Firefly III vs YNAB
Firefly III and YNAB are both personal finance software. Firefly III is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 25k GitHub stars. YNAB is a commercial product from You Need A Budget.
Which to pick
- Pick Firefly III when
- You want detailed control over personal finances and accept entering or importing transactions yourself.
- Pick YNAB when
- You want to change spending habits with a strict budgeting method and will use it regularly.
Side by side
A self-hosted personal finance manager using double-entry bookkeeping, with budgets, categories, rules, recurring transactions and reports.
A zero-based budgeting app where every dollar is assigned a job, with bank import and shared household budgets.
Run largely by one developer, and the double-entry model has a learning curve for casual budgeters.
The subscription is relatively expensive, bank sync coverage varies by country, and the method takes effort to learn.
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 You Need A Budget
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
430 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.