CountAbout Review: CountAbout vs Quicken, Pricing and the Quicken Import

CountAbout costs $19.99 a year for Basic and $54.99 a year for Premium, both billed annually. A third tier with invoicing built in is $64.99 a year. Two add-ons are priced separately: invoicing on its own is $10 a year and file attachments are $15 a year. Active military get the Basic plan free with no expiration.

Those figures took effect on April 1, 2026. Before that date Basic was $9.99 and Premium was $39.99, so anyone renewing in 2026 saw the bill roughly double. It is still one of the cheapest paid options in personal finance software, but the gap between it and Simplifi at $47.88 has narrowed to about $7 a year.

No. CountAbout has no permanently free tier for general users. What it has is a 45-day free trial of all Premium features that does not require a credit card, after which you pick Basic at $19.99 or Premium at $54.99. The only genuinely free option is the military plan, which gives active military the Basic feature set with no expiration date.

The no-card trial is worth more than it sounds. Monarch asks for a card up front for a 7-day trial, and Quicken Classic has no trial at all, so you are buying a year blind. Forty-five days is long enough to run two full statement cycles through the product and find out whether the categorization actually holds up on your accounts before any money moves.

One thing: automatic bank downloads. Premium connects to your financial institutions and pulls transactions in on its own. Basic does not connect to anything, so you either type transactions in by hand or import files your bank produces. Everything else, the budgeting, the reports, the categories, the Schedule C and E tracking, the multi-user access, is identical on both tiers.

That makes the $35 a year difference a straightforward question about how you like to work. Plenty of people who left Quicken did so because the bank connections kept breaking, and for them Basic plus a monthly file import is not a downgrade, it is the point. Premium also adds auto-categorization rules, which matter more as transaction volume climbs.

Yes. CountAbout directly imports QFX, QIF and OFX files exported from Quicken, and it brings across accounts, categories, payees and transaction history rather than just a flat list of amounts. The company describes itself as the only web-based personal finance software that imports data from Quicken or Simplifi, and on the evidence of what the competitors accept, that claim holds up.

This is the single reason CountAbout keeps appearing in Quicken-replacement shortlists despite being a small product. Monarch, YNAB and Simplifi all make you flatten your history into CSV, remap the columns by hand, and lose your category tree on the way. If you have ten years in Quicken and you want the payee list and the categories to survive the move, the field of options is very short.

QIF, QFX and OFX. QIF is the format to reach for when you are moving your own history out of Quicken Classic on Windows, because it is the one Quicken exports for a full account with a date range. QFX and OFX are the formats banks hand out for a single account download, so they are more useful for topping up an account than for a bulk migration.

One trap that catches Mac users: Quicken for Mac has not exported QIF since Quicken Mac 2007. If your data lives in the modern Mac product, the QIF route is closed and you will be working from CSV or QFX instead. That is a Quicken limitation, not a CountAbout one, but it changes the plan.

Only partially, and this is the most important limitation to understand before you switch. CountAbout tracks investment account balances. It does not track a full portfolio the way Quicken Classic Premier does, with individual holdings, cost basis, IRR and ROI, or Morningstar Portfolio X-Ray. CountAbout's own comparison material draws exactly this distinction: balances for CountAbout, full portfolio for Quicken.

For most households that is fine. Your brokerage already shows you cost basis and your 1099-B does the tax work. But if you have been using Quicken specifically to reconcile lots and compute basis across taxable accounts, moving to CountAbout means giving that up, and no amount of budgeting polish makes up for it. In that situation Quicken Classic Premier at $95.88 is doing a job CountAbout is not built to do.

It is a good replacement if you used Quicken for budgeting, spending tracking, reconciliation and reports, and you are happy for the data to live in a browser. It is a poor replacement if you used Quicken for portfolio management, if you want a file on your own disk, or if what you actually need is business bookkeeping rather than personal finance.

The honest split is that Quicken Classic does more, and CountAbout costs less and takes your history. At $54.99 against $83.88 you are saving about $29 a year to lose the local file and the deeper investment tooling, and to gain a 45-day trial to test the theory. That is a reasonable trade for a lot of people and a bad one for a smaller group, and the trial is long enough that you do not have to guess which group you are in.

CountAbout states that financial information you enter or download is encrypted, and that data is stored in an Amazon Web Services data center. That is the standard arrangement for a small finance SaaS and there is no public record of a breach. As with any aggregator, the practical risk is not the storage, it is the bank credentials you hand over for automatic downloads on the Premium tier.

If that bothers you, Basic is a real answer rather than a compromise. It never connects to your bank at all, so there are no stored credentials to lose, and you import files yourself. Very few competitors give you a supported way to run without aggregation.

CountAbout does not publish its ownership or corporate details on its website, and we are not going to guess at them. That is worth stating plainly because several review sites assert an answer with more confidence than the available evidence supports. What is verifiable is the product, the pricing and the terms, all of which are on countabout.com and all of which are quoted here with the date they were read.

Yes. CountAbout offers dedicated iOS and Android apps with widgets for quick access to accounts and transactions. That puts it ahead of desktop-only options such as Moneydance, whose companion app is iPhone and iPad only, and level with Simplifi and Monarch, which are mobile and web products with no desktop program at all.

Treat this as unconfirmed. CountAbout advertises connections to thousands of financial institutions, but its own support material directs bank-addition requests at U.S. institutions specifically, and it does not publish a Canadian coverage list. If you bank in Canada, use the 45-day no-card trial to test your actual institutions before paying, rather than relying on a review's assurance.

Up to a point. CountAbout includes Schedule C and Schedule E tracking, so a sole proprietor or a landlord with a couple of units can tag income and expenses to the right schedule and hand a clean report to a preparer at year end. The invoicing tier at $64.99 adds invoice generation and payment tracking on top.

What it is not is double-entry accounting. There is no general ledger, no balance sheet built from journal entries, no accountant login, no payroll, no accounts payable. Once you have inventory, employees, or a CPA who wants access to the books, you have outgrown the category rather than the product, and the answer is real accounting software.

CountAbout, by a wide margin. Premium is $54.99 a year against Monarch Core at $99.99, so CountAbout is $45 cheaper, and CountAbout Basic at $19.99 is a fifth of Monarch's price. CountAbout also imports Quicken data, which Monarch does not.

Monarch earns its price somewhere else. Its household sharing gives each partner a separate login on one subscription, which CountAbout's multi-user access does not replicate in the same way, and its interface is considerably more modern. If you are budgeting jointly and want two real logins, Monarch is worth the difference. If you are migrating a long Quicken history and watching the cost, CountAbout wins on both counts.

CountAbout has not published a detailed explanation. What is documented is the change itself: on April 1, 2026 Basic moved from $9.99 to $19.99 a year and Premium from $39.99 to $54.99. Existing subscribers hit the new rate at renewal rather than immediately.

It is a large increase in percentage terms and a small one in dollars, which is why it has gone largely unremarked. The practical effect is that CountAbout is no longer dramatically cheaper than Simplifi, and the case for it now rests on the Quicken import rather than on price alone.

No, and it is not trying to. CountAbout is personal finance software with some self-employment tagging bolted on. QuickBooks is double-entry accounting with a general ledger, accountant access, payroll and reporting an accountant will accept. They serve different readers who happen to search similar phrases.

The distinction matters most for people who used Quicken Home and Business, now called Quicken Classic Business and Personal at $131.88 a year. That product sits awkwardly between the two worlds, so people leaving it split in both directions: households go to something like CountAbout, and anyone with a real set of books goes to QuickBooks. If you are trying to work out which side of that line you fall on, our breakdown of Quicken vs QuickBooks lays out where personal finance stops and accounting starts.

If the answer above pointed you at accounting rather than budgeting, the path is different and it has a specific obstacle: QuickBooks Online has no Quicken file import. You cannot hand QBO a .QDF or a QIF and have it open. Intuit's own Quicken Converter only produces a QuickBooks Desktop company file, and it cannot read a Quicken for Mac file at all.

The route that does work is to export your Quicken register to QIF and convert it to QBO, the Web Connect format QuickBooks Online imports natively. That is what this converter does, and it writes deterministic transaction IDs, so re-importing the same converted file will not double post your register. Drop your QIF in the tool at the top of this page, or read the full walkthrough on converting Quicken to QuickBooks.

Three things, in this order. First, run the Quicken import on your real file, not a sample, and confirm the payee list and category tree came across intact rather than collapsing into one bucket. Second, if you are on Premium, connect every bank you actually use and watch it for two full statement cycles, because aggregation failures show up on the second sync, not the first. Third, pull the reports you relied on in Quicken and see whether the equivalents exist.

Forty-five days is deliberately long enough for all three. Most people spend two evenings on it, decide it looks fine, and discover the gap in February. Use the time.