quicken review can help you decide if you want to spend money on financial management tools or stick with a free alternative.

Most money management apps excel at just one aspect of budgeting. For instance, Mint categorizes your purchases by expense type and recommends a monthly budget. Personal Capital helps you build an investment portfolio, and bank and budgeting apps like Simple automate bill pay.

But Quicken? Depending on the plan you pick, Quicken does it all.

Every Quicken plan shows all of your bank accounts in one spot and, like the Intuit-owned Mint, automatically categorizes expenses for you. Its bill-specific dashboard lets you save bills or download them as PDFs so the software can easily categorize and track bill payments. And unlike most personal finance apps, Quicken includes over-the-phone customer service.

Quicken's pricier plans offer even more features, including debt and loan interest tracking, tax help, and bill pay.

Why can Quicken do everything while other budgeting tools focus on expense tracking or investing or bill pay? For one, Quicken costs an annual fee. For another, unless you choose the simplif plan, it isn't just an app or website. Instead, like Intuit QuickBooks Desktop, Quicken is a downloadable desktop software that syncs with Quicken's mobile budgeting app and website. It isn't just cloud-based or desktop-based: it's both.

Quicken's Starter plan offers income and expense tracking, spending trend reports, and budget recommendations. Honestly, it's pretty similar to Mint, but it has better support and a more comprehensive dashboard. And as a paid plan, Starter skips the pesky targeted ads that slow Mint's interface.

Quicken Starter also includes a helpful bill tracking center. For now, you can't pay bills directly from Quicken unless you choose the Premier plan. But you can sync your bills to Quicken's dashboard so you can see which payments are due when and plan them into your monthly budgets.

Quicken Deluxe expands your budgeting options. You can set annual budgets instead of just month-to-month budgets and track your taxes, retirement savings, and investments. More detailed tracking and reports give you a better look at your net worth, as do features like these:

• Principal and interest tracking
• Schedule D tax form generation (to report capital losses and gains from property sales or trades)
• Stock market tracking to capitalize on investment opportunities

All of Quicken's plans track personal finances, but Quicken Home and Business adds on business features that are geared toward sole proprietors and small-business owners. This plan lets you separate your personal and business finances (which you should always do for tax and legal liability reasons). Along with all of Premier's personal finance features, the plan gets you these business-specific tools:

• Invoice creation and customization (including payment links so customers can pay via invoice)
• Business profit and loss tracking
• Business tax help, including tax deduction tracking and tax form generation

The plan is more than Quicken for business, though. It also adds property management features, including these:

• Rent tracking, including overdue rents
• Security deposit tracking
• Rental document organization and storage

Quicken's biggest perk is its sheer amount of features. As good as apps like YNAB and Personal Capital are, they can't offer as much as desktop-based software. Quicken's bill payment is a particularly crucial feature: few budgeting apps provide bill payment, and some that used to (notably Mint) don't anymore.

And if you're worried about being tied to your desktop to budget, don't be. Quicken's mobile app lets you calculate expenses and track your budget on the go. Along with checking your accounts and budget in real time, you can manually enter transactions (for instance, if you buy something with cash) even when you're offline.

Finally, Quicken is one of the few personal finance tools with thorough customer service. Each plan includes over-the-phone tech support, which is rare among money management apps: after all, it's hard to provide good customer service when your product is free.

Quicken's primary downside is its cost. Free apps like Mint offer similar services at the low cost of zero dollars.

Plus, Quicken's app is a fairly recent development, and per its user reviews, the app works better for iOS users than Android users. On Apple's App Store, the app has 4.7 stars out of 5 from 11K users.¹ In contrast, the 4K+ users on Google Play give it 3.1 stars out of 5, citing frequent crashes, bugs, and inaccurate bank account information (yikes).²

On the other hand, Windows users have a leg up on iOS users in terms of desktop software. Quicken's Windows version offers more than its Mac version, most importantly its Home and Business plan. You also have to buy the Quicken version specific to your operating system—the Mac and Windows versions are incompatible, so while you can run the program on multiple computers, you can't run it on different types of computers.

If you aren't sold on cloud-based budgeting apps and don't mind spending a little to get a lot, Quicken's locally installed software is an excellent fit. And if you aren't quite sold on Quicken itself, get behind the wheel for a test drive—Quicken comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Looking for a more affordable personal finance app? Head over to our review of the year's best money management apps for individuals.

Quicken was developed by Intuit, the same company that owns TurboTax and QuickBooks. However, once Intuit acquired the budgeting app Mint, it sidelined Quicken. In 2016, Intuit sold Quicken to H.I.G. Capital.

Yes. After your initial Quicken purchase, you'll pay an annual renewal fee.

Quicken Online was a free, cloud-based version of a Quicken plan offered by Intuit in the 2000s. When Intuit bought Mint, the company phased out Quicken Online. Although you can now use Quicken on the web instead of just on your desktop, there isn't an official product called Quicken Online.

We carefully analyzed Quicken's ease of use, value for the money, mobile app quality, data privacy practices, and learning curve, among other factors.

Disclaimer

At Business.org, our research is meant to offer general product and service recommendations. We don't guarantee that our suggestions will work best for each individual or business, so consider your unique needs when choosing products and services.