Open Source PocketGuard Alternatives

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.

Firefly III tracks personal expenses and income so you can see where money actually goes. The premise is blunt: if you know where your money is going, you can stop it from going there, and budgeting stops being guesswork.

It is self-hosted and isolated, and never contacts an external server until you explicitly tell it to. Records are kept with double-entry bookkeeping and organized by budgets, categories and tags. A REST JSON API covers almost every part of the application, which is how the ecosystem of third-party tools around it was built.

Past plain transaction entry, the parts that get daily use are these.

• Recurring transactions: standing commitments are entered once and then manage themselves.
• Rule based handling: transactions are processed by rules you write, rather than sorted by hand.
• Piggy banks: money is set aside toward a named goal and tracked against it.
• Reports: income and expense reports, plenty of charts, and views that make navigation through old records quick.
• Currencies and security: any currency you like, with two factor authentication on the account.

A demo site comes preloaded with an example administration if you want to look before installing. Running it yourself means a server install, the Docker image or a Kubernetes deployment. It suits people who like tinkering with self-hosted software and would rather not upload financial records to anyone.

ezBookkeeping records daily transactions, imports data from other sources and lets you search and filter the result quickly. Built-in charts handle the usual analysis, and custom queries with your own chart dimensions answer the questions the default views miss.

Resource efficiency is the point of the design. The application runs comfortably on a Raspberry Pi, a NAS or a MicroServer, starts from a single Docker command, and stores data in SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL across Windows, macOS and Linux on x86, amd64 and ARM.

The bookkeeping model goes well past a running list of amounts.

• Two-level structure: accounts and categories each nest one level deep.
• Transaction detail: image attachments, location tracking with maps and scheduled transactions.
• Import formats: CSV, OFX, QFX, QIF, IIF, Camt.052, Camt.053, MT940, GnuCash, Firefly III and Beancount.
• Localization: many languages and currencies, several exchange rate sources with automatic updates, multiple timezones and custom date and number formats.
• Security: two-factor authentication, OIDC login, login rate limiting and an application lock by PIN or WebAuthn.
• AI features: receipt image recognition, plus MCP and agent skill support for integration.

Interfaces are tuned separately for mobile and desktop, dark mode included, and PWA support means the mobile version can be added to a home screen and used like a native app. The MIT licensed project ships Docker images, binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows, and a build script for anyone compiling it themselves.

Most budgets fall apart on the bills that land between paychecks. Monetr works the other way around, setting money aside for each recurring expense as its due date approaches, so the number on screen is what is genuinely free to spend before the next paycheck arrives.

It takes its cues from Simple, the banking app that shut down, and rebuilds that idea as software anyone can run. Account data arrives through Plaid for automatic updates, or as OFX files exported from a bank by hand for people who would rather not link anything.

The application stays close to a few ideas rather than growing into an accounting suite.

• Recurring expenses: each one is funded gradually on whatever interval it repeats.
• Paycheck budgeting: allocations follow your pay cycle instead of a calendar month.
• Free to spend: the headline balance is what remains once every commitment is covered.
• Forecasting: projected balances show when a shortfall is coming and when it clears.
• Mobile first: the interface installs as a web app on both desktop and phone.

Self-hosting is free and documented, and the whole source tree is public. Contributors need their own Plaid sandbox credentials, after which a single make develop command brings up the local environment and make clean tears it back down. The hosted version starts with a thirty day trial.

YAFFA is a personal finance web application built around long term planning rather than a monthly spending summary. It is self-hosted, so the financial data sits on an instance you run instead of being uploaded to a service and shared onward.

The app is written in PHP on the Laravel framework and is MIT licensed. Currency rates update daily from the free Frankfurter service, with no key or registration, while investment prices come from Alpha Vantage, which does ask you to register for a free key of your own.

The feature set covers the whole picture of a household's money.

• Multiple currencies: accounts are held in several currencies, with one default used across dashboards and charts.
• Transactions: income and spending are recorded with suggestions while typing and splits across categories.
• Document processing: uploads, received email and Google Drive imports are read by OpenAI or Gemini to prefill a transaction, with Tesseract available for local OCR.
• Forecasting: scheduled and recurring transactions and budget plans produce forecast figures, and recurring entries can post themselves.
• Investments: holdings are tracked with automatic price retrieval to calculate gain and loss.
• Imports: QIF and CSV files import through rules you customize for country and bank specific formats.

The author is equally clear about what YAFFA will not do, since direct bank downloads are rejected on principle and there is no native mobile app. A sandbox with sample data is available before you install, and the README notes that precise decimal arithmetic for monetary values is still on the list.

Recurring charges hide in email. Suprascribe reads a connected mailbox, pulls out the receipts and renewal notices, and turns them into a subscription dashboard, so the trial you forgot and the annual plan renewing next week sit in the same list with their real cost.

It is a Next.js 15 application in TypeScript, with Supabase Postgres and row-level security keeping user data separate, Supabase Auth covering Google, Microsoft and Apple sign-in, and the Vercel AI SDK abstracting more than ten model providers. One service fetches mail through the Gmail API, Microsoft Graph or IMAP, and another asks a model to extract subscription details from the message text.

The tiers split along what discovery costs to run.

• Free features: the dashboard, unlimited manual entries, multi-currency support and bring your own key discovery.
• Paid features: automatic discovery from Gmail, Outlook, iCloud or any IMAP account, full history, search, grouping, quick unsubscribe, a calendar view and renewal reminders.
• Key storage: model keys you supply are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and decrypted only while a request runs.
• Mail safety: outbound requests to mail servers refuse private and loopback ranges along with cloud metadata endpoints.
• Payment safety: Stripe webhooks are checked against their signature, and an idempotency guard stops a duplicate tier upgrade.

Running your own copy needs Node.js 20, Yarn v4 and a Supabase project, with Stripe, Resend and Brandfetch optional. The AGPL-3.0 license means a modified copy offered as a network service has to publish its source to the people using it.