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Looking for a Credit Karma budgeting alternative

By , who built Keep the Diff

When Mint closed in March 2024, its users were pointed to Credit Karma, owned by the same company. Credit Karma is free, links your accounts, shows your spending by category, compares this month with last month, and tracks your net worth and credit scores.

What it does not do is let you set a budget. There are no monthly limits by category and nothing to plan against. For people who opened Mint to see whether dining out was over budget, that gap is the whole reason to look elsewhere.

Why Credit Karma works the way it does

Credit Karma is free because it earns money when people take up the credit cards and loans it recommends. Seeing your spending and your scores in one place suits that model. Telling you to spend less in a category is a different kind of product, and it is reasonable that Credit Karma never became one.

So the useful question is what you actually wanted, because there are three common answers.

You wanted budgets by category

You want the tool Mint was: linked accounts, automatic sorting, and a limit for each category. Paid apps do this well. The ones former Mint users chose most are covered in looking for a Monarch Money alternative, looking for a YNAB alternative and looking for a Quicken Simplifi alternative.

You wanted it free

Mint was free, and paying for budgeting can feel wrong after years of not paying. Keep Credit Karma for the overview and add a free budget beside it: a spreadsheet, or one of the tools in free YNAB alternatives.

You wanted to spend less

Many people kept Mint open to feel in control, and what they really wanted was to spend a little less and save a little more. A budget is one way to get there. Another is to record the decisions that save money as you make them.

That is what Keep the Diff does. When you decide against a purchase, or decide to spend less, you log what you were ready to spend and what you actually spent. The difference is money you kept, and it adds up by week, by month and toward a goal with a photo.

Credit Karma and Keep the Diff together

The two do different jobs and fit side by side. Credit Karma looks at everything that already happened in your accounts. Keep the Diff records the purchases that never happened, which no account feed can show, because a skipped purchase leaves no transaction.

Keep the Diff has no bank connection and needs no account. Logging is free on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, Windows and Android, with no ads and no limit. Premium adds history, export, categories and more goals. You can try it in your browser, or read Mint alternatives if you never wanted your bank connected.

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