# Monarch Review: Premium Finance Tracking Done Right > Source: > Published: 2026-07-28 17:37:10+00:00 ## Pros & Cons - - Exceptional user experience - Enhanced forecasting and investment tracking features - Excellent transaction management and cash flow tools - Smart, personalized AI Assistant - Terrific mobile apps - - Comparatively high price ## Monarch Specs | Android App | | | Free Credit Report/Score | | | Income/Expense Tracking | | | iOS App | | | Web Interface | Monarch already delivers everything you expect from a [personal finance](/personal-finance/15448/the-best-personal-finance-services) app, but it continues to outpace the competition with novel features and constant innovation. The new Monarch Plus tier adds powerful capabilities for forecasting, investment tracking, long-term planning, and business finances. Meanwhile, both the Core and Plus versions benefit from a smarter AI assistant, refreshed goal tracking, upgraded security, and enhanced shared views. Thanks to these superb enhancements and a best-in-class user experience across all platforms, we've increased Monarch's rating by half a star and named it an Editors' Choice winner. It shares that honor with [Quicken Simplifi](/personal-finance/124838/simplifi-by-quicken), which offers a highly competitive feature set and interface for a slightly lower price. ## Pricing: More Expensive Than Most Alternatives Monarch's entry-level Core plan costs $8.33 per month, billed annually. But if you want to forecast your retirement path, get advanced investment analysis, or track business income and expenses, you must pay for Monarch Plus ($16.67 per month, billed annually). The Core tier's rate is in line with some competitors, though the Plus version is the most expensive personal finance solution I reviewed this year. For comparison, [PocketGuard](/personal-finance-apps/153631/pocketguard) is $6.25 per month, billed annually; Simplifi charges $6.99 per month, billed annually; and [YNAB](/ynab/) starts at $9.08 per month, billed annually. Even [WalletHub Premium+](/personal-finance/74400/wallethub) ($10.50 per month, billed annually) isn't as expensive as Monarch Plus. The days of free personal finance applications (remember Mint?) are waning, with only [Credit Karma](/personal-finance/89806/credit-karma) and [NerdWallet](/personal-finance/118149/nerdwallet) remaining among those I tested. ## Interface and Ease of Use: An Unmatched Design and Layout Like competitors, Monarch gives you real-time feedback as soon as you create an account and start importing transactions from your online financial institutions. All the apps I reviewed let you start using their tools to view your imports in various ways, such as charts, transaction lists, and reports. But Monarch’s use of AI provides feedback in a different, more technical way, allowing you to see what’s happening behind your actual physical internet connection. Besides offering multiple services to facilitate your connections, it uses AI to find the best one for each account. When you open an account page, the site shows your connection status and last sync, and helps you fix a connection if it drops. I haven’t seen this kind of connectivity help elsewhere. You can start using Monarch after connecting your accounts, but I recommend going through the site’s unusually thorough Settings pages. You can, for example, invite anyone you want to share application access with to join you (everyone gets a separate login). You can view your data separately, but Monarch also accommodates what it calls shared views that combine financial information from multiple people. You can add and edit transaction categories in Settings, create new rules about how Monarch automatically modifies transactions based on criteria you specify, and turn on numerous notifications, too. The site is quite attractive and colorful, while navigation cues are intuitive. Its customizable dashboard displays the charts and tables that are standard across competitors, including those related to budget progress, net worth, recent transactions, and investments. Monarch can now track equity compensation. Some underlying details are available on the dashboard, but you have to navigate to other pages to do most of your regular work. ### Easily Separate Business and Personal Data A new entry on the Dashboard supports one of the features you get with Monarch Plus. You can now apply filters to the site’s tools (such as cash flow and transactions) to separate business information from personal finance content. If you have accounts you use strictly for business, you can indicate them as such while still seeing shared views of business and personal details. This feature is best suited for self-employed individuals (such as sole proprietors and LLCs), not W-2 workers. You can use the special business reporting to see targeted views and to help prepare your Schedule C when it’s time to [file your income taxes](/accounting-tax-software/4403/the-best-tax-software). ## Help and Support: AI-Driven Answers and Plenty of Resources As easy as Monarch is to use, you might need support. Monarch has as many thorough, well-written articles in its help center as any app I reviewed (with the possible exception of YNAB). You can also converse with an AI chatbot, which is more helpful than last year. This chatbot provides site help and expert advice on financial topics, including ways to achieve your financial goals, save money, and budget effectively. I asked it how I could cut down on expenses. It thought for about two minutes, and then it gave a detailed analysis of my budget, making specific, personalized suggestions for economizing. Where appropriate, it included links to articles in the help center. If you still need help, you can leave a message for Monarch's online support team. ## Transaction Management: Goes Far Beyond the Basics Monarch provides a unique blend of transaction details and options. It shows you the transactions you import or enter manually in a register, listing the amount, spending or income category, merchant, account, owner status, and business or household designation. You can add notes and tags to a transaction, attach a receipt or other file, mark it as recurring, and split it. That's mostly standard stuff. But no other personal finance app that I’ve reviewed lets you assign transactions to one of your collaborators for review. And most don't have tax-related business categories. ([Rocket Money](/personal-finance/148009/rocket-money) at least lets you mark expenses as tax-related, and Quicken Classic has business categories.) Monarch also allows you to edit multiple transactions simultaneously in the register. I really like the Retail Purchase Sync feature. Once you install the Chrome extension, you can import your Amazon and Target transactions and see them as totals and individual items. Monarch plans to eventually add connections to other retailers. ## Budgeting: An Effective and Flexible New Approach The budgeting tools in personal finance apps have traditionally been pretty similar, except for WalletHub, which offers multiple approaches. You set target goals in each spending category (like dining out and transportation), which are usually educated guesses. The app then keeps running tallies of your dollars spent based on your transactions, providing three numbers in each spending category: how much you budgeted, what you spent, and how much is left over. Of course, they track income, too. In addition to this sort of standard framework, Monarch now offers the Flex Budget tool. It allows you to divide your expenses into three buckets: Fixed (recurring, predictable obligations like utilities and rent), Flexible (costs that vary from month to month, such as groceries and entertainment, and which you can reduce or increase if necessary), and Non-Monthly (expenses that occur at various intervals, such as car repairs and seasonal costs). I like how Monarch provides historical data for each entry in the Planned (budgeted) column. Click any category there to open a chart showing how much you spent last month and your monthly average. Rather than micromanaging your money by tracking dozens of categories, Monarch lets you focus primarily on those three totals. You can still see what you’re making and spending in each category, but your budget requires less bookkeeping and time. You can adjust the totals as necessary, of course, but the three-bucket approach forces you to look at your money differently and plan better for unexpected expenses. ## Recurring Transactions: Get an Overview of Your Bills and Subscriptions Like [PocketGuard](/personal-finance-apps/153631/pocketguard) and others, Monarch has tools for identifying and managing recurring transactions, whether they are automatic withdrawals, such as for Netflix, or periodic bills that you pay offline and mark as paid in the app, such as your rent. When Monarch spots a recurring pattern and isn’t sure it’s legit, it asks you to review it and gives you the option to set it up as such. These approved transactions appear on an interactive calendar and in a list. Monarch lets you gauge your success in paying bills by providing a daily update on your credit score. Monarch doesn't offer any service to cancel unwanted subscriptions like Rocket Money, nor does it offer online bill pay like [Quicken Classic](/personal-finance-apps/152763/quicken-classic). But the site helps you track account balances and due dates for online billers, such as your utility company or your wireless carrier. You just supply a few personal details, and a third-party service finds and connects your online accounts. This is much easier than entering your online credentials one by one to check your balance and due date. ## Cash Flow, Investments, and Reports: Depth and Innovation on Every Page Monarch includes an insightful, flexible cash flow tool. It shows you multiple customizable charts and lists that you can view by category, group, or merchant. You can also filter them by account or tag and view them monthly, quarterly, or yearly. At a glance, you can see how your income and expenses balance out over time. Monarch is the only personal finance app I’ve tested that can generate both a bar chart and a Sankey diagram (a data visualization technique that illustrates a flow from one set of values to another). The latter works well for visualizing your cash flow. Monarch allows you to create a portfolio of investment types (cryptocurrencies, derivatives, ETFs, and mutual funds) by connecting your brokerage accounts or entering holdings manually. It updates benchmarks in real time when the markets are open and your holdings daily. You can view your portfolio by account, asset class, institution, and security type for multiple date ranges. Monarch now offers advanced views that display gains and losses for individual holdings; it also performs more sophisticated fund analysis. You can create standalone reports in Monarch that cover three areas of your finances: cash flow (tools similar to the Cash Flow page with greater depth and customization), spending, and income. New this year is Business Tax Prep, as mentioned earlier. You also get a detailed Profit & Loss report option. These are primarily presented as charts and Sankey diagrams, with lists of related transactions. They’re colorful, comprehensive, and quite customizable via a variety of filters. You can drill down to the underlying data and save reports you create. I enjoyed using them, and I think their content and form are especially suitable if you are after robust overviews of your finances. But Quicken Classic is king when it comes to report templates in terms of sheer volume. The Goals tool gets an update, too. Monarch tracks two different kinds. Save Up goals are monetary targets you set for specific uses (such as $5,000 for a vacation). Monarch allows you to connect these to specific accounts and even transactions, so it can track your progress. Pay Down goals automatically measure your progress as each debt account’s balance decreases over time. I like how Monarch handles forecasting, too. This thorough, intuitive tool uses real data from your Monarch account to provide starting assumptions for your assets, expenses, income, and liabilities, helping you determine when you can retire and whether you can afford to buy a house, for example. It tracks your progress in real time using live data from your accounts, allowing you to add life events along the way (such as having a child or getting a windfall) so you can model their impact. Monarch makes the mechanics of this tool simple and visually compelling. ## Mobile Apps: Exceptionally Attractive and Comprehensive Monarch’s mobile apps (available for Android and iOS) include practically everything from the web version. I couldn't find anything missing except for reports. Every page replicates the browser-based content quite well. The apps let you view your account information and manage your budget. You can also add and edit transactions and view your cash flow. The dashboard is terrific and even includes a feature the desktop version doesn't: a multipage weekly review that summarizes your financial activity from the previous week in charts and lists. The apps' colors, design, and graphics blend effectively to create an especially compelling interface. ## Security: Is Monarch Safe to Use? Monarch is certified SOC 2 compliant, a coveted designation that means the [AICPA](https://www.aicpa-cima.com/home) has verified that the company manages customer data securely. The company also says it employs industry-leading [security practices](https://www.monarch.com/security) to protect your information, as do the data providers it partners with. The app doesn't store your username or password and has read-only access. This means Monarch can't move money in or out of your accounts. The company also claims to implement strict security practices, including encryption, one of the industry's strongest bug bounty programs, and role-based access controls at each layer of its infrastructure. It supports [multi-factor authentication](/security/153947/the-best-authenticator-apps-for-2024) for accounts. ## Final Thoughts # Monarch Review: Premium Finance Tracking Done Right From day-to-day budgeting to advanced financial forecasting, Monarch delivers an exceptional feature set wrapped in a best-in-class user experience across mobile and web.