Banktivity vs Moneydance for Mac: Pricing and Features 2026

Banktivity is a subscription built only for Mac and iOS, published at $6.99 to $10.99 a month with annual billing. Moneydance is a one-time purchase that runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and the vendor does not display its license price. If you own only Apple hardware and want the better-looking, better-reporting app, pick Banktivity. If you want to buy software once and keep it, pick Moneydance.

Last updated August 24, 2026. Prices and platform details below were read from banktivity.com and infinitekind.com in August 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, this article says so rather than repeating a number from a review site.

These two get compared constantly because they are the last serious desktop personal finance apps that are not Quicken. Both keep your data in a local file, both connect to US banks, both have been around long enough to have real ledgers behind them. The differences that matter are not in the feature grids, they are in the pricing model and in what happens to your data when you stop paying.

Which is better, Banktivity or Moneydance?

Banktivity is the better app if your household is entirely on Apple hardware. It is written for macOS and iOS rather than ported to them, its reports are deeper and more customizable, and it feels current in a way Moneydance does not. Moneydance is the better purchase if you care about owning the software, running it on more than one operating system, or keeping it working without paying every year.

That framing is more useful than a score, because the two apps are not really competing on quality. They are competing on what you are buying. One is a rental with better fittings; the other is a purchase with a plainer finish.

How much does Banktivity cost?

Banktivity's published plans, checked in August 2026, are Bronze at $6.99 a month, Silver at $8.99 and Gold at $10.99, all with annual billing. Every plan includes a 30 day free trial and the vendor does not ask for a card to start it. The higher tiers add features like investment tools and additional cloud sync rather than more accounts.

One thing to be careful about: several review sites list Banktivity annual totals of $59.99, $79.99 and $99.99, which do not reconcile with the per-month figures shown on Banktivity's own plans page. When numbers disagree, the vendor's page wins. Check the current price at banktivity.com before you buy rather than trusting any roundup, including this one.

How much does Moneydance cost?

The vendor does not display the one-time license price on its purchase page, and the figures circulating on review sites disagree with each other, so this article will not repeat one. What Infinite Kind does publish is the subscription side, described by the vendor itself as approximate: about $4 a month or $40 a year for the Moneydance+ add-on, and about $9 a month or $90 a year for the program bundled with Moneydance+.

The buy-once purchase carries a 90 day money back guarantee, which is unusually long for this category and worth more than a short trial. It also includes a free upgrade to the next major release, so a purchase typically covers two versions rather than one.

Is Moneydance a one-time purchase?

Yes, and this is the main reason people choose it. You buy the program and it keeps working. The subscription piece, Moneydance+, is an add-on for automatic bank downloads through Plaid, and you can skip it entirely if your bank still supports OFX Direct Connect, which the base license handles with no time limit.

There is one trap in the fine print that nobody advertises. If you buy the version bundled with Moneydance+ and later cancel, the program reverts to trial mode. If you instead buy the license outright and add Moneydance+ separately, cancelling the add-on only removes the bank sync and leaves the program fully working. Those are two very different outcomes from what looks like the same subscription, so buy the license first and add the sync second.

Does Banktivity work on Windows?

No. Banktivity is macOS and iOS only, with no Windows build and no web app. That is a deliberate choice by IGG Software and it is why the app fits Apple hardware as well as it does, but it means a mixed household, or a future move to a Windows machine, ends the relationship. Moneydance runs on macOS, Windows and Linux from the same license, which is the entire argument for it if your machines are not all Apple.

Does Moneydance work on Mac?

Yes, and it is a real native application rather than a browser wrapper. More importantly for anyone thinking about the exit, Moneydance exports QIF on every platform including macOS. That sounds like a small detail until you compare it with Quicken for Mac, which has not exported QIF since Quicken Mac 2007.

If you are weighing these two against the rest of the field, the wider roundup of personal finance software for Mac puts both of them next to Quicken, GnuCash, Moneyspire and the browser-only apps on price, native Mac support and exports.

Can Banktivity import Quicken files?

It imports QIF, OFX, QFX and CSV, so a QIF file exported from Quicken for Windows will come across. What neither app can do is read a Quicken .QDF data file directly, so the migration always runs through an exported file rather than by opening your old file.

If you are on Quicken for Mac, this is where the plan usually breaks, because there is no QIF export to make. The workable route is to download your history from the bank as QIF and import that instead of trying to move it out of Quicken. Our comparison of Banktivity vs Quicken for Mac goes through that in more detail.

Which one is easier to leave?

Moneydance, by a clear margin, and for two reasons. Its export list includes raw JSON alongside QIF and tab delimited, so a technically inclined user can get at everything rather than just the register. And because the license is bought rather than rented, you can stop paying and still open your file years later to look something up.

Banktivity's QIF export is genuinely good, full ledger with a date range, and better than most of this category offers. But if the subscription lapses, you are relying on having exported before it did. That asymmetry is worth thinking about before you pick, because personal finance data has a habit of mattering most several years after you stopped paying attention to it.

What if the real destination is QuickBooks?

This comes up more than people expect, usually when a side business grows or an accountant asks for something a personal finance app cannot produce. Neither Banktivity nor Moneydance writes a QuickBooks file, and QuickBooks Online has no Quicken or Moneydance import at all.

The route that works is the one both apps already support: export your ledger as QIF, convert that QIF to QBO, and import the QBO into QuickBooks Online as a Web Connect file. The converter at the top of this page does that step, and because it writes deterministic transaction IDs, re-importing the same converted file will not double post. If you want the longer version, see converting Quicken to QuickBooks and the QIF to QBO converter comparison.

Who should buy which

Buy Banktivity if every machine in the house has an Apple logo, you want the app to look and feel like it belongs on macOS, and reporting matters to you. The 30 day trial without a card makes this an easy one to test properly rather than guess at.

Buy Moneydance if you want to own the software, if there is a Windows or Linux machine in the picture, or if the idea of losing access to your own ledger when a card expires bothers you. Take the 90 day guarantee seriously and actually import a real year of transactions during it, because that is the test that tells you whether the app fits.

Worth being honest about what neither of them does: they are ledgers, so they record what already happened. Neither will interrupt you the moment a charge lands, so if what you actually want is an alert the instant spending crosses a limit you set, that is a different category of tool and no amount of reporting depth in either app will substitute for it.

Still deciding? Compare both against the rest of the field in personal finance software for Mac, or read Moneydance vs Quicken, Moneyspire vs Moneydance and Quicken alternatives.