# YNAB alternative

> YNAB costs $14.99/month or $109/year billed in dollars, with direct import limited to selected banks. Whisper Money bills in euros, connects banks over PSD2 and imports files. Comparison and migration guide.

YNAB (You Need A Budget) is probably the budgeting method with the most devoted following in the world, and deservedly so: assigning every euro to a category before you spend it works. The problem in Europe is not the method, it is the logistics. The price is in dollars and automatic import only covers some European banks.

## Head to head

| Dimension | YNAB | Whisper Money |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Price | $14.99/month or $109/year. Its pricing page warns that the rate is "priced in US dollars" and publishes no euro price (checked 18 August 2026). | A free plan and a paid plan billed in euros, with the rate published on the pricing page. |
| Language | App, marketing site and help centre in English only. | Interface in English, Spanish and French. |
| Bank connection | "Direct import currently supports select US, Canadian, UK, and EU Banks." For everything else, file-based import. | PSD2 connections with Spanish and European banks, plus file import when a bank does not connect. |
| Budgeting method | Envelopes: the whole available balance gets assigned before you spend it. | Category budgets — weekly, biweekly, monthly or yearly — with optional rollover. You can budget only what you care about. |

## The catch: the method travels, the typing does not have to

YNAB's subscription is $109 a year billed in dollars, so what you actually pay depends on the day's exchange rate and on what your bank charges for a foreign currency transaction. That is the visible part.

The less visible part is the daily work. Its own page says it: direct import covers "select US, Canadian, UK, and EU Banks". If your bank is not in that group, the routine becomes downloading the statement and uploading it by hand every week, so the tool you bought to save time charges you twice — in dollars and in Sundays.

The good news is that what you learned in YNAB does not disappear when you switch apps. Setting category limits, reviewing the month and deciding before you spend are habits, not features of one particular product. Whisper Money holds them up with category budgets and rollover, billed in euros, with the bank syncing itself.

## What changes when you move from YNAB to Whisper Money

- PSD2 connections with Spanish and European banks, with no file to upload every week.
- Billed in euros, so no currency conversion fee on your card.
- Interface in English, Spanish and French.
- Category budgets on a weekly, biweekly, monthly or yearly period.
- Roll the leftover into the next period whenever you want, without being forced to account for every euro.
- A budget that catches everything the others do not, so no spending slips through unclassified.
- Automation rules to categorise by merchant, amount or text, without redoing the work every month.
- Optional AI categorisation that learns from your corrections, if you consent to it.
- Investments and crypto inside the same net worth: Indexa Capital, Interactive Brokers, Wise, Binance, Bitpanda and Coinbase.
- CSV, XLS and XLSX import with column mapping for the accounts that do not connect.

## How to migrate from YNAB to Whisper Money, step by step

YNAB exports your data, so the move is direct. In its web app, click the plan name in the left sidebar and choose "Export Plan": you get two files, one with the plan and its categories and one with the transaction history. The second is the one we want. You can also select one account's transactions and export just those.

1. **Create your account and prepare the destination accounts** — Connect the banks that sync over PSD2 and create the ones that do not by hand. The destination account has to exist before you import, because the importer always asks where the transactions go.

2. **Export from YNAB** — In the YNAB web app, plan name in the left sidebar, then "Export Plan". You get the transaction history as CSV, or as TSV if your currency uses the comma as its decimal separator. If it comes out as TSV, save it as CSV from your spreadsheet before uploading.

3. **Merge Outflow and Inflow into one column** — YNAB splits the amount across two columns, Outflow and Inflow. Our importer expects one: in your spreadsheet, build a single amount column with expenses negative and income positive. It is the only manual edit in the whole move.

4. **Upload the file and map the columns** — Under Transactions, open the importer, pick the account and drag the file in. YNAB's file carries Date, Payee, Memo and Category: map Date to the date, Payee to the description — you can add Memo as a second column and they get joined — and your new column to the amount. You pick the date format from DD-MM-YYYY, YYYY-MM-DD, MM-DD-YYYY and YYYYMMDD, and you see the first three rows already parsed before carrying on.

5. **Turn your categories into rules and import** — The preview gives you the total, the selected rows and the duplicates, which come unticked. On import your automation rules run, so writing four or five rules for your regular merchants puts much of the history back in place in one pass; whatever is left uncategorised the AI handles if you turn it on.

## What people already using it say

> Categorizing transactions used to eat my whole Sunday. Now the AI does it and gets most of them right, and the few it misses it remembers after I fix them once. I barely touch it anymore.
>
> — Priya Nair

> My accounts sync on their own and everything lands already sorted, so checking my budget takes two minutes instead of an hour. I didn't think I'd keep up with it, but I have.
>
> — Sofía Romero

## Join the people who moved from YNAB

The method you learned in YNAB still holds. What changes is that here you apply it in euros, with the bank coming in on its own. The free plan asks for no card.