The YNAB alternative for your budget and your investments

YNAB is a budgeting product, and the envelope method is the product. It has the teaching, the community and the track record behind it, and if what you want is to get a grip on your spending, it is very good at exactly that.

Turbobulls is a portfolio tracker that also does envelope budgeting, encrypted on your device so the server cannot read either half. Spending, salary, cash accounts and debt sit next to holdings, and net worth is reported across all of it.

So this is not a fight over who budgets better. On budgeting alone, YNAB is the stronger product and this page will not argue otherwise. The question is whether you want the investing side in the same place, and whether you want a server that can read any of it.

Both products budget the same way in principle. Each month you assign the money you actually have to categories and watch what is left; unspent money rolls over, and overspending comes out of next month’s pool, so the budget stays tied to real cash rather than a forecast.

YNAB is ahead on what sits around the budget. Goal setting and progress tracking, debt tools including a loan calculator, sharing a subscription with up to six people, and the material that teaches the method in the first place. Turbobulls publishes a help centre, broker import guides and a public roadmap you can vote on; what it does not have is a named budgeting method with a body of teaching behind it, or a user community built around one.

Our budgeting is also thinner on the free plan than a budgeter would like: it is read-only there, and the wallet caps at 120 transactions, three accounts and ten categories. That is enough to see how it works, not enough to run a household on. Paying for the spending side lifts all of it.

YNABYNAB’s security page describes a genuinely careful operation. Encryption in transit and at rest, passwords one-way salted and hashed, bank credentials going to the aggregators Plaid and MX rather than to YNAB, OAuth with the institution where available, and infrastructure compliance including ISO 27001, SOC 2 and PCI Level 1. It states plainly that the team does not access customer data in normal operations, that access requires customer approval, and that it is documented. On data sales it answers directly: YNAB says it does not sell your financial data or anything you enter in the app, and that it uses targeted advertising to reach new users, which some US state privacy laws count as a sale or share. Its privacy policy, effective April 20, 2026, says the same about Financial Data. The same policy says the services are operated from the United States, and that your information is transferred, processed and stored there.

TurbobullsThat is a policy commitment, and a good one. Turbobulls makes a different kind of claim: data is encrypted on your device with AES-256-GCM under a key derived from your password using PBKDF2, before anything is sent. The platform is designed so that it cannot read your figures, rather than choosing not to.

The trade runs both ways and it is worth being straight about it: encrypting on the device is exactly why we cannot offer the automatic bank import that makes YNAB pleasant to use. On analytics, Turbobulls records explicit events only within the app, with no autocapture, no session recording, no advertising trackers, and nothing sold. See exactly how the encryption works, including what we can still see.

This is the biggest practical gap on this page, and it runs against us. A budget only works if the spending actually lands in it, and YNAB links your accounts and imports transactions automatically, for select US, Canadian, UK and EU banks per its pricing FAQ, with a file import for everyone else. Turbobulls has no bank connections at all, because a sync service has to hold working credentials and read what it fetches, which is the thing the encryption exists to prevent.

What we have instead is file import: adapters for ING Romania, Raiffeisen Romania, Salt Bank and Revolut personal, plus a generic CSV mapper for anything else. You pick the adapter, and if the file does not match it the app points you at the one it does. The import preview flags duplicates before anything is written and the commit is atomic, so a bad file does not leave you half-imported.

If you bank outside that list, you are on the generic CSV route or typing spending in by hand. For portfolio trades that is a minor cost, since there are few of them. For daily spending it is a real one, and if it is the deciding factor then YNAB is the better tool and we would rather say so here than have you find out in week two.

YNAB’s features page describes spending and net worth reports and does not mention investments. Its help centre describes two ways to handle an investment account: a category for the contributions, or a balance-only tracking account that can be included in net worth. You reconcile that account to its new balance to record interest, dividends or gains, amounts it calls informational only. It does not track individual holdings, their prices or cost basis, and its pricing FAQ says you cannot use multiple currencies together in a single spending plan. That is the gap Turbobulls is built to fill: stocks, ETFs, crypto, bonds and deposits, with per-lot cost basis, splits applied retroactively, and multi-currency handled with the FX rate on each transaction date.

On returns you get ROI, money-weighted return and time-weighted return on every plan, benchmarking against any ETF, stock or basket you add, and historical snapshots that rebuild the portfolio as it stood on any date. Behind those sits the Overview’s All figures card: its growth and return figures, wealth velocity, growth rate (CAGR) and time-weighted return among them, are on every plan, and paying for the investing side opens the risk and efficiency figures. Dividends are tracked with withholding tax recorded per payment.

The point is not that this is more features. It is that the savings rate from your budget and the return on your portfolio are the same question asked twice, and answering it in one place is the reason this product exists. If you do not hold investments, none of it matters and YNAB is the simpler choice.

YNAB lists $109 USD a year, shown as $9.08 USD a month, or $14.99 USD a month, plus tax where applicable, as checked in September 2026. It is one subscription billed yearly or monthly, and the pricing page shows a single feature list with no feature tiers. The trial runs 34 days, with no card when you sign up directly with YNAB, and college students who submit proof of enrolment get a free 365-day trial. There is no permanently free plan: once a subscription expires you re-subscribe to get back in, per its cancellation page.

Turbo Pro, which covers both sides, is €6.66 a month billed yearly at €79.90, or €7.99 monthly. If the budget is all you want from us, you do not have to buy the portfolio tracker with it: Spending Pro is €2.99 a month billed yearly at €35.90, and it leaves the investing side exactly at free-plan depth. The trial is 14 days, shorter than YNAB’s, and afterwards the account lands on a permanent free plan rather than ending.

Two honest caveats. The prices are in different currencies and move with the exchange rate, so we are not going to quote you a percentage saving. And our free plan, while permanent, caps the wallet at 120 transactions with budgeting read-only, which is a demonstration rather than a place to run your budget. YNAB’s pricing is also in US dollars with exchange rates not reflected in the price, per its pricing FAQ, and tax is added where applicable, which may matter more than the headline if you earn in something else.