Mint vs. Pageonce: the iPad dilemma
I'll admit: I haven't been an early adopter of applications that help you track and analyze your finances, such as the popular Mint.com.
It was just this week that my wife got motivated enough to dump our financial info into the Website and get an aggregated view of all of our bills, expenses, investments and savings. Mint impressed us, and we've been pretty excited about the insights it already has given us into our financial habits.
Mint has an iPhone app that's somewhat limited. But here's the crux for myself and many others: It doesn't yet have an iPad app. Mint is reportedly working on an iPad app, but it seems the long wait for it has annoyed its user community. Mint apparently uses a lot of Adobe Flash to generate those nice charts and graphs for you to analyze your data -- but all of that doesn't work on Apple's iPad and iPhone platforms, where Flash is forbidden.
Mint, which used to be independent, is now owned by Intuit. People wonder why Intuit hasn't moved quicker to roll out an iPad app for the millions of users on that platform. A Forrester Research report released this week indicates that Mint will roll out iPad and Android tablet apps in the fall.
So, yesterday, I went through what I guess every Mint user who owns an iPad has gone through: I searched for the Mint iPad app online, which I obviously didn't find. Instead, I found its lesser known competitor, Pageonce, which happens to be on basically all platforms: Android, Blackberry, Apple iPad/iPhone, and even the relatively new Windows Phone.
And, because I want to use my iPad as part of my efforts to track my finances, I signed up for Pageonce. I'm willing to give Pageonce a chance right now -- which is something that Mint should have never allowed for me to do! If it works as well as Mint, I may say goodbye to Mint because I can use Pageonce on all my various gadgets.
So, add this blogpost to the cacophany on the Web about Mint's iPad app: What's going on, Intuit?
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Comments
You're serious? You have to ask why intuit drags their feet when it comes to Apple apps? Ask first about the bastardization that is QuickBooks for Mac? For more than a decade Intuit has dropped the ball and has been single-handeledly responsible for the loss of sales of probably tens of thousands of Macs. Businesses buy Windows because their accountants insist on QB, and the version of QB that runs on the Mac has been embarrassingly inadequate. You have heard that the Mac is not for business? It's partly Intuit's fault that that old saw even arose! And the sad part of it is that ex-head of Apple subsidiary Claris was the CEO of Intuit for most of the time where this was a problem. On top of that he has been, and still is, on Apple's board! Every year when I sign the proxy vote for my Apple stock, in the area where you vote for the board, I write "Everybody, but Bill Campbell!" Every. Year. You can tell how much they listen to me, because HE'S STILL THERE!
Posted by: Instig8r | July 1, 2011 7:00 PM
As a long time Mint user, and a recent Pageonce user, I would say go with Pageonce on the iPad.
Mint online has gotten buggier since Intuit took it over, Pageonce is much better and works great!
Posted by: Raj | July 1, 2011 9:31 PM
Nice post. Pageonce is fantastic.
I dumped Mint as soon as they were purchased by Intuit (Quicken), the worse computer company in America.
Posted by: drrjv | July 2, 2011 5:54 AM
I don't get why everyone is so excited about PageOnce. Without tracking where the spending is going, like you can in Mint.com.. I find this to lack most of what I'm looking for. Mint.com was so close, but I really want to do all that they could, but now they are too buggy to be worthwhile.
I'm ready to go back to a desktop app that can automatically sync to all my accounts and allow me to really "account" for my debt and investments. This thing is not cutting it.
Posted by: Karin | July 3, 2011 2:25 PM
Gus - how does PageOnce work? How do you upload your data?
Similar to Mint, Pageonce can connect to your various checking, credit card, loan accounts, etc., via your usernames and passwords for various online accounts. -gs
Posted by: JTK | July 5, 2011 1:32 PM
Intuit certainly hasn't been the most customer friendly company out there.
As soon as I read your comment about being bought by Intuit I cringed.
Certainly is unlikely to be good news for users of Mint.
I tried looking at Quicken & Money years ago and just never saw a need for them. They make many things excessively complicated and if you are doing investments some things the had serious issues dealing with.
Posted by: rich (arizona) | July 6, 2011 6:36 PM
At first, the Pageonce app for Android phones was very very slow but with their updates and my update to Froyo, it is way faster now. Does way more than Mint did (at least after I evaluated both apps several months ago).
Pageonce is compatible with every single financial account I have (including my ATT cell phone bills), so I am thrilled with it!
Posted by: Crusader | August 17, 2011 11:11 AM
Has anyone contacted banks to ask them if they are okay with giving Mint or Pageonce bank passwords? If a rogue employee or hacker gets your bank username and password, what is your recourse? Both Mint and Pageonce make you agree that they have no liability (or if they are found to have liability, it is limited to $500).
Posted by: MGP | October 6, 2011 3:43 PM
I use both on my android phone and here is my observations. Mint has a lot more types of information that it can track, so it does a better job at giving you an overall financial picture. It can track your home values (via Zillow), retimement accounts, etc. However, Pageonce does a better job at pulling real time information for your bills, so it gives you real time updates for bill payments. They also just started beta testing for a billpay service, which should be nice. It would be nice if the capabilities of both were combined. For now I use Mint to get a quick financial update (balances, etc.) and pageonce for alerting me when bills are due.
Posted by: cirehawk | October 18, 2011 2:22 PM
As a long time (16 year) user of Quicken on my desktop, I'm now looking for an online solution. In the past few years I've had a lot of issues with Quicken messing up my data (I have 23 accounts) and I agree Intuit is a horrible company. I will try mint, but given that it's Intuit owned, I'm leaning towards and rooting for PageOnce.
Posted by: Scoot | January 6, 2012 10:29 AM