Money management can get complicated. You likely spend money every single day (and probably multiple transactions daily at that). Plus, there are bills to monitor and pay, investments to track, and many other ongoing tasks to keep up with.
Streamlining your financial tasks improves your overall quality of life, and the Quicken Simplifi app is aptly named to do just that: simplify your finances. In this Simplifi review, we'll examine some of its unique features and how it compares to similar budgeting apps.
What is Simplifi?
Simplifi is a personal finance management tool created by Quicken. While Quicken has been around since 1984 (remember MS-DOS?!), Simplifi was more recently introduced in 2020 to capture a younger generation of users.
Simplifi is a modern, comprehensive personal finance app that goes well beyond budgeting. It allows users to manage cash flow, track investment accounts, and set and monitor financial goals. It is less complex than Quicken, as it aims to summarize key aspects of one's financial life without going too in-depth into details and advanced analysis.
Some of the main highlights of Simplifi include:
- Comprehensive dashboard – Customize a snapshot of your net worth, spending trends, upcoming bills, and more.
- Savings goals – Set and prioritize savings such as an emergency fund, future car, or home purchase.
- Spending plan – Determine your bills for the month as well as other planned spending.
- Retirement planner – Visualize various scenarios to ensure you save enough for the future (available on web version only).
- Reports – Filter income and spending in various ways to analyze and improve financial decisions.
- Watchlists – Set up completely customizable lists to monitor spending by the payee, category, or a custom tag.
Simplifi is available on the web and for iOS (App Store) and Android (Google Play) devices.
Simplifi Review: Best Features
Despite being a late player to the game, Simplifi has a solid base of users who rave about it. Here are just a few of the best features that have made it an almost instant success among competitive personal finance apps.
Ease of Use
Within just minutes of creating your Simplifi account, you can access detailed, helpful information that can be utilized to make financial decisions.
The steps to set up your Simplifi dashboard are simple:
- Link your financial accounts.
- Identify your bills and subscriptions from the existing transaction list.
- Set savings goals.
- Add planned spending amounts (Simplifi will suggest amounts based on prior months, which is a great feature!).
From there, Simplifi provides clear, polished visuals and reports to help you monitor your spending and investments. At a glance, you can see past trends in income and spending, progress to specific goals, and upcoming bills.
On an ongoing basis, keeping your Simplifi data up to date is … simple. Log in regularly to your account to ensure all transactions are correctly categorized and accounts are still linked, and you're good to go!
Ability to Customize
Fortunately, Simplifi is not only simple to use but also allows you to customize nearly all its features, including:
- Dashboard views
- Categories
- Payees
- Account names
- Spending watchlists
- Alerts
In addition, it is one of the only budgeting software programs that accommodates multiple budgeting methods (such as traditional, zero-based, 50/20/30, etc.) rather than pushing one set method.
You'll find filters and options on nearly every screen, so there's no doubt that you'll be able to get the information you're looking for without having to export and analyze your data elsewhere.
Low Cost
Simplifi is one of the least expensive personal finance apps available (other than the free ones, of course!). Their annual subscription fee is $71.88, which comes out to only $5.99/month (although they require a yearly subscription). They also frequently offer discounts for new users.
This is a small price to pay for not having to deal with advertisements or upsells, which makes it absolutely worth it in our book!
Account Sharing
Within the Simplifi app, there are financial “spaces.” You can invite others to access, view, and edit your budget and other financial information in this area. Budgets that have been shared with you are also accessed within Simplifi's “spaces”.
This is an essential feature for couples and those needing to share financial information with a coach or financial advisor.
Simplifi Review: Areas for Improvement
While the expectations might be especially high for a budgeting product from Quicken, there are some things that Simplifi is lacking. The software is still relatively new (especially compared to Quicken); however, it may fall short on a few items that may be important to some potential users.
Lack of Debt Tracking
Currently, Simplifi doesn't offer tools to help analyze or pay down debt. Keeping a keen eye on income and spending trends, which are clear and plentiful in the app, undoubtedly helps to reduce future debt. You can add a connected loan account or add one manually, but you're limited to monitoring your balance within your budget.
However, those with significant debt payoff goals may need an additional or alternate tool to help them plan for debt payoff.
Mobile App is Limited
Some of Simplifi's features are only available for the web or are more limited when using the mobile app, including:
- Retirement planner
- Spending plan forecasting
- Detailed investment tracking
- Custom reports and views
While this may not make or break your decision to use Simplifi, those who prefer to manage their finances solely from the mobile app might find this problematic.
Limited Investment Features
One important thing to note about Simplifi is that the investment features are significantly less detailed than those offered by their main Quicken product. This is intentional, as it aims to simplify and summarize rather than manage complexity.
Simplifi's investment features are limited to tracking the values of holdings (including cost basis and gains) and investment performance. It essentially focuses on monitoring but not on optimizing or analyzing investments. This is something to consider for those who meticulously track their investment data (and specifically those who currently use Quicken).
Simplifi Competitors
Monarch Money
Simplifi and Monarch Money are comparable tools that aim to provide a comprehensive look at your finances. Monarch Money has a few more investment-related features and additional budget customization options but comes at about twice the cost of Simplifi.
One way Monarch shines over Simplifi is in its' design for couples managing money together. There are no additional fees for additional users, and each person gets their own secure login.
See more detailed features of Monarch Money in our review here.
YNAB (You Need a Budget)
YNAB is a top-rated zero-based budgeting app that focuses almost exclusively on cash flow management. Users follow a set method of allocating all their funds to specific categories and goals as soon as money is received. This results in increased intentionality around money and a more proactive budgeting mindset.
If you are a fan of zero-based budgeting and want to optimize every dollar, YNAB may be a better option. However, Simplifi provides a more holistic view of your finances with a much less steep learning curve for new users.
You can find our comprehensive YNAB review here.
Empower
It's hard to beat free, and Empower offers many of the same money management features (and significantly more in some areas) as Simplifi, all without a subscription fee. Empower, previously known as Personal Capital, is highly rated among all platforms and has a dedicated base of users.
Empower provides less emphasis on budgeting and more on investing and retirement planning. So, if you are less focused on cash flow and more on those aspects of financial planning, Empower may be an excellent fit for you (of course, it may also be a good option to go along with budgeting in Simplifi!).
Find out how Empower's free dashboard can help you here.
Simplifi Review: FAQ
Is Simplifi worth the money?
For as little as $72/year (or often even only 50% of that cost with a new user discount), Simplifi is almost a no-brainer. While you'll have to pay for an annual subscription cost, as Simplifi does not have a monthly subscription plan, it's still less expensive than most other budgeting apps.
Those looking for an inexpensive way to manage their money without pesky ads or upsells will find it a small price to pay for the financial clarity they gain.
What is the difference between Simplifi and Quicken?
Simplifi was intentionally created to be more streamlined and less complicated than the flagship Quicken software. Those with complex financial situations may prefer Quicken's advanced reporting tools and investment management features.
In addition, Quicken offers a more traditional method of tracking finances and is only available in its most fully featured form as a Windows or Mac desktop program.
Final Thoughts on Our Simplifi Review
Simplifi is a newer tool from a company with four decades of experience in the personal finance software space. The features offered clearly show that they know exactly what a user is looking for in a money management app: efficiency, clarity, and the ability to customize budgeting to one's preferred method of cash flow tracking.
Those looking for an intuitive, inexpensive, user-friendly way to monitor their finances will likely find that Simplifi is the best value among all paid money management tools.
What do you think of our Simplifi Review? Are you currently using Simplifi as your budgeting solution?
Please let us know in the comments below.
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