Costflow vs Firefly III
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted budgeting & finance options
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
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Compare Costflow with
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Compare Firefly III with
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Feature Costflow Firefly III Category Budgeting & Finance Budgeting & Finance License MIT AGPL-3.0 Language JavaScript PHP Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 128 MB 512 MB Deployment source, binary docker, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 33 ★ 24,254 First released 2019 2016 Replaces Expensify, Mint Mint, YNAB
Why pick each one
Choose Costflow if… Released under the MIT license Written in JavaScript Tiny footprint — runs in 128 MB RAM Costflow details
Frequently asked questions Is Costflow or Firefly III better? Neither is universally better. Firefly III has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Costflow and Firefly III free and open-source? Yes. Costflow is licensed under MIT and Firefly III under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Costflow and Firefly III with Docker? Costflow: check the project docs for container support. Firefly III: yes.