Still a desktop app. Still your own register. Now it shows you what's coming.

The short version

Choose TinyCashflow if you were mostly using Quicken as a checkbook register with a balance at the bottom, you want that on a modern desktop app that also projects the balance forward, you'd rather not hand your bank credentials to anyone, or you live somewhere Quicken doesn't sell.

Stay with Quicken if you rely on downloaded transactions, investment and tax reporting, decades of history you need inside the app, or reconciling line by line against a statement.

Side by side

Quicken details are taken from Quicken's own published pricing and support pages as of August 2026. Promotional pricing changes often, check quicken.com for today's numbers.

If you keep your own register, this was built for you

There's a particular kind of person Quicken created and nobody sells to anymore: someone who sits at a computer, keeps a transaction list by hand, knows every line in it, and would rather type an entry than have an aggregator guess at it. Every current "Quicken alternative" list leads that person to a phone app whose main selling point is that it connects to their bank and categorizes things for them, which is precisely the part they didn't want. Scroll far enough and you'll find a desktop program or two, but they're the survivors of an earlier era rather than anything built recently. TinyCashflow starts from the opposite assumption: you're the source of truth, the app's job is to add up what you told it and show you where it lands.

The part a register can't do on its own

A register tells you where you've been. The question people actually have is whether rent clears before the paycheck lands, and what's left in March after the insurance renewal. In TinyCashflow that isn't a separate report, it's the same list: scroll up for history, cross Today, and keep scrolling into a future where your salary, rent, subscriptions and one-off plans are already placed and already added up. Net worth sits in the footer the whole time and updates as you type. Nothing to configure to get there.

The complaint that actually pushes people out

Read the threads where long-time Quicken users announce they're done, and it usually isn't the price. It's speed. People describe waiting seconds after pressing Enter, updates that take half an hour, a register that got slower every year they stayed loyal. The punishment lands hardest on exactly the people with the most history in the file.

TinyCashflow's timeline only ever renders the rows on screen, so scrolling costs the same whether you're holding a few hundred transactions or tens of thousands, and the balance is recalculated off the main thread so typing doesn't wait for it. In fairness, we're a young product and nobody has thirty years in it yet, so treat that as an architectural claim rather than three decades of proof. But it's the part we designed for first.

Where "pending" and "cleared" went

In Quicken you mark a transaction cleared once the bank posts it, because the register on its own can't tell what's real yet from what's still in flight. TinyCashflow doesn't have that column, and after a week you stop reaching for it. Everything dated ahead of today is what's coming, everything behind today is what happened, and the running balance already treats them differently, so the thing the flag was there to tell you is simply where the row sits. Nothing to tick, nothing to forget to tick, and no register that quietly drifts because you stopped keeping the marks up to date.

The one habit that doesn't carry over is reconciling line by line against a paper statement. If that monthly ritual is how you trust your numbers, you'll feel its absence.

Any currency, anywhere

Quicken is explicit that it doesn't sell outside the United States and Canada, and that it supports English-language system settings only. If you have a euro account, a shekel salary, a Wise wallet or some crypto, that's not a limitation you can work around, it's the product. TinyCashflow treats currency as an ordinary property of an account and a transaction: hold accounts in as many currencies as you like, view every total in whichever one you think in, and switch at any time. Historical exchange rates are kept, so past balances stay correct rather than being retroactively rewritten by today's rate.

About the price, honestly

Quicken Classic is a subscription now, advertised at a discounted first-year rate that renews at whatever the price is when it renews. TinyCashflow is $6/month billed yearly, $72 a year, or $9 a month if you'd rather pay monthly, and there's a free desktop tier that keeps one worksheet locally with the core features and no time limit. On a first-year promotion the two land in similar territory. The difference is what you're buying: Quicken sells you bank feeds, investment tracking and tax reporting, and prices accordingly. We sell you a register and a forecast, and price accordingly. If you're paying a Quicken subscription and using a fraction of it, that's the comparison worth making.