YNAB alternative

Head to head

The catch: the method travels, the typing does not have to

YNAB's subscription is $109 a year billed in dollars, so what you actually pay depends on the day's exchange rate and on what your bank charges for a foreign currency transaction. That is the visible part.

The less visible part is the daily work. Its own page says it: direct import covers "select US, Canadian, UK, and EU Banks". If your bank is not in that group, the routine becomes downloading the statement and uploading it by hand every week, so the tool you bought to save time charges you twice — in dollars and in Sundays.

The good news is that what you learned in YNAB does not disappear when you switch apps. Setting category limits, reviewing the month and deciding before you spend are habits, not features of one particular product. Whisper Money holds them up with category budgets and rollover, billed in euros, with the bank syncing itself.

What changes when you move from YNAB to Whisper Money

• PSD2 connections with Spanish and European banks, with no file to upload every week.
• Billed in euros, so no currency conversion fee on your card.
• Interface in English, Spanish and French.
• Category budgets on a weekly, biweekly, monthly or yearly period.
• Roll the leftover into the next period whenever you want, without being forced to account for every euro.
• A budget that catches everything the others do not, so no spending slips through unclassified.
• Automation rules to categorise by merchant, amount or text, without redoing the work every month.
• Optional AI categorisation that learns from your corrections, if you consent to it.
• Investments and crypto inside the same net worth: Indexa Capital, Interactive Brokers, Wise, Binance, Bitpanda, Kraken and Coinbase.
• During your first 15 days, the full importer brings your whole YNAB history in one go: every account, its categories and its transactions from a single file.
• CSV, XLS and XLSX import with column mapping for the accounts that do not connect.

How to migrate from YNAB to Whisper Money, step by step

YNAB exports your data, so the move is direct. In its web app, click the plan name in the left sidebar and choose "Export Plan": you get two files, one with the plan and its categories and one with the transaction history. The second is the one we want: it covers every account and names the account of each transaction, so during your first 15 days the full importer turns it into all your accounts, categories and transactions in one go. After that, you can also select one account's transactions and export just those for the importer under Transactions.

1. 1

   Create your account and prepare the destination accounts

   Connect the banks that sync over PSD2. If you use the full importer, it creates the rest of your accounts from the file; if you go account by account, create each destination account first, because that importer always asks where the transactions go.

2. 2

   Export from YNAB

   In the YNAB web app, plan name in the left sidebar, then "Export Plan". You get the transaction history as CSV, or as TSV if your currency uses the comma as its decimal separator. If it comes out as TSV, save it as CSV from your spreadsheet before uploading.

3. 3

   Merge Outflow and Inflow into one column

   YNAB splits the amount across two columns, Outflow and Inflow. Our importer expects one: in your spreadsheet, build a single amount column with expenses negative and income positive. It is the only manual edit in the whole move.

4. 4

   Bring every account in at once

   During your first 15 days, open Settings → Import from another app, choose "Another app or my own spreadsheet" and upload the file. Map Date to the date, your new column to the amount, Payee to the description, Memo to the notes, Category to the category and Account to the account: each YNAB account is created here, or sent into one you already have. Importing the same file twice duplicates nothing, and Undo in Settings takes it all back.

5. 5

   Or go account by account

   After those 15 days, or for a single account, export just that account's transactions, open the importer under Transactions, pick the account and drag the file in. Map Date to the date, Payee to the description — Memo can be joined to it — and your new column to the amount, and pick the date format. Duplicates come unticked in the preview, your automation rules run on import, and four or five rules for your regular merchants put much of the history back in place; whatever is left uncategorised the AI handles if you turn it on.

What people already using it say