Review by Daddy Dave

I’ve been a Quicken user for many years, but am really ticked off at their upgrade policies. The best you’ll get away with is repurchasing Quicken every 3 years if you want to retain the online banking feature. I presently run the 2010 version which works well. I see no reason to upgrade and agree with some other reviewers that Quicken upgrades rarely improve anything or add useful features. However, I now get frequent reminders that if I don’t upgrade by April I’ll lose the online banking feature. That is blackmail! If I ever find a decent useful personal finance program that supports online banking, I’ll switch in a second without looking back. Mint looks decent but it is now owned by Intuit and will soon become Quicken. I used Microsoft Money a long time ago and would still use it if it had not been discontinued.

It deserves only a 1-star rating, but I give it 2 stars because I’ve had a good experience with Quicken 2010 so far.

11/27/2013 update: I compromised my morals and upgraded to 2013 because nothing else looked very robust. Lowered to one star because the 2013 version is not any different than the 2010 version, yet I was forced to upgrade to retain online banking. Idiots. I’d really like to monitor anticipated income and expenses easily. I can probably do it with Quicken but it is soooo cumbersome and takes way too much time and thought to make it work. Microsoft Money did it well but that was many years ago. We’ve come a long ways backwards with Quicken. Quicken 2013 also doesn’t like the Quicken Exchange Format that one of my banks uses so online banking is only partially successful.

2/8/2014 update: Yet another reason to hope that Quicken or someone else comes out with a better product. I anticipate a budget crunch in 2014 to pay for unforseen federal taxes so I started a budget under Planning. They’ve removed a feature that previously existed! I’d like to specify the starting month for my budget but I’m limited to complete Jan-Dec years. I don’t consider defining a date range for a budget to be an advanced feature. Another thing I’d like to be able to do is enter paychecks in as bi-weekly, not monthly. That is not possible with Quicken 2013 Home and Business.

Intuit is slowly dumbing down Quicken to the point were anyone can use it at a very basic level at the cost of leaving experienced users in the dustbin. The problem with doing that is once people own it and try to use it for the purpose it was designed for, they become experienced users and start looking around for something better. There isn’t anything better, yet.