There is no shortage of budgeting apps in today’s fintech world, all with different features and focuses. In this honest review, we’ll examine two popular ones: YNAB and Rocket Money.

Both apps focus on budgeting and cash flow management, but their purposes and ideal use cases differ significantly.

Let’s look at the individual features of each app to see if we can decide on a clear winner (spoiler alert: we think there is!).

What is YNAB?

YNAB, short for You Need a Budget, is an app with a loyal fan base focusing on one central theme: proactive and intentional budgeting.

The app uses zero-based budgeting to ensure all incoming funds have an assigned purpose. YNAB has recently emphasized the concept of “giving every dollar a job” by labeling it as the method behind the app and replacing its previous four rules.

In addition to revising their four rules, which seemed restrictive to some users, YNAB came up with five spending questions to guide users in their budgeting endeavors:

1. What does this money need to do before I’m paid again?
2. What larger, less frequent spending do I need to prepare for?
3. What can I set aside for next month’s spending?
4. What goals, large or small, do I want to prioritize?
5. What changes do I need to make, if any?\

From the first time you land on YNAB’s home page, it's clear that they emphasize a goals-based spending approach.

YNAB is available on the web, for iOS (App Store) devices with separate apps for iPad and iPhone, and for Android (Google Play) mobile devices. Find more details here in our full YNAB review.

What is Rocket Money?

Rocket Money is part of the Rocket group of companies, the most famous of which is Rocket Mortgage. Before being purchased by Rocket, it was branded as Truebill. 

Rocket Money helps you take control of your subscriptions and bills through automated features. This primary focus has stayed the same, even from its origin as Truebill, which started in 2015.

Rocket Money uses traditional budgeting to provide:

• A breakdown of everyday spending
• A list of recurring bills and subscriptions
• Alerts for upcoming bills and changes in trends from prior months

With over five million users, Rocket Money has a base of people who want to get control over their finances, especially recurring cash outflows and are willing to pay for that help. Rocket Money offers a free version, but we’ll focus on the Premium version in this review.

This central theme of gaining control over your money is evident throughout Rocket Money’s website.

Rocket Money is available on the web, Apple App Store (iOS), and Google Play (Android devices). Check out our full Rocket Money review for more details.

YNAB vs. Rocket Money: Round 1 (Best Features)

While the ways YNAB and Rocket Money help you gain control over your finances are different, they both have some great features. Here are a few of our favorite features to help guide your decision.

YNAB: Best Features

When it comes to efficiently managing your cash flow, YNAB has an extensive list of things it does exceptionally well. Here are a few of the features that users love about YNAB.

Ability to Customize

The overall user interface and functionality of YNAB are reminiscent of a spreadsheet, which makes sense because of its origin. YNAB started as a spreadsheet and has kept that ability to customize different pieces of your budget to suit your needs.

In YNAB, you’re able to customize:

• Your account names and ordering
• Whether you want to link your accounts or enter information manually (or through a simple drag and drop of a CSV file)
• Your primary category groups, categories, and ordering
• Payees, including setting rules for naming in the future
• Your financial currency, including the format of currency and even dates, depending on your region

YNAB encourages adding emojis and fun names to make your budget unique. 

Community & Education

YNAB’s loyal following, who aptly call themselves YNABers, share their financial wins and get help from others through various online communities. 

In addition to its robust customer support team, YNAB has an official Facebook group and a dedicated Reddit forum. 

The YNAB website is an excellent educational resource. It offers extensive articles, live and recorded webinars, and other ways to learn about money.

Goal-Focused Cash Flow Management

The mantra “give every dollar a job” doesn’t solely aim to determine how you’ll spend your money. YNAB is also about setting goals and prioritizing real-time tradeoffs to decide how you want to use your money.

Categories can be used to set aside money for financial goals, such as saving for an emergency fund, an upcoming family trip, or a wedding.

On a more granular level, targets are individual goals that can be set for each category. Of course, to meet some of your big goals, you need to manage your everyday spending, and targets help you do just that.

Sharing Budgets

Families will appreciate how easy it is to share budgets with other family members through YNAB Together. 

Your subscription includes budget sharing with up to five different people. You can even set up budgets for your kids to help them learn the value of money and share their budgets with them (without them seeing your family budget).

Rocket Money: Best Features

The way Rocket Money markets its products makes it crystal clear that helping people manage subscriptions is their most significant selling point. However, Rocket Money also does other things extremely well.

Some of these features are only available in the Premium app, so keep that in mind.

Ease-of-Use and Setup

It’s fast and easy to start using Rocket Money to track your expenses. They offer a 7-day trial to check it out, and you can immediately see a breakdown of your cash flow for the last few months.

You can adjust the categorization and customize alerts, but the initial setup only takes a few minutes. The most time-consuming part is linking your financial accounts through Plaid.

Net Worth & Big-Picture

In addition to gaining clarity on your cash flow, you can link other investment accounts and manually include other assets to see a big-picture view of your financial life.

Rocket Money even allows you to link your home value to Zillow, which is a great feature. Many families hold a significant portion of their net worth in their homes, so this is definitely a value-add.

Automated Help (Subs and Bills)

The most unique feature of Rocket Money is, of course, its ability to help you monitor and cancel subscriptions and negotiate bills.

Rocket Money excels at identifying recurring transactions, regardless of their frequency. Separating these recurring subscriptions allows you to identify ones you no longer use. Plus, it goes one step further and helps you to cancel them, all within the app quickly. 

Bill negotiation is another similar feature that Rocket Money offers to those with Premium subscriptions. However, if you want Rocket Money to negotiate your internet, phone, cable or other bills, there is an additional fee.

Credit Scores & Reports

Since Rocket Money is owned by a company primarily focused on providing loans, it may not be surprising that they offer credit scores and reporting.

It’s helpful to monitor and track your credit directly within your budgeting app, especially if you’re looking to buy a home or need loans for another purpose.

YNAB vs. Rocket Money: Round 2 (Areas for Improvement)

Let’s look at a few things we’ve found lacking in each app. Both YNAB and Rocket Money are actively updating their apps and providing new features regularly, but there are still a few areas of improvement for each one.

YNAB: Areas for Improvement

Depending on your budget and what you’re looking for in a budgeting app, there are a couple of things that you may find to be downsides to YNAB.

Cost

A full-featured budgeting app comes at a cost, and YNAB is one of the more expensive budgeting apps.

The monthly plan is steep at $14.99/month, and if you choose an annual plan, you’ll pay $109. However, this is one case where it will quickly pay for itself if you can manage your cash flow more effectively.

Reporting is Lacking

YNAB users complain that the reporting is not as robust in YNAB as some of the other top budgeting apps. You can track cash inflows and outflows, review trends, calculate your net worth, and filter transactions based on specific criteria, but that’s about the extent of reporting.

Manual Net Worth Tracking

While tracking the big-picture view of your financial life in YNAB is possible, it’ll require some manual entry and upkeep.

Currently, YNAB only allows you to link budget accounts (e.g., checking, savings, credit cards, etc.). You can add tracking accounts to track your net worth, but those must be manually entered. As such, there is no investment tracking in YNAB.

Rocket Money: Areas for Improvement

As for Rocket Money, we found some issues when researching user experiences that you will want to make sure you’re aware of.

Lack of Clarity in Pricing/Cost

One of the biggest complaints about Rocket Money is its lack of clarity in pricing. You won’t even find pricing on its home page. You must dig into the support questions to find the subscription cost, a pay-what-you-want fee of $4-12/month.

If you want Rocket Money to negotiate bills on your behalf, they also charge a fee of 30-60% of the first year’s savings, which is quite high.

There have been quite a few complaints about this aspect of Rocket Money (and the original Truebill had its share of angry customers over this as well).

Short Trial Period

If you want to try out the premium version of Rocket Money to see if it will work for your family, you’ll only have seven days to decide before paying. This is one of the shortest trial periods for budgeting apps (and significantly shorter than YNAB’s 34-day trial period).

No Investment Tracking

Rocket Money's big-picture view of finances is quite limited. It doesn’t have the functionality to view your underlying investments, so it is limited to tracking your net worth only. However, this is more than YNAB currently offers.

YNAB vs. Rocket Money: Final Verdict

So, when we put YNAB and Rocket Money against each other, which wins?

If you want to gain control over your cash flow in a way that promotes lasting change, YNAB is the clear winner. It requires dedication to ongoing budgeting but rewards you with clarity over where your money is going. Focusing on goals and intentionality helps you foster a better mindset around money that puts your goals first.

However, Rocket Money may be the best option if you have many subscriptions and high internet and phone bills that you need help managing (and reducing!).

The following chart illustrates some of the key features you might be looking at in a budgeting app and how YNAB and Rocket Money compare for each one.

YNAB vs. Rocket Money Breakdown

FEATURE	YNAB	ROCKET MONEY	WINNER
Bank import	Yes	Yes	YNAB (more banks)
Shared access	Yes – 5 users	Yes – 1 user	YNAB
Availability	Web, iOS, Android,	Web, iOS, Android	Tie
Cost	$109/year or $14.99/month	$6-12/month + Bill Negotiation Fees	Rocket Money
CSV exports	Yes	No	YNAB
Ease of Setup	No	Yes	Rocket Money
Customer Service	Help Menu, Email	need	YNAB
Educational Resources	Yes	No	YNAB
Security	Bank Level/2FA	Bank Level/2FA	Tie
One-on-One Support	Yes, through a network of coaches	Yes, for bill negotiation only	Tie
Dashboard	No	Yes	Rocket Money
Unlimited budgets	Yes	Yes	Tie
Detailed reports	Yes	Yes	Tie
Customization	Yes, Extensive	Yes, Some	YNAB
Automated categorization	Yes	Yes	Tie
Split transactions	Yes	Yes	Tie
Recurring transactions	Yes	Yes	Tie
Category rollovers	Yes	No	YNAB
Investment & portfolio tracking	No	No	Tie
Credit monitoring	No	Yes	Rocket Money
Debt management	Yes	No	YNAB
Goal setting	Yes	Yes	Tie

YNAB beats Rocket Money hands-down in almost every category. 

YNAB is a great solution for managing cash flow, tracking progress toward financial goals, and fostering an abundance mindset. However, if you’re looking for a simpler zero-based budgeting alternative to YNAB, we suggest EveryDollar. 

If you’re looking for a budgeting app that provides a clear overall picture of your financial life and helps identify recurring expenses, we recommend you check out Monarch Money!

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Have you used YNAB or Rocket Money to manage your finances?

Please let us know in the comments below.

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