Ghostfolio vs YNAB
Ghostfolio and YNAB are both personal finance software. Ghostfolio is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 9.6k GitHub stars. YNAB is a commercial product from You Need A Budget.
Which to pick
- Pick Ghostfolio when
- You invest across several brokers and want one private portfolio view, self-hosted or as a paid hosted service.
- Pick YNAB when
- You want to change spending habits with a strict budgeting method and will use it regularly.
Side by side
A wealth management app that tracks stocks, ETFs and crypto holdings across accounts and shows performance, allocation and dividends.
A zero-based budgeting app where every dollar is assigned a job, with bank import and shared household budgets.
Market data comes from external providers whose limits can affect accuracy, and some features are reserved for the paid plan.
The subscription is relatively expensive, bank sync coverage varies by country, and the method takes effort to learn.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Cloud service and mobile app
TypeScript, Angular, NestJS, Prisma, PostgreSQL and Redis
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.
9.6k GitHub stars
430 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 5 years ago, latest release 3.97.0.
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.