If you’re juggling multiple bank accounts and credit cards while trying to align finances with your partner, it might be time to team up with Monarch Money. I signed up for a free trial of Monarch Money to bring you an in depth review. Below, we’ll dive into the features, pros and cons, and compare how it stacks up against other top tools like Empower, YNAB, and Rocket Money. We’ll help you decide if it’s the right fit for your financial life. Here’s my Monarch Money review.
Quick Take
Monarch Money is a modern personal finance app designed to give users a complete view of their financial lives in one place. It connects to thousands of banks, brokerages, and credit card companies, allowing users to track accounts, transactions, investments, and net worth automatically. Unlike many budgeting apps that focus only on expenses, Monarch provides a broader perspective by combining budgeting, cash flow forecasting, investment tracking, and long-term financial planning.
Promo Code: Get 50% off the first year subscription of Monarch Money’s Core Plan with Promo Code ROB50.
5 out of 5 stars
Our Rating
4.9 out of 5 stars
App Store (80k reviews)
4.8 out of 5 stars
Google Play (19.7k reviews)
Monarch Money is a subscription-based personal finance app designed to give you a full view of your financial life. There’s a desktop and mobile version to track your spending, budget, even investments and net worth. Think of it as a modern version of Mint (which shut down in early 2024), but with better collaboration features and zero ads.
It’s ideal for individuals and couples who want financial transparency, especially if you maintain separate accounts but share long-term goals. You can track:
- Income and spending
- Bank accounts and credit cards
- Investments (brokerage, retirement, and even crypto)
- Loans and liabilities
- Net worth and financial goals
Getting Started With Monarch Money
I signed up for a free 7-day trial of Monarch Money to check it out. You’ll need to enter billing information at signup, but you can request an email notification when the free trial is about to expire. The app is available via web, iOS, and Android, and your experience is synced across all platforms.
Once you have access, you can connect your financial accounts via data aggregators like Plaid, MX, and Finicity, which securely link over 13,000 financial institutions. The process is quick, but like many aggregation tools, occasional hiccups with bank logins aren’t uncommon. For example, I entered my bank and Monarch told me my bank had connectivity issues. However, it populated my information right away.
Also, when you link an account, such as a credit card, you’ll need to enter your username and password. In my case, my computer stores and enters my passwords automatically when I need to access my credit card accounts. It took more time for me to find my passwords (or change them, when I couldn’t find them) than it did for Monarch to access my account. Once you give Monarch the correct login information, the connection takes less than a minute.
Monarch Money Features
Dashboard
Monarch Money can track everywhere your money goes. The dashboard can show all of your accounts at a glance. You can get a snapshot of your:
- Cash flow
- Upcoming bills
- Budget categories
- Goals progress
- Net worth trends
You can also click into any of these for deeper insights. It’s a powerful, yet not intimidating tool. Below is a look at the spending section of the dashboard:
The interface is colorful and easy to use and it’s clear where your money is going each month.
Cash Flow Insights
If you often get to the end of the month wondering why your account balance is $400 less than you thought it was, cash flow insights can help. You can customize reports by merchant, category, or group, and you can sort by month, quarter, or year. The graphs/charts are immediately available, colorful, and easy to understand.
Investment Tracking
Monarch can track your investments so you can see how they are performing over a set month or year. However, out of all the features Monarch Money offers, investment tracking gets the most complaints on Reddit. Users report connection issues, plus it’s somewhat limited in the analysis it can offer. You can’t compare foreign stock holding to U.S. stocks, nor can you compare retirement vs. non-retirement accounts. In Monarch Money’s defense, it does say this feature is still in beta.
Net Worth
This one is pretty straightforward: you can sync all of your accounts to analyze your net worth. Real estate, car loans, bank accounts, investments, and credit cards are all accounted for.
Goal Setting
You can use Monarch Money to create and track your financial goals. You can create as many goals as you want, but if you share Monarch with a partner, you will only be able to set one retirement goal for the both of you.
Reports
There are three sections under reports: Cash Flow, Spending, and Income.
Cash Flow:
Spending:
Income:
You can create your own reports as well, such as vacation spending, household spending, and year-end tax reports. The reports make it easy to see your spending and savings.
Collaboration
This feature allows you to share your account information with your partner, so you can instantly see your partner’s individual accounts and joint accounts. You can choose which accounts you want to share and choose to make the information read-only to avoid accidental edits. Even better, each partner can have their own login.
You can set joint goals and create a household budget. Everything is transparent when you share your account. So, if you want to hide some expenses from a partner, there’s no way to do that, other than not to enter an account at all.
Budgeting
Monarch Money uses a bucket system of budgeting, so you can categorize expenses by Fixed (expenses that stay the same every month, such as car payments), Flexible (expenses such as groceries, which can vary) and Non-monthly, which includes things like quarterly tax payments and seasonal expenses.
Categorizing transactions is one area where Monarch really shines. It automatically categorizes every transaction. Many budgeting apps do this, but Monarch takes it a step further in several ways.
First, it makes changing the category as easy as a click of the mouse. And when you make a change, it offers to set up a rule to categorize future and/or past transactions the same way.
Second, you can easily split transactions across two or more categories.
Third, and the personal favorite of our founder, Rob Berger, Monarch can sync with Amazon and Target to sync transactions and automatically categorize them. No more “Shopping” category as a catchall at Amazon or Target.
Advice
The last one is pretty cool. If you click the last menu option on the left for Advice, you’ll be introduced to a CPA who can help you with whatever it is you need help with.
It will ask if you were able to connect all of your accounts, if you have an emergency fund, what types of loans you have (including any credit cards you don’t pay in full each month), types of insurance, if you have beneficiaries set up, and goals. Based on that, it comes up with a plan:
Monarch Money Security
Monarch has bank-level encryption, so you don’t have to worry about your information being compromised. It doesn’t store your passwords, and all information is filtered through third-party data provider partners (such as Plaid, Finicity, and MX). Monarch Money can’t make any changes to your accounts. There’s an option to turn on multi-factor authentication as well.
Monarch Money Pricing
The best and worst part of Monarch Money is the cost: $14.99 a month, or $99 a year. There is a free 7-day trial, though, and readers of Robberger.com can get 50% off their first year of Monarch Money’s Core Plan with code ROB50. There are no subscription tiers–everything is included in the price.
Yes, it is a bit pricey, but because Monarch makes its money through subscriptions, it never sells your data, and there are no annoying pop-up ads anywhere on the site.
Monarch Money vs. Empower
Empower is geared towards investment management and retirement planning. There is a budgeting feature, but users report that Monarch is better for day-to-day financial management, while Empower is better at wealth management and retirement planning. Many use both apps.
Another difference is that Empower is technically free, but with that you can expect to get ads for financial advisors and for their investment services (fees are based on the total amount invested, starting at 0.89% for the first million and decreasing after that). Monarch Money doesn’t offer investment advice, but it can track your investments and analyze the results.
Read our Empower Review
Monarch Money vs. Rocket Money
Rocket Money claims to find subscriptions you don’t need or want so you can cancel them, thereby saving you money. They can also negotiate bills on your behalf with the Premium subscription, but (and this is a big but) you have to authorize them to contact your providers on your behalf. This is in the Terms of Use:
Therefore, it may be necessary for our agents to represent, as your limited agent and for the limited authorized purpose, that they are the account holder.
It’s possible Rocket Money can save you a few bucks. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s definitely something you should know.
Monarch Money tracks your recurring expenses, including subscriptions. It can also give you an alert before your payment is due, but it doesn’t negotiate your bills for you. When you compare pricing, Rocket Money is free but the Premium subscription is between $7 and $14/month. Free is hard to beat. But, if you’re going to pay for Rocket Money’s Premium service, you’ll get more useful features at a similar price with Monarch Money.
Monarch Money vs. YNAB
If you want to budget every cent you make, YNAB is great for that. It is a comprehensive budgeting tool based on knowing where every dollar goes. Every. Single. Dollar. If that sounds exhausting, it can be. Some of the complaints about YNAB say that it’s a lot of work and can be overkill if you don’t enjoy that sort of thing. I tried it and found it overwhelming, but it does work for a lot of people (life-changing is often mentioned).
Monarch Money is better at seeing all of your accounts in one place. The budgeting is more of a tracker, but it is less work. Monarch also offers significantly more features.
Monarch Money Pros and Cons
FAQs
Is Monarch Money better than Empower?
Define better. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. It depends on what you want and how you use the features. Empower is stronger at tracking investments and retirement planning, but the budgeting feature is simpler and less robust than Monarch Money. There is a free version of Empower, but to access all of the wealth management advice and investment services, there’s a fee.
Can you use Monarch Money for free?
You can try Monarch Money for free, for 7 days. After that, there is no free version of Monarch Money. But, all features are included in the price, there are no ads, and Monarch Money doesn’t sell your data to make money.
Does Monarch Money connect to all banks?
Monarch Money connects to most banks–over 13,000 of them. However, there are a few banks that it doesn’t support. You can still use it, but you’ll need to enter your transactions manually.
Is Monarch Money secure?
Monarch Money uses bank-level encryption and security and uses read-only data access to protect customer accounts. In other words, Monarch can’t enter or delete anything in your accounts. You can also enable multi-factor authentication when you log in, if you want that reassurance.
Does Monarch offer investment advice?
Not really. Monarch Money can certainly track your investments and offer some insights as to how your accounts are doing compared to the rest of the market. As far as nudging you to buy certain stocks or analyzing P/E ratios, no, it doesn’t do that.
Does Monarch offer a free trial?
Yes. You can use Monarch for free for seven days.
Can I see just my accounts when I budget with a partner?
Yes. Monarch enables you to run reports based on filters. You can filter by account, category, merchant, tags, goals, or amount. Once you’ve created a filtered report, you can save it for future use.
Final Thoughts
I tried Monarch Money for a 7-day trial. I like the interface, but my financial profile is pretty straightforward, and I didn’t need all the features of Monarch Money. My husband and I have separate accounts as well as shared accounts, so if he was willing to enter all of his accounts so we could collaborate, I would keep it.
I think Monarch Money is absolutely worth the money for two types of customers: one, anyone who wants to share access with their partners accounts for financial transparency, and two, anyone who has multiple bank accounts, credit cards, investments, etc and wants to see it all on one dashboard.
And if you do try Monarch Money, remember to use Promo Code ROB50 for 50% off the first year subscription of Monarch Money’s Core Plan.
