When it comes to startups in the online personal finance sphere, most people think of Mint. But another player in the space, Wesabe, has been holding its own as well, seeing some nice growth in the past year. Which one you use is probably a matter of personal taste, but perhaps you were mesmerized by Mint’s slick iPhone app. Well, now Wesabe has one as well.
So how do the apps stack up? Well, there are two key differences: Mint’s looks nicer, but Wesabe’s is more dynamic. What I mean by that is, with Mint’s iPhone app you can only see an overview of your finances, and look at things like the budget you set up online. With Wesabe’s iPhone app, everything is editable. And that’s a nice feature because more than a few times with Mint, I have seen a transaction categorized wrong, but had to login on my computer to edit it.
One cool feature that comes out of this ability to edit and add transactions from the app is that you can use your phone’s GPS to geo-locate wherever you made a purchase. This means you won’t have to type out the name of every merchant if you really want to take a hands-on approach and enter every purchase you make manually. The app also allows you to tag items on the fly, which is core to Wesabe’s offering.
If you’re really worried about security, you’re probably not going to use either of these apps. But one nice thing Wesabe’s features is a separate security layer that allows you to set a password for accessing the app. This is great if you don’t have a password set on your iPhone and worry about losing your phone and someone seeing your finances.
Wesabe’s iPhone app gives you access to all the accounts you set up online through the service. Unfortunately, while you can sign up for a Wesabe account through the app, you cannot import any bank accounts or credit card accounts through it — you’ll have to go to a computer to do that. Wesabe CEO Marc Hedlund tells me that functionality will be available in an upcoming release of the iPhone app.
Ultimately, the choice of which app you’re going to use on the iPhone will come down to which service you use. But if you’re deciding which to sign up for and being able to edit your finances easily on a mobile device is important to you, than Wesabe may be a good choice.
Find the Wesabe app available for free in the iTunes App Store.
Are these finance related apps secure ?
Great apps and certainly a far cry from Mint. Finally iPhone apps approval team has passed on a good app.
Frankly speaking i Wesabe is new to me but its app application looks better to me than Mint.that because it editable.
Great App. All about Iphone @ http://search.m...ch&q=Iphone Try mazic widget and add it as default browser search engine
Great app
Can one do optimized budget allocations using either one of these 2 apps? This will be a really cool feature for both Wesabe and Mint to implement if they haven’t done so, since optimizations can allocate the budget efficiently, ie, the capability to minimize the loss and maximize the profit.
…great story!
I have been using Desktop Budget from http://Spryka.com to manage my personal finances for a few months now. Its the easiest to use free, offline personal finance software I have seen so far.
iPhone only
Sometimes it sucks to have an iPod Touch.
Cory: works on 2nd generation iPod Touch, and the next release will likely support all iPod Touches.
I’d really like to see this come to the UK.
Is there a similar service available here?
Lewis,
Wesabe supports many UK financial institutions and support GBP (and all worldwide currencies) fully. If you have accounts in more than one currency, we even do conversion as of the date of the transaction, and show you aggregate reports in your preferred currency.
Hope this helps.
Marc Hedlund
CEO, Wesabe
That’s great. I’ve created an account and I have imported a statement from my bank (HSBC UK).
However, HSBC use a security system requiring entering 3 digits (ie. First, Third, Last) from a 6 digit number. This causes a ‘bumpy’ statement import procedure after recording the steps using the firefox plugin. If Wesabe could support this type of security or better yet co-develop a secure API with major banks the service would be perfect. Thanks again Marc!
@Lewis,
Yes, I agree. We have this same system working with HSBC-US and plan to add it for HSBC-UK. Thanks much for the feedback.
Marc Hedlund
CEO, Wesabe
I am torn between the two. From what I understand, Wesabe has an API….allowing integration with other services. Does Mint offer or will they offer similar features?
@tarch – I can’t speak for other services, but Wesabe has had a public REST API since before Mint launched.
https://www.wes...be.com/page/api
Best, Marc Hedlund
CEO, Wesabe
I still do not see the value in getting advice from the crowd in Wesabe since most of them have got to be folks who have no educational or otherwise sound basis for their opinions. Can we say the blind leading the blind.
Sharing how one has saved money may be of some value, but thinking that there is material financial wisdom in that crowd is whack!
Marc: Unless you provide specific examples and statistics, please save the high level “we have lots of experienced people with personal financial experience in our community” hype.
@SaM: you definitely don’t have to use those features if you don’t see the value of them. Some people benefit from them (and when they do, they say they benefit enormously); others don’t want to talk about money with other people. Choose the path that’s right for you.
That’s fine, but beyond the crowd stuff, it seems like Mint is a much more feature rich application.
As an avid Wesabe user I look forward to checking this out!
For those of us too busy to be bothered doing Quicken like accounting with Mint or Wasabe, PageOnce’s Personal Assistant app on iPhone and Blackberry makes it effortless to track your finances as well as travel and other online accounts.
Wesabe could be worth $1 billion if it went public and mint.com worth $5 billion due to its huge growth and immunity to the media generated recession. No recession for web 2.0 http://iamned.com/blog/ keep buying stocks. Bull market unstoppable.
Hmm, you didn’t mention the moneyStrands iPhone App. You should give it a try, too. http://itunes.a...480796&mt=8
As one of the creators, I’d like to invite readers to also check out moneyStrands. We do provide automatic account aggregation along with a mobile web and iPhone app based access to your financial transaction and analysis data. It is great that the consumer has so many choices at such a game-changing time in personal finances.
Cheers!
I heard Pageonce is acquiring Wesabe….
Mark Hedlund, you might find the following links useful :
1) A Mathematical Model of the Capital Allocation Problem
2) Methods for Solving the Capital Allocation Problem
As I stated in my previous message, that having an efficient budget allocation capability in your system or Mint, would give a huge advantage to users. Anyone can do a budgeting, but the question to ask is, is it the most efficient (ie, minimizing & maximizing of resources)? Operations Research (OR) algorithms will bring that capability to optimize budget allocation.
Anyway, there are some open source & freely available APIs on the net for OR (Ops Research) in various languages, such as Matlab , C++, Java, etc …
If you’re curious about OR, then post back here, so that I can give more explanations.
A recently introduced finance App – Dough is quite interesting.
Dough combines money management along with Budget and Bill paying in an elegant interface.
-Augustus