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Moneydance 2011

Back in February of 2010 I replaced Quicken for Windows with Moneydance on the Mac.  Since then I’ve written briefly about SEE Finance and more recently about iBank 4.

As a Moneydance user it seemed only fitting to also talk about the latest Moneydance release, Moneydance 2011.  As I write this, version 2011 is currently in release candidate state.  Since release candidates are feature-frozen I don’t feel I’m jumping the gun by writing now.  Moneydance 2011 has been officially released and can be downloaded from here.

I’m going to assume that readers are already familiar with Moneydance 2010.  If not, you might want read the original article I wrote, or visit the developer’s website.  Having said that, I thought I’d mention some of what I consider to be the more salient improvements Moneydance 2011 brings to the table.

First off, the general look and feel of the software is the same; the interface has undergone only cosmetic changes.  The application is still written in Java and is still available for all three major OS platforms.  Moneydance still isn’t the prettiest software, but its strengths have been and continue to be functional in nature.

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iBank 4

Recently I was contacted by IGG Software about a post I wrote back in early 2010 detailing my search to replace Quicken with a Mac equivalent.  Doug Bowman (formerly of Google and currently at Twitter) commented about my article on his Twitter feed.  I guess that generated a little buzz for a couple days.  In my original article I evaluated GnuCash, Moneywell, Moneydance, and iBank, eventually settling on Moneydance.  In that original comparison I used iBank 3, but the performance after importing my ten years of existing Quicken data was so poor that I couldn’t actually test the features.

When IGG contacted me, they informed me that they’d released version 4 of the software since then and that the performance had been improved drastically.  They asked if I’d take a look at their latest version.  I love personal finance software and I was interested in seeing the improvements, so I happily agreed.

The goal in my original article was to find a Mac-native replacement for Quicken.  As I mentioned I did that with Moneydance over a year ago.  Since that problem has already been solved I decided that this article should focus on two things:

  1. Answer the question of whether or not iBank is now capable of handling large amounts of data
  2. Finally review iBank to see if the important features are there

 

The short answer to question #1 is a resounding yes.

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Moneydance 2010

In the spring of 2010 I’d been a Quicken user for a little more than ten years (since 1999 to be exact).  In the summer of 2008 I made the switch from Windows to a Mac but I had to hang onto Windows XP for a couple applications for which I just couldn’t find Mac equivalents.  One of these two applications was Beyond Compare for which I finally found a suitable replacement in DeltaWalker.  The other was Quicken.  Quicken for Mac does exist but every review I’ve ever read about it is completely unfavorable.  I’ve never seen a product more universally panned.  It hasn’t been updated since version 2007 and the first proposed update since (Quicken Financial Life) had a fraction of the features of its Windows counterpart.  That initiative was scrapped by Intuit (generally read sentiments being that it was pretty terrible) and has since been tasked to a company Intuit recently purchased called Mint.com.  That product at the time of this writing is called Quicken Essentials for Mac (the title really a euphemism meaning fewer features for the same price).  It’s still pretty lame in comparison to its Windows counterpart, so much that I’m not willing to spend $60 on it only to likely have to request a refund (since I can’t seem to get a trial version).

So after having the Mac for about a year and a half I went on the search once again for a suitable Quicken replacement for the Mac.  There were more players than I had originally thought but most of them did not have a comparable feature set to Quicken.  After doing some research I ended up settling on four possible replacements; iBank, GnuCash, Moneywell, and Moneydance.  What I found is that I experienced such poor performance on many of the replacement solutions I was unable to test most of these “feature by feature”.  All of the other applications had problems of varying degree importing my Quicken data as well.  Instead this is more of a review of Moneydance than anything else.  For more extensive reviews on multiple personal finance products click here.

(I’ve added an addendum review to include a short review on a Mac personal finance application called SEE Fiance after it was recommended in a comment below by Robert Tell.  I’ve also added a follow up review on iBank 4.)

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Guess what? I also write horror and thriller novels. Click here to learn more...