sardonick

A short while back, my wife appropriated my iBook. She couldn’t resist its OSX-y goodness. Until now, I’d been tracking my finances in Quicken on the thing, and, as I have very little love for Quicken on the Mac, this gave me a good excuse to finally migrate away.

My primary machine is a gentoo box, so that shaped my options somewhat.

First, tried a few versions of Quicken (2003, 2005) under Wine. Neither worked. Neither even installed. Googling showed mixed results of sucesses and failures. Perhaps if I invested in Crossover or Cedega I’d have better luck–but for now, I’m a poor PhD student, so I’d rather go the Free as in Beer route. Scratch the easy solution.

There seems to be two main free personal finance apps for Linux: KMyMoney (v 0.8.4) and GnuCash (v 1.8.11).

KMyMoney

• First step was to import my years of Quicken data. Its QIF import was FINICKY—it took me quite a while manually regexp-tweaking the quicken data file before I could get the data to import correctly (this step alone told me it’s not ready for the everyday user).
• The UI is pretty friendly (lots of icons, non-imposing). Will need to try it out more before I can make a judgement on big-picture usability
• Handles OFX imports (through AQBanking) even better than Quicken does.
• It’s missing graph-based reports. The text-based reports are nice, but they don’t compare
• The real game-ender, though, was its epilepsy-inducing flashing red text (the first google hit for “kmymoney flashing red” was this same question, greeted by a RTFM, and the original poster deciding to try GnuCash. Sigh. Maybe that’s what I’ll try next

GnuCash

• I import my QIF data without problem (and without data tweaking, gnucash + 1).
• The UI looks to be made circa late 1980s. It is ugly and imposing. The feelings I get are more “Generic industrial-strength cleaning product” than “Friendly personal finance management”.

I’ll update this entry more as I hack around with both over the weekend. I’m not too impressed with Free Software solutions for this. Maybe I’ll try MoneyDance, I’ve heard good things about it.

update 20060709:

• Entries in kmymoney flash red because they are missing categories. While I agree with the spirit of this “feature” (I do eventually want to categorize everything), it doesn’t make the implementation any less epilepsy-inducing. I long for the day when I can’t say “Good idea, ugly UI. What else can you expect from Free Software”.
• I ended up using KMyMoney because it seems to be more actively developed than GnuCash. For Free Software, I consider forward momentum to be just as important as current feature set, and it appears KMyMoney has it won here (GnuCash is still in GTK1? Maybe that bit about “late 80’s UI” for GnuCash wasn’t as large of an exaggeration as I’d thought! Phew!).
• a few more reviews

update 20060710:

• How timely, GnuCash has just released 2.0 as of last night. And appears to be using a modern version of GTK also. So much for that last comment about “forward momentum”. I’ll give the new version a try.
• Half an hour later: Errr, this isn’t that much better. Oh well…

update 20070131:

• I’ve been using KMyMoney for half a year now, and for the most part it’s been good to me. OFX support is decent, and it hasn’t disappeared any of my data. Functionally, the only things it’s really lacking is decent graph visualization and budgeting. However, with this new year, I’ve found that the real deal-breaker for me is no cross-platform support. KMyMoney is all right if it’s only me hacking on the finances, but if I want to get my wife involved then we’ll need something that works in mac and/or windows
• Enter Moneydance. It’s written in java with crossplatformness in mind, which means it works equally well in Mac/Linux/Windows/Solaris/whatever.
• It has decent graphing visualization and budgets that KMyMoney lacks. Its UI is better than either KMyMoney or GnuCash… but the best part is it has API hooks into python (!!!) —this means (hopefully) I can automate lots of the drollery of, say, categorizing stuff.
• The downside to Moneydance is that it’s neither free nor Free, but: the python API allows me to get my data out of I need it (mitigating the data lock-in and the fact that it’s not libre Free)… and as far as gratis free, $30 for a license that allows you free upgrades for multiple years… that’s not that bad.