Mint Budgeting App Review (2024)

Editor’s note: Mint shut down on Jan. 1, 2024. If you are looking for a replacement, Buy Side recommends Monarch Money, our new pick for best budget app, or one of our other budgeting favorites.

If you’re looking for an app to help get your finances in order, Mint just might be the best solution available.

One of the earliest popular budgeting apps—it first launched in 2007—Mint is easy to use and doesn’t require a lot of work, making it a great choice for first-time budgeters. The app helps you create a personalized budget in just a few clicks, then helps you stay on track with notifications that keep you updated on your spending.

There’s a free basic version as well as a premium version that costs $4.99 per month, or $34.99 for the year—affordable compared to other apps’ paid versions. Mint’s premium version includes management of your subscriptions and a deeper spending analysis.

Mint’s robust features and ease of use are why Buy Side from WSJ named it the Best Overall Budgeting app.

How to use the Mint budget app

Once you sign up and enter your personal information, Mint uses your credit history to identify your various financial accounts including credit cards, savings, checking, loans, investments, property, and taxes. You’ll have the option to add each account to the app.

Mint crunches your past spending habits and available monthly cash to suggest a budget for each spending category, from gas to groceries to restaurants. You can also decide how much you want to put aside in long-term savings each month.

Mint’s pros

• Intuitive and easy to use
• Less expansive than many competitors

Creating your budget is as easy as starting with Mint’s suggestions and tweaking accordingly. The app features a clean design and is easy to navigate. The home screen offers you a glance at your overall financial health, including your net worth and credit score.

You’ll get in-app notifications—and, if you’d like, push notifications—warning if you’re spending an unusually high amount in a certain category compared with previous months. At the end of each month, you’ll see an easily digestible, Instagram-style story featuring insights into your spending breakdown.

Mint’s well-designed interface is reflected in reviews. It owns a 4.8 out of 5 rating in the App Store, one of the highest of any budgeting app, with more than 757,00 reviews. It’s not hard to see why.

At $34.99 for the year, Mint’s premium version costs less than that of most other budgeting apps. Plus, it could end up paying for itself and then some: Through a partnership with Billshark, the app negotiates subscription costs on your behalf. I tested this feature out with a $262 annual satellite radio bill. Two days later, I found out that my new rate was $144 lower. Forty percent of these savings go to Billshark, but that still amounts to $86 more in my pocket at the end of the year. The whole process took just a few clicks.

The premium version also offers spending projections for the rest of the month based on your past behaviors. This way, you’ll have an early warning on where you need to cut back to stay under budget for the rest of the month. It also allows you to compare your spending to average Mint users within your location and income bracket.

Mint’s cons

• Less convenient for upcoming bills
• Less focused on savings

Mint is great for analyzing your past spending history, but it doesn’t excel at hands-on, forward-looking budgeting. For example, after syncing with your credit card, you can create rules that will automatically sort transactions as they occur, but to input upcoming or recurring bills, you’ll need to sync with an external calendar.

The concept of long-term savings doesn’t get the attention in Mint that it does in other apps, like Monarch, which we named the Best App for Growing Your Savings. Your savings progress isn’t prominently featured within Mint, nor are you alerted if you’re falling short of the savings goals you set for yourself.

Our budget app methodology

To pick the Best Budgeting Apps, we selected and downloaded 18 apps based on customer reviews and our own discussion with five financial planners.

While using each app, we noted whether it offered various features and, if it did, how good those features were. Those features included: automated suggested budgets, auto-categorization of transactions, the ability to connect with various accounts, price and more.

We also took into consideration each app’s design, intuitiveness and ease of use. To see our full methodology, check out our full budgeting app ranking.