Choose Simplifi if you want a light, cloud-hosted spending tracker from a company that has been doing this for decades, and the monthly bill does not bother you. Choose PennyBolt if the thing that bothered you about Quicken was the subscription and the cloud — because Simplifi is both, and PennyBolt is neither.
Simplifi is Quicken’s attempt at a modern, simplified finance app. It’s cloud-only and subscription-based — a lighter Quicken with the same business model.
| Simplifi | PennyBolt | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $5.99/mo ($47.88/yr) | $79 one-time |
| Your data | Cloud-only | Local on your computer |
| Privacy | Data on Quicken servers | Data stays on your machine |
| Data portability | Limited export options | One file, copy anywhere |
| If you stop paying | Lose access | Keep everything |
| Getting data in | Requires bank connection | Import files from your bank |
| PDF import | No | Yes |
| Importing history | Only what the bank connection returns | Any order — add older years whenever you want |
| Reporting | Basic spending | Sankey flows, bar charts, trend analysis |
| Reconciliation | No | Yes |
| Split transactions | Limited | Yes |
Simplifi is essentially Quicken’s cloud-only future. If you left Quicken because of the subscription model and cloud dependency, Simplifi doesn’t solve the problem — it doubles down on it.
Where Simplifi is the better choice
Simplifi is the cheapest monthly bill on this page, and cheap-per-month is a genuinely reasonable thing to want if you are not sure you will still be tracking your money in a year — nobody should pay $79 up front to find that out. It also connects to your bank and keeps itself current, which PennyBolt does not do: PennyBolt reads the files you download. And Simplifi is deliberately light. If a full double-entry ledger with reconciliation is more machinery than you want pointed at your spending, that is a preference, not a mistake, and Simplifi is built for it.
Coming across from Simplifi
Simplifi’s export options are limited, so the reliable path in is your bank rather than Simplifi. Download OFX or QFX files from each institution, or drop in PDF statements where that is all you can get, and PennyBolt imports them, checks the result against the bank’s own stated balance, and tells you if anything is missing rather than letting you find out months later.
Because history can arrive in any order, you are not stuck with however far back the bank connection happened to reach. Start here: Which format should I use?, then bank downloads (OFX / QFX).
Related comparisons
- PennyBolt vs Quicken — the desktop product Simplifi is the cloud successor to
- PennyBolt vs Monarch Money — the other polished cloud subscription in this bracket
- All alternatives — the full comparison hub
Next step: see exactly what $79 buys you, or leave your email below for the download link — 60 days with your own accounts in it before you pay anything.