Firefly III vs Quicken Classic
Firefly III and Quicken Classic are both personal finance software. Firefly III is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 25k GitHub stars. Quicken Classic is a commercial product from Quicken Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick Firefly III when
- You want detailed control over personal finances and accept entering or importing transactions yourself.
- Pick Quicken Classic when
- You are in the US or Canada and want detailed desktop tracking of accounts and investments with long history.
Side by side
A self-hosted personal finance manager using double-entry bookkeeping, with budgets, categories, rules, recurring transactions and reports.
Desktop personal finance software for tracking bank accounts, bills, investments and budgets, with a business and rental property edition.
Run largely by one developer, and the double-entry model has a learning curve for casual budgeters.
Subscription now required, bank connection issues are common, and it is mainly for North America.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Desktop app and mobile app
PHP, Laravel, MySQL and PostgreSQL
Not published
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Quicken Inc.
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
780 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
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.