Quicken Classic vs. Simplifi: Which Finance App Should You Use? (2024)

Quicken Classic is one of the earliest PC-based personal finance applications. It’s a power user’s dream, extraordinarily feature-rich and flexible. A few years ago, Quicken’s parent company released a new app called Simplifi, an online personal finance app targeting a different and less demanding demographic. Both are exceptional and affordable, and both provide comprehensive views of your personal finances by:

• Showing you how you’re making money and spending it

• Providing tools for budgeting and planning

• Tracking your investments and bills

• Charting your finances

Though they have similar feature sets, they vary in depth, flexibility, and user experience. Here’s what sets them apart from each other.

Quicken Classic vs. Simplifi: Price

Quicken Classic has two tiers of service for personal use: Deluxe ($71.88 per year) and Premier ($95.88 per year). They do similar things, as discussed below, but Premier is slightly more advanced. You can also pay more for a version that lets you manage a small business, called Quicken Classic Business & Personal ($131.88 per year).

Simplifi costs $47.88 per year.

Winner: Simplifi

Quicken Classic vs. Simplifi: Access

Simplifi is totally web-based, so you can access your info anywhere. Quicken Classic is desktop software, though its Mobile & Web service synchronizes some of your account data with a secure website, so you can see and interact with subsets of your financial data from a mobile device.

Winner: Simplifi

Quicken vs. Simplifi: Transaction Import and Management

Both Quicken Classic and Simplifi let you connect to your online financial accounts (like your checking account, credit cards, and investment accounts) and import transactions that have cleared.

(Credit: Quicken/PCMag)

They also give you ways to manage your transactions, including the ability to categorize them so you can easily see, for example, all expenses categorized as entertainment or food. Both apps automatically guess the categories of each transaction, and you can change them if they're wrong. You can also create and add tags to transactions, split them, mark them as recurring (Simplifi only), and add notes and attachments. If you had a transaction that wasn't included in your accounts, like a cash payment to a babysitter, you can add it manually. Both Quicken Classic and Simplifi give you ways to import and export financial data.

(Credit: Simplifi by Quicken/PCMag)

Each app delivers unique features. For example, you can assign transactions to the appropriate tax lines or simply mark them as tax-related in Quicken Classic and automatically track refunds in Simplifi.

Winner: Tie

Quicken vs. Simplifi: Budgeting

Quicken takes a standard approach here, tracking budget amounts and actuals (pulled from your transactions) by category in a color-coded graph or table. You can create your own categories or let Quicken do it based on your historical income and expenses.

(Credit: Quicken/PCMag)

Simplifi’s version of a budget, called the Spending Plan, is exceptional. Using your imported, categorized transactions and other input from you, it divides your month’s money into:

• Income after bills and savings

• Planned spending (expenses that fluctuate, like groceries)

• Other spending

• Available funds

You can drill down on everything in the Spending Plan to see underlying details and make adjustments to your plan.

(Credit: Simplifi by Quicken/PCMag)

Winner: Simplifi

Quicken vs. Simplifi: Paying Bills

Simplifi has great bill management tools. You can convert existing transactions into recurring bills or subscriptions, or add them manually. You can also connect to biller sites so you know when bills are due and link them to cleared transactions. Reminders and a calendar keep you from missing due dates.

Quicken Classic has similar bill management tools but goes further. For example, its Bill Manager lets you easily pay bills online to more than 11,000 billers nationwide. If your biller is not included, Quicken can send a check through the US Postal Service.

Winner: Quicken Classic

Quicken vs. Simplifi: Investment Tracking

If you only want to track your investment portfolio using 15-minute delayed quotes, Simplifi should serve you well. You can create a portfolio manually or connect to an online brokerage and view news and basic market stats for your holdings. You can also import historical balances and transactions in CSV format and from other online sources.

Quicken Classic stands out here. It's a better choice if you’re a serious investor who wants real-time quotes and more sophisticated analysis to track your holdings and expand them to improve their returns. The Morningstar X-Ray tool keeps your diversification goals on target, while other portfolio management tools help you explore new investing possibilities.

Winner: Quicken Classic

Quicken vs. Simplifi: Mobile Apps

Quicken Classic and Simplifi have excellent iOS and Android apps. We especially consider the information you might want when you’re away from your computer: the Dashboard, budget, transactions, and investments. Simplifi has a slight edge here, providing more detail and data in those areas.

Winner: Simplifi

Quicken vs. Simplifi: User Experience

Some of Quicken’s pages look spacious, colorful, and easy to read. Older ones feel cramped, with small fonts that may make you miss some features. Quicken Mobile & Web, though, is clean and attractive.

Simplifi has a more cohesive, understandable, and aesthetically pleasing experience.

Winner: Simplifi

Quicken vs. Simplifi: Preparing for Taxes

Quicken provides an exceptional collection of tax planning tools that make it easier for you to file your taxes using any tax software, or an accountant, for that matter. As mentioned, you can earmark transactions as being tax-related and assign them to specific tax lines, then run individual reports that show, for example, which transactions should appear on Schedules A, B, and D for the previous or current tax year. The Deduction Finder asks numerous questions about your income and expenses to determine whether you can take deductions.

There’s a Tax Planner tool, a kind of tax management control center that guides you through the Form 1040, and an itemized deduction estimator. Quicken pulls some of its tools together in the Tax Center, but most of them are scattered throughout the program. They’re updated for the 2023 and 2024 tax years. The tools themselves look like “old Quicken” (small fonts, hard to read) and are not particularly intuitive or easy to use. There’s also a lot of duplication.

If you want to work with Quicken data in TurboTax, you canexport a TurboTax Schedule Report and a TurboTax Capital Gains Report.

Simplifi does not have any similar tools, though you can tag transactions as tax-related and export them in .CSV format.

Winner: Quicken Classic

Quicken vs. Simplifi: Planning for the Future

Like the Tax Planner, the Lifetime Planner uses data you’ve already collected in Quicken about your ongoing income and expenses, property and debt, and investments to predict your success at achieving long-term goals for your retirement and other major life events. In order for this to work, you must use all of Quicken’s tools and provide every bit of financial data you have. Every transaction you make can have an impact on your results, so it should be revisited regularly.

Simplifi only supports simple savings goals.

Winner: Quicken Classic

Winner: Simplifi, But Consider Both Carefully

Simplifi wins more of our categories than Quicken Classic, but don’t discount the latter. For instance, Quicken Classic goes beyond Simplifi in some areas, like tax and retirement planning and debt reduction tools. Both are easy to recommend, so think about your individual needs before diving into one or the other.

And The Winner Is...