Rocket Money vs Quicken: Quicken vs Rocket Money Cost and Features

Rocket Money is better at cutting recurring costs, and Quicken is better at keeping records. Rocket Money finds subscriptions, cancels them for you and negotiates bills, all from a phone. Quicken Classic tracks investments by cost basis, pays bills, reconciles accounts and produces rental and business reports. If your goal this month is to spend less, Rocket Money fits; if you need a complete financial history, Quicken does.

A simple test: list the Quicken screens you opened in the last quarter. If it is the spending report, a budget and the net worth total, Rocket Money covers all three and adds the subscription tools Quicken lacks. If the list includes an investment register, a capital gains report, bill pay or anything tagged Schedule C or E, Rocket Money will leave a gap you would have to fill with a second tool, and at that point keeping Quicken is usually simpler.

Rocket Money Premium costs $7 to $14 a month on a pay-what-you-think-is-fair scale, which is $84 to $168 a year, and Premium+ costs $15 a month, $180 a year. Quicken Classic Deluxe costs $83.88 for a first year billed annually, Premier $95.88 and Business & Personal $131.88. Rocket Money also has a free plan; Quicken Classic does not.

Rocket Money's help center describes Premium as a monthly price you choose, adjustable or cancellable at any time, and it does not list an annual plan. New Premium members get a 7 day free trial, after which the monthly charge starts at the price picked during signup. Quicken's guarantee is 30 days. One more line item on the Rocket Money side is the bill negotiation fee covered above, which is charged on success and applies to the free and Premium plans.

No. Rocket Money has no file import for QIF, QFX or CSV. Its help center documents two ways transactions get in: linked accounts, and custom transactions you add by hand for accounts that are not connected. Your Quicken history does not carry over, so Rocket Money starts from whatever your banks send when you link them.

That makes the export the step to get right before you cancel anything. Quicken Classic for Windows exports each account as a QIF file (File, then Export, then QIF File), and our guide on how to export a QIF file from Quicken walks through the settings that keep dates and categories intact. A QIF file is plain text with one field per line, so it is readable to software and awkward for people. Running it through a QIF to Excel converter or a QIF to CSV converter turns ten years of Quicken into a normal spreadsheet with date, payee, amount, category and memo columns you can sort, filter and hand to an accountant.

Quicken for Mac is the awkward case. It has no QIF export, only CSV from registers and reports, so Mac users either export CSV and accept fewer columns or open the file once in Quicken for Windows to produce QIF.

Not in the same depth. Rocket Money Premium syncs investment accounts and includes them in net worth, so you see balances next to checking and credit cards. Quicken Classic tracks each holding with its cost basis, reinvested dividends, and realized and unrealized gains, and Premier adds deeper performance and tax planning views.

For someone with a 401(k) and one brokerage account who only wants a net worth number, Rocket Money is enough. For someone who sells positions in a taxable account and wants the gain on Form 8949 to match their own records, the basis history in Quicken is hard to give up, and it is one more reason to export before the Quicken membership lapses.

No. Rocket Money is a personal finance app with no Schedule C or Schedule E reports, no invoicing and no separate business ledger. Quicken Classic Business & Personal, at $131.88 for a first year, tracks rental income and expenses by property and produces the schedule summaries a tax preparer works from.

If the business side is why you are leaving Quicken, the cleaner move is to put the household on a budgeting app and the business on QuickBooks. The business accounts in Quicken export as QIF like any other, and our QIF to QBO converter turns that file into a QBO file QuickBooks imports as bank transactions, so the history arrives categorized and ready to match instead of retyped. Our page on moving Quicken Home and Business to QuickBooks covers the account setup, and landlords comparing options can see Quicken for rental property.

Usually yes if the savings are real, because the fee is only charged when Rocket Money lowers a bill, but it is steep: 35% to 60% of the first year's savings. On Premium+ at $15 a month there is no negotiation fee at all, so anyone planning to negotiate more than one or two bills should compare the two plans before starting.

Quicken has no equivalent, so this is a feature you gain by switching rather than a trade-off. It is also a feature you can use without leaving Quicken: the free Rocket Money plan includes bill negotiation access, so a Quicken user can run both, keep Quicken for records and let Rocket Money work the phone calls.

Yes, but only on a paid plan. Rocket Money's iPhone and Android apps are available on every tier, while access through a web browser at rocketmoney.com requires Premium or Premium+. There is no installed desktop program, and the CSV export is delivered as an emailed link that has to be opened on a laptop or desktop.

Quicken Classic is the opposite shape: an installed program on Windows or Mac, with a companion mobile and web app that syncs a subset of the data. People who do their finances at a desk once a week tend to prefer Quicken's layout; people who check spending on the phone every few days tend to prefer Rocket Money.

It stays in your Quicken data file, and you keep access to it. Quicken's Data Access Guarantee lets Deluxe and higher members "view, edit, export, and manually enter transactions and accounts" after the membership ends. Bank downloads, quotes, mobile sync and support stop, but the file is not locked.

That softens the switch, but it does not make the data portable. A Quicken file only opens in Quicken, and a copy you cannot read without a working install is a weak archive. Exporting to QIF and converting to a spreadsheet gives you a copy that opens anywhere. We cover the details on what happens when a Quicken subscription expires.

Yes. Rocket Money Premium exports transactions as a CSV file, and Quicken Classic for Windows imports CSV through File, then File Import, then Banking Transactions. Map the date, description and amount columns during import and check the first few rows before importing a full year.

Switch if Quicken has become a spending tracker for you, if most of your money questions are about subscriptions and monthly bills, and if you would rather check your finances on a phone than at a desk. Stay with Quicken if you track investments by lot, pay bills from it, reconcile against statements, or run a rental or side business through it. Many households end up with both: Rocket Money's free plan for subscription alerts and negotiation, Quicken for the records.