Just wanted to report that I have Monarch all set up and I am *loving* it so far (1+ week in).
I'd say Monarch combines the best of what I liked in both Mint & YNAB, plus it handles lots of investment detail (which is maybe similiar to Personal Capital?). The visuals are really good: nice clean views of information, multiple graphs available, cute customizable icons for categories (you could remove those if you want). The site is well-designed (e.g., separate addresses for page views so allows using the back button). It even has one feature that I've always gone into Excel for: a yearly view of the budget/actuals (months as columns), or even further (years as columns).
I think my favorite part is that Monarch allows categorization rules to be very detailed/specific, so it is doing *far* better at capturing my transactions the first time around, meaning I don't have to do much manual mucking about. For example, I can say "if the merchant CONTAINS this phrase" instead of needing an exact match, which captures all the variations that my different banks use. I can also set rules like, "if the AMOUNT is X and the ACCOUNT is Y" for those annoying recurring transactions that my credit union processes with a different incomprehensible code each time. (Note: I am using custom categories, so I have to set up my own rules; if you use the system categories it uses machine learning, so manual rules are optional.) As far as creating the rules, every time I recategorize a new transaction, a small box pops up in the corner of the screen that I can click on, so I have not found it too much work. It's such a relief now to log in and just see everything in place. (YNAB was seriously depressing/exhausting with its constant pile of transactions requiring review, and I both do this frequently and like this stuff!)
Plus, it is a paid app, so no ads and no selling of data. Thank god.
Anyway, just my 2 cents in case anyone else is looking. And no, I don't work for Monarch ; )
