Firefly III vs Monarch Money
Firefly III and Monarch Money are both personal finance software. Firefly III is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 25k GitHub stars. Monarch Money is a commercial product from Monarch Money.
Which to pick
- Pick Firefly III when
- You want detailed control over personal finances and accept entering or importing transactions yourself.
- Pick Monarch Money when
- A US household wants a modern Mint replacement with collaboration between partners.
Side by side
A self-hosted personal finance manager using double-entry bookkeeping, with budgets, categories, rules, recurring transactions and reports.
Connects bank, card and investment accounts to track spending, budgets, net worth and shared household goals.
Run largely by one developer, and the double-entry model has a learning curve for casual budgeters.
Subscription only, and bank aggregation coverage is mainly US.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Cloud service and mobile app
PHP, Laravel, MySQL and PostgreSQL
Not published
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Monarch Money
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
25k GitHub stars
No Wikipedia article of its own
Established: started 12 years ago, latest release v6.7.9.
Not known
Other comparisons
More personal finance and budgeting apps
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.