Yesterday I wrote about Mint vs GeeZeo. I wanted to explore Wesabe. I read many good reviews about Wesabe, but I wanted to explore it myself. So, I created account and decided to give it a try. To use its groups and networking features, you don't need to provide the bank account details.
There are other tools like Yoodle, Expensr, Mvelopes, Spendview and of course Microsoft Money and Quicken. I haven't expored Expensr, Mvelopes and Spendview yet. Sometime in the future, I will give it a try. I'm sure in somepoint of time all the free tools will be paid service, but some basic features will be still free.
I have used Microsoft Money for couple of years, but I have account with Bank of America and I think its $5 per month service charge to access Bank of America accounts from Microsoft Money. I felt its more work to export the transactions manually. I personally feel GeoZeo to be better( personal choice). Here's my comparison results of the 3 personal finance tools
| Mint | GeeZeo | Wesabe | |
| My general thought's | Colorful, user friendly, but I feel its slow when displaying the Spending Trends. Difficult to identify to which bank the transaction belongs. | Transactions are listed under each account and more readable then Mint. Uses Tag Cloud feature. | Transactions are listed under each account. I like the way in which transactions are listed. Tags are more appealing than GeeZeo |
| Usability | Adds tags to the transactions automatically, but I have to make some changes to get it right. | Simple to use, yet powerful. Budget screen loads much faster then Mint. | Tags needs to be manually edited, but similar transactions gets updated automatically. |
| Automatic Account Updates | Yes | Yes | No |
| Downloads to cell phone | You can receive mobile alerts. | Provides support to download the transactions to your mobile device. | I couldn't find that options. |
| Networking with other users | No | Yes | Yes |
| Money savings tips | Displays offers from bank, credit cards, phone companies based on your account records. For instance, if your Checking account APY is 1.00%, it will display other bank that offers more Interest on your money. | Subscribers provide savings tips, coupons list for shopping and helps to join groups of similar interest. Example "pay off car loan", "save t buy iPod" | Provides similar feature as GeeZeo. I personally feel Wesabe's Groups are more helpful than GeeZeo's. And again, it depends on the readers tips and comments. |
| Security | Uses Yoodle to fetch bank account details and transactions. Yoodle is supported in many financial institutions like Bank Of America. | Uses Cash Edge's aggregation service is used by some of the largest financial institutions (e.g. Vanguard) and hosted at Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) | Uses a software program that runs on your computer and keeps your passwords safe, encrypted on your local drive. Read more on this below the table. |
| Adding Accounts | I had to spend considerable amount of time trying to add the right account. For instance, if you want to add Citi Credit Cards, it will list 2 options ( Citi Credit Cards Only and Citi Drivers Edge Card) and it asks for different credentials before you can add the account. | It was much easier to add the account. Gave my user name and account was added. I feel adding accounts is much easier in GeeZeo than Mint and Wesabe. I was able to add my 401k and home mortgage accounts too. | You have 3 choices to add the account. I tried using Firefox Uploader. Account adding feature is not within the application. It a program installed in desktop or as add-in to Firefox. I had to search for Bank of America. After I clicked next to Bank of America, new tab was loaded with BoA website and I logged in to the account and manually downloaded the transaction. This steps were recorded and for future updates, I had to manually re-run the recorded steps. I was not successful in updating the records with HSBC and Bank of America. |
| Who is the winner | I have been using Mint for some 4 months now, but after finding GeeZeo, I'm planning to use it for a while and then decide, if I really want to come back to Mint. I enjoyed the stay with Mint, then Microsoft Money. | I personally feel GeeZeo is much better then other 2. Will I go back to Mint or Wesabe, it really depends. but for time being, I'm going to play with GeeZeo. | It was little difficult to add the accounts manually. Yeah, I'm kind lazy to do the manual work. When, I login to the account, I would feel much more comfortable to update all the accounts in few mouse clicks. But, not open up a recorded script to upload the transactions. |
Hope you enjoyed this article. I would appreciate if you leave a comment about the comparison.
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