Monarch Money is $14.99 a month and targets couples wanting full net-worth tracking. Cash Compass is the simpler iPhone-first option for daily cash-flow.
Apple-native · No bank logins · iCloud sync
Monarch Money costs $14.99 a month or $99.99 a year, often discounted to $69.99 for the first year. Cash Compass Premium is $29.99 a year. Renew Monarch for two years at full price and you've paid almost seven times the Cash Compass annual rate. The Cash Compass free tier covers manual entry and basic charts permanently.
Monarch markets its shared-account feature as a couples-and-family app. Cash Compass Premium includes Apple Family Sharing for up to 5 people in the standard $29.99 a year price. That's everyone in your household using premium features under one subscription. Monarch's price is per household, but you're still paying $99.99 a year versus $29.99.
Monarch leans on bank aggregation through Plaid and MX to populate transactions and net worth. Cash Compass doesn't connect to banks. You log entries by voice, receipt scan, or tap, and the data sits in your iCloud. The Monarch path is more automated and gives you net-worth tracking; the Cash Compass path is more private and never breaks when an aggregator deauthorizes your bank.
Voice, photo of a receipt, or 3-tap manual entry — every method takes under 5 seconds.
Cash Compass picks the category automatically. Override once and it learns your pattern.
Weekly chart shows where money went. Adjust caps before the month is over, not after.
Mostly, yes. Monarch was one of the most-recommended Mint alternatives during the 2024 shutdown because it offered similar automatic bank-sync, category tracking, and a household-style shared view. The catch is Monarch charges $14.99 a month or $99.99 a year, where Mint was free. That's a real value if you specifically want the net-worth dashboard and the household sharing. If you mostly used Mint for daily glance-at-spending and category totals, a free app like Cash Compass covers that core habit without the subscription, just with manual logging instead of bank-sync.
Yes, with manual setup. Monarch supports CSV export of your transactions from the web app. Cash Compass doesn't auto-import Monarch files yet, but you can use the export to identify the categories you actually used (usually 8-12 that matter) and rebuild them in Cash Compass in a few minutes. Most users find they don't need historical Monarch transactions imported into Cash Compass; the value is in the going-forward tracking. Keep the Monarch CSV archived for tax records and start fresh from the current month in Cash Compass. The clean slate often surfaces categories you were ignoring inside Monarch's auto-categorized firehose.
Cash Compass has a smaller data surface. Monarch has a solid privacy policy and uses Plaid and MX for bank-sync, which is industry-standard. But any bank-aggregator architecture means your credentials and transaction history flow through external servers in addition to Monarch's own. Cash Compass never asks for a bank login. Your entries live in your private iCloud container, encrypted by Apple, not on our servers. We have no analytics on individual user spending, no third-party trackers, no ad network. The trade-off is the same as elsewhere on this page: you log entries instead of auto-syncing. That trade is worth it for users who specifically chose iOS for privacy reasons.
No. Monarch's headline feature is the household net-worth dashboard that pulls together checking, credit cards, brokerage, retirement, and real-estate estimates into one view. Cash Compass is a spending and budget app and focuses on the cash-flow side: what came in, what went out, by category. If you want one screen showing brokerage values plus daily spending, Monarch is the right tool. Many Cash Compass users keep investments in their brokerage app and home equity in a separate tracker, and use Cash Compass for the part that changes daily. The split keeps each tool focused and means a brokerage outage doesn't blank out your budget.
Built native for iPhone, iPad, and Mac with iCloud sync. Works offline.
No bank logins, no Plaid, no data sales. All data lives in your iCloud.
Manual entry, charts, category tracking — all free, forever. Premium is optional.
Install Cash Compass, set 5 category caps, and log this week's spending with voice or receipt scan. Free tier never expires.
Download Cash Compass on the App Store