Instead YouTube gives me literally nothing but AI spam. :/
I scrolled down a bit more and got this: https://i.postimg.cc/fJcPhG45/Screenshot-20251118-150802.png
Scrolled down some more and this: https://i.postimg.cc/v1khnhRp/Screenshot-20251118-151325.png
I kept scrolling until I ran out of relevant results. Not a single video was legit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much AI slop in one search term and by the gods there is a lot of crap on YouTube.
Anyone have a good comparison video? I’m just wanting a decent comparison of Actual, Firefly III and possibly HomeBank. Feel free to also give me your 2 cents on whatever you use :)
We need platforms where AI content is just banned. We’re past the point we need to start systematically excluding all this crap.
We need more PeerTube devs to develop it further
Also to switch everybody to Vanillo (not open source but definitely a way better alternative)
Best if they make it so there is no AI Content allowed too or at very least segmented away from human content
I’ve got a family member interested in switching to Linux but the finance software is an obstacle. I had a look and landed on gnucash which I thought I would trial myself and then see if if would work for them. I like it!
Just FYI, take a look at how YNAB works — which is a paid app, but with a great approach: you track your spending for a while, and then basically always know how much you can spend on various categories of things. Idk what the workflow is in modern budgeting apps, but back in the day YNAB was rather different from the more typical accounting-type software like GNUCash. One of its tenets is that you don’t spend money which you don’t actually have, i.e. the credit card dept.
I would avoid YNAB. They had an offline version years back that was really nice until they did a rug pull and disabled it in order to get people to buy their subscription service.
I still have the offline version in my Steam library. It still works, just no syncing to cloud.
As do I. I don’t really recall why I just stopped using it - it could just be because I didn’t feel ok feeding my personal finances into software controlled by a shady company.
I don’t have a video for you but I’ve been using Actual for over a year and really like it. I recommend it. Caveat, I very actively interact with my budget (inputting things manually) and cannot speak for it’s account linking features.
I use actual as well.
The docker compose works really well, basically set it up once and then it works, even with running updates by pulling new container versions.
I used the account importing to start but now input everything manually and don’t do live sync.
Never heard of the other options so didn’t know about them to compare before setting up actual. I do like the methodology of actual, where it has you only budget money that actually exists in your account, that feels very sane to me.
I just installed Firefly yesterday, and I can say that the docker compose setup was easy. I’ve got no real opinions yet, just wanted to mention this for OP in case he reads your experience as it being easier. I imagine they’re both easy.
I’m curious, when you say you stopped importing, does that mean you were getting info from your banks, and stopped doing that? Why did you stop? My next step was to set up the automated importer for Firefly.
I never set up the actual bank sync, I think what I did was basically a CSV export and then import, rather than the bank sync.
But it’s been about a year so not remembering exactly how the import was.
Got it. Thanks.
Maybe not what you’re looking for, but there’s a program called “Money Wallet” on Android. It’s on F-Droid and free software. Maybe my favourite because every time I spend cash I just open it up and I enter what I just spent.
For professional use, I’d recommend GNU Cash, though.
I think its budgeting features are lackluster, but I have highly enjoyed gnucash for tracking my expenses, incime & where everything goes.
It’s all manual more or less, and you do double ledger accounting, so all the money is accounted for somewhere.
Seconding gnucash, there’s modern stuff that’s slicker but nothing that works better imo
Ive started seeing a lot of these sadly… Luckily they’re still somewhat easy to spot.
Im reasonable happy with Actual Budget. I like that it has desktop apps that can sync woth a server that was easy to set up, I can import various things via .csv, rules to automatically categorise stuff are nice. I dont care about the envelope budgeting or whatever it’s called they’re on about but it’s easy to ignore / turn off.
I’ve been using Actual for a while now, probably close to a year. Before that I was on YNAB, which isn’t FOSS but does have a huge library of material for how to make your budget work for you instead of the other way around.
I got off YNAB after they kept raising their subscription fees for seemingly no reason. Actual is not nearly as feature-rich but you can’t really argue with the price.
At least on YouTube you can tell at a glance that it’s AI.
I have been self hosting fireflyIII for almost 2 months now, I like it, my wife is an accountant and she likes it. I didn’t want to have to pay for an accounting service, and my credit union doesn’t have an api that I am aware of to connect to the paid services anyway.
Would recommend 👍
Have you had to deal with refunds yet? I see that as a criticism and I would have to agree that the official doc’s way of handling them is not ideal for our situation or the way refunds are handled in my country. Interested in knowing if anyone has come up with more creative solutions.
I have not had to do a refund yet
There’s also text-based tools - not sure if they fit your needs. beancount (with ‘fava’ has a nice web UI), ledger, hledger. Good thing about text based is: you can easily use git.
Not sure if they go as ‘budgeting’ software. ‘Accounting’ might be more accurate.
This is all just Capitalist slop. Has nothing to do with AI or llms, just the kind of society it exists in and the type of psychopath corporations that delivers. We seem to forget that all other tool we use to de-shittify the net, ALL fight capitalist tendencies, but when AI comes along and gives the Capitalist believers a new tool for scamming people, then it is suddenly the tools fault !!
People hate Capitalism, not the tool…
I remember people making this same argument but for social media, doesn’t make any more sense now than it did then. Corpos are the ones in control of that tool, using it helps them so much more than it does you. If you don’t want to support the ideology that developed it, you really need to just not engage.
When we get good, ethical and competitive AI we can execute locally on Linux I’ll be a fan of that. But…
