SHSelfHostIndex

Budgeting & Finance

Track money privately with self-hosted budgeting, accounting, and personal-finance software.

136 self-hosted apps · 206 comparisons

All budgeting & finance apps

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 437 words

"Self-hosted finance" is three different product categories wearing one label, and picking from the wrong pile is the most common mistake here. Budgeting apps (Actual Budget) tell you where next month's money should go. Ledger-and-reporting apps (Firefly III) tell you where last month's money went. Portfolio trackers (Ghostfolio, Wealthfolio) watch your investments. And business accounting (Akaunting, Invoice Ninja) is its own world of invoices and double-entry books. No single app in this category does all four well.

How to choose a money app

Start with the job. If you want a plan for every dollar before you spend it, you want envelope budgeting — Actual Budget (28,374 stars) is the category's best implementation of the YNAB method, local-first with end-to-end encrypted sync, and runs in 256 MB. If you want rules, reports, and a searchable history of every transaction across accounts, Firefly III (24,415 stars) is the accountant's choice, with rule-based auto-categorization and a strong REST API. If the question is "how are my investments doing," Ghostfolio (9,185 stars) tracks stocks, ETFs, and crypto with allocation and performance charts. The second axis is tolerance for data entry, which brings us to the uncomfortable part.

Bank sync is the weak spot everywhere

Mint refugees expect transactions to appear automatically. In self-hosted finance they mostly don't. US bank aggregation depends on paid third-party services, and every app here treats sync as an add-on: Actual does it through community plugins, Firefly III through its separate data importer, and Ghostfolio expects manual entries or CSV imports — there is no automatic broker sync at all. European users fare better thanks to open banking APIs. Budget one evening a month for imports, or pick Actual, whose fast manual entry makes the chore genuinely tolerable.

Where to start

Actual Budget for anyone whose goal is spending less than they earn — it's the easiest deploy in the category and the YNAB switching guide covers the migration. Firefly III for the person with six accounts and a need to know exactly where it all goes; expect a steeper learning curve and a payoff in reporting depth. Ghostfolio for investors who want portfolio analytics without handing holdings data to a fintech.

First-timers should install Actual Budget. It answers the question most people are actually asking, the local-first design means the server going down costs you nothing, and if you later want deep reporting you can run Firefly III alongside it rather than instead of it.

Curated picks

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Budgeting & Finance comparisons

206 head-to-head comparisons in this category.

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