# Looking for a YNAB alternative in Europe > What people are usually trying to escape when they go looking, why bank connections are the sticking point outside North America, and what to replace it with. Source: https://trybica.com/guides/ynab-alternative-europe/ Updated: 2026-08-18 --- People go looking for a YNAB alternative for two quite different reasons, and the alternatives that suit one group are wrong for the other. Working out which one you are is most of the decision. The first group likes the method and cannot make the mechanics work — the bank connections are unreliable where they live, or the price rose past what it was worth. The second group never wanted the method at all. They wanted to know where their money went, and found themselves being asked to run a budgeting system to find out. ## The bank connection problem YNAB's method assumes you are reconciling frequently, which assumes transactions arrive without much effort. In North America that assumption mostly holds. In Europe it holds unevenly: coverage varies by country and by bank, and Portuguese institutions in particular are not where an app built for the American market invests its integration effort. The fallback is file import — download a statement from your bank, import it, repeat. That works, and it reintroduces exactly the manual step that made you want software in the first place. Do check the current state of coverage for your own bank rather than trusting any article about it, including this one; these arrangements change and the only reliable test is your own account name in their supported list. European Open Banking makes this a solved problem in principle. Under PSD2, any licensed provider can read your accounts once you approve it at your own bank, which is why tools built here tend to have coverage that tools built elsewhere have to negotiate for. ## If you want to keep the method Zero-based budgeting — every euro assigned a job before the month starts — is a real technique and it works for the people it works for. If that is what you are after, look for tools that describe themselves in terms of envelopes, categories with assigned balances, and the discipline of giving money a purpose in advance. Actual Budget is the usual open-source answer, and there are others. An aggregator like Bica is not one of these, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. It has no envelopes, no assigning, no monthly allocation ritual. If the method is the point, this is not the replacement. ## If you never wanted the method This is the larger group, and it is worth naming what they usually discovered: that the budgeting apparatus was the price of admission for a question that did not require it. "Where did my money go last month" does not need envelopes. It needs your accounts read accurately, the cryptic statement lines resolved into merchant names, transfers between your own accounts excluded, and the result sorted into categories that mean something to you. That is a record-keeping problem, not a planning one. The distinction shows up most clearly in what happens when you overspend. A budgeting system asks you to move money between categories to cover it. A record system tells you it happened and leaves the response to you. Neither is superior — but if the first has ever felt like homework, the second is what you were looking for. ## What to check in whatever you pick 1. **Your own banks by name.** This is the one that disqualifies, and it is worth doing first. 2. **How much history it pulls on connection.** A tool starting from today tells you nothing for months. Most European banks will hand over a year or two. 3. **Transfers between your own accounts.** Move money to savings during the trial and check it does not appear as spending. 4. **Multi-currency, if you have it.** A common gap, and it makes the totals silently wrong rather than obviously wrong. 5. **What holds the things Open Banking cannot see.** A mortgage, property, savings certificates. ## The version of this worth saying plainly The reason budgeting apps have such high abandonment rates is not that people are undisciplined. It is that most of them ask you to maintain a system continuously in order to answer a question you have occasionally. If the system itself is rewarding, keep it — that is a real thing and some people genuinely enjoy it. If it never was, the honest move is to stop trying to find a better version of the system and switch to something that just keeps the record. [How much you should save each month](/guides/how-much-to-save-each-month/) is the version of budgeting that survives when you drop the apparatus: one number, derived from what you actually do.