Pimp Your Finances

In last week’s Market Share Battle, “Review of Free Online Money Management Tools“, we compared 3 free web-based money management tools: Mint, Wesabe, and Yodlee.  This week, we review 3 more web-based tools for managing your finances: Quicken Online, Geezeo, and Buxfer.

The services are all free, and consolidate information from a variety of sources to give users a complete picture of their financial health.  It’s a great way to figure out how you’re spending money, and identify ways to save.

Quicken Online – http://quicken.intuit.com/online-banking-finances.jhtml

Summary: Quicken Online is the newest site for financial management, but one of the oldest when it comes to desktop software.  Intuit, the company behind their desktop software, released Quicken Online earlier this year to grab some of the market share in the online arena.  Quicken Online is now free.  It used to cost $3 per month, but they changed it to compete with the other financial management sites.

• Pros:
  • Intuit has been a market leader for years in financial software, so they know the market very well. 
  • If you are already a user of Quicken, then this is an easy transition.
• Cons:
  • Can’t sync the online version of Quicken with the desktop version

Geezeo – www.geezeo.com

Summary: Geezeo is a free, web-based application offering a variety of tools and services to help reach your financial goals.  You can organize your finances, create a budget, set savings goals, plan for retirement, and learn how to buy a house.  Along with the online software, Geezeo includes a community feature that lets users help and learn from each other.  The back end of Geezeo uses CashEdge, an online account aggregation and interaction service used by numerous financial institutions.

• Pros:
  • Simple, clean design
  • Email-based; lets you manage your finances via your inbox
• Cons:
  • Set-up is more painful than others we reviewed
  • Plain and doesn’t offer rich graphics like Mint.com
  • I could not find the ability to add student loans, but it is my understanding that this will be added later.

Buxfer – www.buxfer.com

Summary: Buxfer is simple and easy to use.  Most of the core features are similar to its competitors, including things like budgeting, summary reports, transactions, etc…. 

Like Wesabe, Buxfer is trying to position themselves in the social networking arena, but they take a different approach.  Whereas Wesabe encourages users to join group discussions, Buxfer creates a more one-on-one feel by adding a contacts list to your main screen.  The contacts list lets you track how much money people owe you (or how much you owe them), and also lets you send and receive payments for those loans via Amazon Payments. 

As for their security, they boast successful audits by Verisign and McAfee, but I’m troubled by number of data entry and exit points that they offer.   Most of the other sites we reviewed have one method of entry: a web portal log in. 

Buxfer has numerous entry points because they offer Firefox add-ons, Google add-ons, iPhone applications, Facebook applications, and other mobile device tools.  If you are worried about this, they offer a manual upload of your financial data so you do not have to provide them with user names and passwords.  This increases security, but also makes it much harder to use.

• Pros:
  • Clever social networking features
  • Personal loan tracking and payments
  • Clean and simple interface
  • Financial reports offered via email or text message
• Cons:
  • Numerous data entry and exit points that can could cause security issues
  • Not as much reporting functionality

Conclusion:

• Out of these 3 products, Quicken Online is my personal favorite.  The others have great potential, but lack deep functionality and a rich interface.

To see our reviews of Mint.com, Yodlee, and Wesabe, check out part one of our online tool reviews: Market Share Battles: Review of Free Online Money Management Tools.