Monarch Review [2024]: Organize and Manage Your Finances in One Place

What is Monarch?

If you’ve ever wished you could find an app that tracks your budget, credit cards, investments, and savings all in one place, you may have found it in Monarch.

Monarch's key feature is its ability to consolidate all your financial data in one place, eliminating the need to juggle multiple apps. It also allows you to collaborate with a partner or financial advisor at no extra cost. I know how hard it can be to set aside time to talk to your partner, and this app makes it easier to stay on top of your finances despite busy schedules.

I like that Monarch gives you an overview of your net worth while also breaking down each aspect of your finances, including your budget, investments, goals, and net worth. The dashboard and reports are 100% customizable, so you can visualize your financial situation rather than just look at numbers.

Monarch claims to be the best alternative to popular apps like Mint (no longer in business) and YNAB (You Need a Budget), thanks to their modern interfaces and tools and a high-level overview of all finances, not just your budget.

How does Monarch work?

The Monarch app includes many tracking options including:

• Budgeting
• Investing
• Net worth
• Goals
• Transactions

With the ability to customize your dashboard, reports, and budgeting options, you can truly make Monarch your one-stop app for all your financial information. I like the idea of having everything in one place, as it can get confusing when you have multiple apps for bank and investment accounts.

To use Monarch, you must connect as many financial accounts as possible to the app. Monarch uses services like Plaid, MX, and Finicity to securely connect to your accounts. It’s best to finish connecting all accounts before customizing categories. When connecting accounts, consider:

• Bank accounts (checking and savings)
• Credit card accounts
• Investment accounts
• Cryptocurrency
• Loans
• Other assets, such as property or vehicles

You can fully customize your dashboard so the most important accounts are front and center when you log onto your app.

I like that Monarch offers a simple view of your accounts and doesn’t clutter the space with ads or a lot of visual distraction. At first glance you can see the information that’s most important to you both as numbers and visual graphs (if that’s what you prefer).

Budgeting features

Once you connect Monarch with your financial accounts, it will sync your transactions and allocate them to their respective categories. They use basic categories, such as rent/mortgage, credit card, or groceries, which is most common when budgeting. If you don't want to budget by category, you can also use their Flex Budgeting feature, which allows you to separate your expenses into fixed, non-monthly, and flexible buckets for a more customized approach.

Customized categories

However, I like that they offer the option to customize your own categories, as everyone has their own preferences regarding tracking their spending. In addition, if the app cannot sync one of your accounts, you could manually add expenses and transactions to get a full picture of your net worth and budget.

Forecast your spending

I especially like that you can forecast your spending for the future to help create a robust budget that works. I also like that it shows the amount you’ve budgeted for a category but then displays the actual amount spent. In the ‘Remaining’ category, you can see if you went over or under your budget.

Investment tracking features

The investment section helps you view your entire portfolio, including 401(k) plans and taxable brokerage accounts in one place. You can compare your portfolio to your chosen benchmarks and view individual values to see where your portfolio performs the best.

On the investment dashboard, you can view:

• A chart of your entire portfolio from all brokerage accounts
• Your asset allocation to see where you keep your money
• The top movers in your portfolio
• Historical performance, which may help with future investment decisions

Monarch net worth features

Finding the time to calculate your net worth may feel impossible, but it can help you make important decisions regarding investments or future purchases. Monarch automatically tracks your net worth across all assets and liabilities, including:

• Bank accounts
• Investment accounts
• Real estate
• Credit cards
• Loans
• Vehicles

Like with the budgeting portion of the app, you can sync all accounts for automatic updates, or you can manually add other assets, such as art or collectibles. Monarch also offers a historical feature that allows you to compare your net worth today to the past. I think this is important so you can see your progress or identify what must change.

If you have real estate investments, Monarch also syncs with Zillow for real-time updates on your real estate values.

Other notable features

In addition to budgeting, investments, and net worth tracking, Monarch offers the following features:

• Recurring bills and subscriptions: Get alerts for upcoming bills and gain more awareness of what you spend your money on monthly. Their Bill Sync feature gives you a bird's-eye view of your recurring expenses (think student loan payments), plus credit card balances (along with minimum payment due). 
• Reports: Create custom charts, track your savings rate, and see where you spend the most money to make important financial decisions.
• Goals: Set up and name individual goals, while tracking your progress on each in an easy-to-use format.
• Transactions: See all your transactions in one place, while saving notes or receipt images of each transaction for future reference. Their Swipe to Review feature lets you swipe left or right so you can quickly get a picture of your purchases and other transactions. 

What Monarch lacks

While Monarch is a great all-in-one app to manage your finances, there are a couple of areas if falls short:

• Credit monitoring: Your credit scores are just as important to your financial life as the amount of savings you have, but Monarch doesn’t offer credit monitoring services.
• Limited crypto tracking: Monarch only syncs with the Coinbase exchange in real time, 24/7. You may need to enter other crypto investments manually.

Who should use Monarch?

While Monarch is great for individuals to effectively manage their finances, it is especially useful for couples. Monarch has built-in collaboration that allows couples to stay on the same page financially. Each person gets their own login, but you see the same real-time information, and each partner can add their own accounts if you have separate bank accounts.

It doesn’t cost anything to share with a partner (or even a financial advisor), and you don’t have to share passwords, which increases the app’s security. Whether you want to track spending, savings, or investment goals, you and your partner will have the same information at your fingertips, making financial planning and conversations about money much easier.

Monarch is also great for couples with different preferences regarding how they see data. For example, if you prefer a list of spending and account balances, but your partner prefers robust graphs, you can each have the data the way you prefer.

Monarch pricing

As I mentioned earlier, Monarch isn’t free, but it’s also less than the cost of two cups of your fancy favorite coffees monthly.

If you sign up for the annual subscription (pay once a year), it’s $99.99 ($8.33/month). However, if you’re not 100% sure it’s for you and you’d rather have a month-to-month subscription, it’s $14.99/month. They do offer a 7-day free trial, so you can see if it’s right for you before choosing a plan.

FAQ

Other budgeting apps to consider

Monarch comes with many features. However, If you tried its 7-day free trial and decided it doesn’t work for you, you could consider some other apps that might fit your needs better. These apps include:

Simplifi

Simplifi is web-based personal finance software by Quicken designed to help people visualize and track expenses, create goals, and manage transactions. Like Monarch, Simplifi automates your finances, provides real-time alerts, helps with savings goals, and provides helpful insights. They offer similar visuals for individual goals to help you see where you stand and how far you have to go.

Simplifi prices start at $2.99 per month, billed annually.

Standout feature: What I like the most about Simplifi is its personalized spending plan. It takes into consideration your income, expenses, and savings goals and makes it easy to see how your choices affect your financial goals, either good or bad.

Rocket Money

The Rocket Money app helps you track and potentially reduce your recurring monthly bills. They constantly search for available discounts and negotiate your current bills to get lower rates. Rocket Money negotiates your bills for free, but premium services may cost between $3 and $12 a month.

In the paid version of Rocket Money, you also get an easy-to-digest spending breakdown, and the option to automatically send money to your savings account based on current and upcoming bills and what the algorithm determines you can afford. Like Monarch, Rocket Money offers a free 7-day trial.

Standout feature: I like that Rocket Money helps you see where you spend money that you may not have realized. We’re all guilty of splurging on subscriptions and then forgetting about them, but Rocket Money doesn’t let you forget.

Read our Rocket Money review.