Actual

Actual is a personal finance tool that keeps your budget on your own machine. It is free, open source and written in NodeJS, and being local-first means the app works against local data rather than a remote service you rent by the month.

Syncing is still there. Changes move between devices without exports or manual merging, so a laptop and a phone stay in step while the data itself stays yours. The method behind the numbers is envelope budgeting, where every amount that comes in is given a job before it is spent.

There are four ways to run it, differing mostly in how much you want to operate yourself.

• PikaPods: one-click deployment, the path recommended for non-technical users.
• Fly.io: managed hosting for people comfortable with a hosting platform.
• Docker: a self-hosted image for anyone already running a home server.
• Desktop apps: downloadable Windows, Mac and Linux builds that run with no server at all.

The codebase splits into loot-core, which runs on any platform, plus a desktop client and an Electron shell. Community documentation covers budgeting, account management, tips and migration from other apps, and the interface is translated through a crowdsourcing project. Feature requests are voted on with reactions in the issue tracker, which is a fair measure of how community-driven the project really is.