Balance brings all your accounts together, sorts every transaction, and shows what you can still spend freely this month.
Live bank connections through Enable Banking, a licensed account-information provider (AISP) under PSD2, with a key you register there yourself — free, and the same key whether you self-host or use Balance Cloud. A free key runs in restricted mode: you link your own accounts to it in Enable Banking’s control panel, and the sync covers exactly those accounts. You approve access in your own bank’s app, and Balance never sees or stores your login. CAMT.053, MT940, CSV and PDF import cover everything else, fully deduplicated.
Move €500 from your current account to savings and most tools count it twice — once as an expense, once as income. Balance matches the two sides on amount, IBAN and date, links them as one internal transfer, and keeps the pair out of every total. What you see as spending is what actually left your household, not what shifted inside it.
Give every euro a place at the start of the month, and the board tells you what is left to assign — not what is left in the account. Eight kinds of target and eight ways to fill them, with one press that covers overspending, funds every target and counts what is still due. Balances roll over, a correction in a past month works through every month after it, and every move an envelope has ever seen stays readable in the envelope itself.
Category momentum, monthly pacing and the month’s cashflow in one view. Know your trajectory with a glance, not a spreadsheet.
End-of-month projections from a robust rolling baseline. Budget-overrun warnings and low-balance alerts — only when it matters.
Balance auto-detects subscriptions and fixed costs, tracks billing cycles and contract end dates, and warns you before a notice deadline slips by.
One bar per day across the whole period, with the busiest day marked. Above the strip: what an average day costs you, and what the period came to. Below it: which weekday is expensive week after week — not when you happened to spend, but the day that always does.
Month-by-month breakdowns, category summaries and income against expenses — as a typeset PDF or a working XLSX. Drag the blocks you want into a layout of your own, then have it arrive in your inbox on the first of every month.
Balance applies a multi-stage ML pipeline to classify every transaction. When confidence is low, uncertain items surface in a dedicated review queue — so you stay in control without drowning in noise.
Bank accounts, ETFs, stocks, pensions, crypto and property in one net-worth line. Crypto wallets are read straight from the chain and priced live; every other holding is a valuation series you keep — type what it is worth when you know, and Balance carries that figure forward. Anything not in euros is converted at the ECB’s daily rate before a single total is added up.
Self-hosted Balance ships with the full feature set out of the box — every feature, no add-ons, no paywalls.
Every feature is in both — the only difference is who runs the server.
Debian/Ubuntu — dependencies installed automatically
wget -qO- https://meetbalance.app/install.sh | bashSelf-hosting: the machine, the database and the key are yours. No third party can reach it, because there is no third party.
Balance Cloud: we run it for you, and then it is only fair to say what that means — your data sits on our server, and technically we can reach it.
What limits that: your secrets and your backup download are encrypted on disk, the bank connection is read-only, and nothing is sold, mined or shared. If you want a server nobody else can reach, self-hosting is the honest choice — and it stays free.
An honest overview. Every tool has its place — this helps you choose.
Filled dots are the stronger side · a grey chip means partly, an outline means no. Balance and YNAB were compared function by function in September 2026; the other four were read against their own documentation on 11 September 2026, which corrected three of their figures and two of the lines under them. YNAB is a trademark of You Need A Budget LLC; Balance is not affiliated.
Self-hosted or in the Cloud. Private by design. Just your money, clearly explained.