Moneyspire vs Moneydance: Pricing, Platforms and QIF Export

Moneyspire costs $59.99 for a new license, discounted from $99.99, and includes one year of bank sync, cloud sync and stock quotes. Moneydance does not publish a one-time license price anywhere on its purchase page. That single difference tells you most of what you need to know about buying either one.

Last updated August 23, 2026. Moneyspire prices were read from moneyspire.com on August 23, 2026. Moneydance platform, import and subscription details were read from the vendor's own knowledge base on August 21, 2026.

These two get compared constantly and for good reason. They are the two surviving paid desktop personal finance apps that are not Quicken: you install them, your data sits in a file you own, and neither one wants you in a browser. If you left Quicken because of the subscription, or you are on Linux, or you simply want the ledger on your own machine, these are the two names that come up.

What does Moneyspire cost?

A new Moneyspire license is $59.99, shown struck through from $99.99 as a 40% discount, and an upgrade license is $49.99, shown as 50% off the same $99.99. The purchase includes one year of Moneyspire Cloud, Moneyspire Connect for bank sync, and the stock quote and currency rate downloads.

Read the renewal wording carefully, because this is where the "buy once" framing gets slippery. After that first year, the way you keep the connected services running is by buying the next major version upgrade at $49.99. So the honest way to describe Moneyspire is a $59.99 program with roughly $49.99 a year attached to it if you want bank sync. The program itself keeps working without paying again. The automation does not.

Against Quicken Classic Deluxe at $6.99 a month, or $83.88 a year, Moneyspire is still meaningfully cheaper, and the one personal license covering every computer in the household is a genuinely generous term that Quicken does not match.

What does Moneydance cost?

Moneydance does not display a one-time license price on its purchase page, which is unusual for a product whose main selling point is that you buy it once. Review sites quote figures for it, and those figures disagree with each other, so none of them are repeated here. The number you should trust is the one on the vendor's checkout when you get there.

What the vendor does publish are the subscription figures, described as approximate: Moneydance+ as an add-on runs about $4 a month or $40 a year, and the program bundled together with Moneydance+ runs about $9 a month or $90 a year. Buying the program outright includes a free upgrade to the next major release.

There is one trap worth knowing before you pick the bundled plan. If you subscribe to the bundle and later cancel, the program reverts to trial mode. If you buy the license outright and separately add Moneydance+, cancelling the add-on leaves you with a working program. Same vendor, same software, very different outcome, decided entirely by which button you clicked at purchase.

Which one runs on your computer?

Both cover the three desktop platforms. Moneyspire lists Mac, Windows, Linux and Chromebook. Moneydance lists Windows 10 and 11 including ARM machines, macOS 12 and later, and 64-bit Linux. Chromebook support is the one platform only Moneyspire claims.

Mobile is where they split, though not as cleanly as most comparisons claim. Moneydance has an iPhone and iPad companion and it does also have an Android app on the Play Store, which several roundups get wrong. The catch is that the Android app carries a poor rating and has not been updated in some time, so it is supported on paper rather than in practice. If an Android phone is central to how you keep your books, test that app during the guarantee window rather than assuming it will do the job.

Can Moneyspire and Moneydance download bank transactions?

Both offer automatic downloads, through different plumbing. A base Moneydance license includes OFX Direct Connect, the older bank protocol, with no time limit attached. Moneydance+ adds Plaid based connections covering US and Canadian banks and syncs up to five data files. Moneyspire uses its own Connect service, included for the first year with a new license.

The practical difference is what happens in year two. Moneydance's Direct Connect access does not expire with a subscription, so a bought license keeps whatever direct bank connections your bank supports. Moneyspire's bank sync is bundled for twelve months and then wants the next upgrade. Neither approach is wrong, but only one of them still downloads transactions three years later without another payment.

Which one exports QIF?

Moneydance documents QIF, tab delimited and raw JSON as its export formats, and it does this on every platform including Mac. Moneyspire does not publish an export format matrix, so its export formats are not asserted here. If getting data back out matters to you, that difference in documentation is itself the answer.

Moneydance exporting QIF on Mac is a bigger deal than it sounds. Quicken for Mac has not exported QIF since Quicken Mac 2007, so Mac users trying to move financial history between applications usually hit a wall. Moneydance is one of the few Mac apps that will just hand you a QIF file.

That matters if QuickBooks is ever your destination, because QuickBooks Online cannot read a Moneydance or Moneyspire file. The working path is QIF out of the app, converted to QBO, imported into QuickBooks Online as a bank file. You can run that conversion with the converter at the top of this page.

What does Moneydance import?

Moneydance documents QFX, OFX, OFC, QFC, QIF and CSV imports. That is the widest documented import list of any desktop personal finance app still being sold, and it is the reason Moneydance keeps showing up in migration threads. Almost anything a bank or an old application will hand you, it will read.

If you are coming off Quicken for Windows, export QIF one account at a time and import those. Reconcile a single month against a statement before you trust ten years of history, because opening balances and cross account transfers are where QIF conversions quietly go wrong.

Is Moneyspire any good?

It is a competent, actively sold desktop finance app with a clear price, generous household licensing and the broadest platform list in the category. The main reservation is transparency: the vendor publishes prices well and publishes technical detail poorly, so questions like which formats it exports are hard to answer before you buy.

For a household that wants budgeting, bills, reports and reconciliation on a Mac, PC, Linux box or Chromebook without a subscription, it does the job. For someone whose main worry is being able to leave with their data later, the missing export documentation is a real reason to look at Moneydance first.

What happens if you stop paying?

With Moneyspire, the program keeps running and the connected services stop. You keep entering and importing transactions manually and lose bank sync, cloud sync and quote downloads until you buy the next upgrade. With a bought Moneydance license, the program keeps running and Direct Connect keeps working; only the Plaid based Moneydance+ features stop.

With the bundled Moneydance subscription, the program reverts to trial mode. That is the one outcome in this comparison where stopping payment costs you the application itself, so it is worth deciding at purchase rather than at renewal.

Which one should you buy?

Buy Moneydance if data portability is your priority, if you want documented QIF export on a Mac, if you have a wide pile of legacy files to import, or if you want bank connections that survive a lapsed subscription. Buy the license outright rather than the bundle.

Buy Moneyspire if you want a published price before you commit, if you are on a Chromebook, if several people in the house need it on their own machines, or if you need an Android app that is actively maintained. Go in knowing that keeping bank sync is about $49.99 a year in practice.

If neither wins clearly, the cheapest experiment is running both trials against the same month of real transactions. Moneydance gives you a fully functional trial capped at 100 manually entered transactions with no published time limit, backed by a 90 day money back guarantee on a purchase. That is enough to test an import but not enough to test daily data entry, so import rather than type. If a pile of paper receipts is the thing that actually stops you keeping books current, it is faster to turn those receipts into a clean spreadsheet first and import the result than to key them into either app by hand.

How do these compare with Quicken and Banktivity?

Quicken Classic Deluxe at $83.88 a year buys the broadest bank coverage in the category, roughly 14,000 institutions, plus phone support and real investment reporting. Both of these apps are cheaper and neither matches that connection coverage. Banktivity is macOS and iOS only, runs $6.99 to $10.99 a month billed annually, and exports QIF, CSV and TXF.

The rough ordering: Banktivity if you are all in on Apple, Moneydance if portability and legacy imports matter, Moneyspire if you want a flat published price across four platforms, and Quicken if you want the bank connections to be somebody else's problem. There is also GnuCash, which is free and reads QIF, if you are willing to learn double entry bookkeeping.

More on this cluster: Moneyspire vs Quicken pricing, Banktivity reviews, cost and alternatives, Moneydance vs Quicken, the full Moneyspire review, Banktivity vs Quicken, Quicken alternatives compared, how to export a QIF file from Quicken and the best QIF to QBO converters compared.