Brewcore

Elasticsearch consultant and software engineer.

Firefly III

I’ve been hunting for the right financial / budgeting software for my personal finances for YEARS. At various points over the last 10 years I’ve tried Quicken, Mint, YNAB, and an assortment of open-source solutions, and I’ve finally found one that stuck with Firefly III.

Here are the reasons I really enjoy it:

  • It’s NOT a cloud platform. It’s a web app that you can host and run yourself, and I use the provided docker-compose config to run it with minimal effort. My finances stay private, but I could share them with my wife with a little effort in set-up.
  • I can import any transactions I can get in CSV format with minimal effort.
  • It has a good UI. Screenshots
  • Under the hood it’s a double-entry accounting system, but it keeps the UI simple and doesn’t make extra work for me.
  • You can schedule transactions and use a rules system to automate a lot.
  • Budgets are an envelope-based system, but they don’t use the YNAB methodology that requires you to allocate every dollar before you spend it. You can easily see per-day budget breakdowns to know if you’re on track.

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