Open-source budgeting and personal finance apps

Apps for budgets, expenses and investments that keep your financial records on your own devices or server instead of a fintech company's cloud.

3 open-source projects, checked against GitHub on 1 November 2026.

All 3 money & budgeting projects

Showing all 3, ordered by health score.

  1. 91 Active
    Actual Budget

    A local-first personal finance app

    MIT
    Setup
    1 of 5
    Stars
    29.9k
    Release
    2 October 2026
  2. 76 Active
    Ghostfolio

    Open Source Wealth Management Software. Angular + NestJS + Prisma + Nx + TypeScript

    AGPL-3.0
    Setup
    2 of 5
    Stars
    9.6k
    Release
    31 October 2026
  3. 75 Active
    Firefly III

    Firefly III: a personal finances manager

    AGPL-3.0 relicensed 2019
    Setup
    From source
    Stars
    25.1k
    Release
    11 October 2026

Our picks by use case

  • Envelope budgeting

    Actual Budget gives every unit of income a job, works offline on your devices and syncs through a lightweight server.

  • Detailed expense tracking

    Firefly III records transactions with budgets, categories and tags and explains your spending with many reports.

  • Investment portfolios

    Ghostfolio follows stocks, ETFs and crypto across brokers and calculates returns including dividends.

How to choose a personal finance app

Personal finance tools follow different methods. Envelope budgeting assigns income to categories in advance; expense trackers record what happened and explain it with reports; portfolio trackers follow investments across brokers. Pick the method first, then the app.

Budgeting method

If you want to plan spending before it happens, choose an envelope budget like Actual Budget. If you mainly want to understand where money went, an expense tracker such as Firefly III fits better. Investments need a tool of their own.

Getting your data in

Bank connections are the weak spot of self-hosted finance apps. Firefly III relies on separate import tools for bank and file data, so check which formats your bank exports before you move years of history.

Who maintains it

Firefly III and Ghostfolio each depend mostly on one developer, while Actual Budget had 49 people committing in the last 90 days. Your financial history should outlive any app, so make sure you can export it.

Privacy and backups

Running the app yourself keeps balances and transactions off third-party servers, but it also makes you responsible for backups and access. Encrypt the backups and reach the app only over HTTPS.

Drafted with AI from the projects’ READMEs and our data, then checked against that data on 31 October 2026. Report a correction

Which of these are really open source?

Fully open source (3)OSI-approved license, no paid parts in the repository
Actual Budget, Firefly III, Ghostfolio
Open source with paid parts (0)OSI license, but some features are under commercial terms
None
Not OSI open source (0)Code is public, use is restricted
None
License changesNewest first
Firefly III: GPL-3.0 → AGPL-3.0, 2019

Read automatically from each repository’s license files every day. How we read licenses

Questions about open-source money & budgeting

What are the most popular open-source money & budgeting projects?

By GitHub stars: Actual Budget (29.9k), Firefly III (25.1k), Ghostfolio (9.6k). By our health score, the most actively maintained are Actual Budget (91), Ghostfolio (76), Firefly III (75).

Which money & budgeting projects are fully open source?

3 of the 3 use an OSI-approved license with no paid parts in the repository, including Actual Budget, Firefly III, Ghostfolio.

Which are the easiest to self-host?

Judged by the services in their compose files, Actual Budget, Ghostfolio need the least setup.

Which projects have changed their license?

Firefly III (to AGPL-3.0 in 2019). Each project page links to the commit that made the change.

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