It's over. After a protracted bake-off I have finally deleted the two losers in my three-way personal finance competition. I wanted to find an alternative to Quicken, but Quicken still wins on its technical merits. Read on for details.

First, what have I got against Quicken? I used to love it; in fact, my second computer purchase was made so that I could run Quicken—Quicken 7 for DOS.

Later, when I bought a Mac, it came with Quicken 5 installed. It was a dream, and remains, in my opinion, one of the best pieces of software ever written. Never had a bug that I saw. Perfectly behaved, crisp, clean, fast, and consistent. The love affair continued. I could also, in that version, send payments electronically via CheckFree—it was the dawn of electronic banking. Awesome.

Then the upgrades began. Quicken 98, 99, 2000, 2001… this was probably a warning sign, the fact that releases now were tied to fiscal years instead of (for example) to product maturity. I waited a long time before upgrading Quicken. Why should I upgrade, indeed? Quicken 5 was The Stuff and did everything I wanted…except…full online banking. By which I mean not just sending payments but downloading transactions from an institution directly into the register. Very big deal.

And this is why I hate Quicken today. It has this extremely valuable online banking feature. Sort of. The taunting! It drives me mad! When it works, oh man, then that is how I want to bank. I require my personal finance software to perform this function. But it is SO EXTREMELY BUGGY. How can it be so buggy? I mean, it crashes, actually crashes, and crashes a lot, when trying to download transactions, and the institution that causes the most crashing (O the irony) is the special Quicken Visa that I got for this purpose! (Note: To Quicken’s credit, these countless crashes have never lost any existing transaction data.)

So after many years of using Quicken I am interested to see if there are any competitors, since competition frequently brings out the best in a product, and the lack of competition, the opposite. I knew that the free software movement was offering GnuCash, and I noticed on Apple’s MacOS X Downloads page that there was something called iBank whose screenshots looked great and whose rating on VersionTracker was quite high. I was ready for a personal finance bakeoff.

My whole purpose in using Quicken is to save time, so I didn’t undertake a time-consuming review like this lightly. It meant that for awhile, my finances would take a lot longer to do than before, using three programs instead of one. But at the end I would find out whether my loyalty to Quicken was based on sloth or on actual technical merits.

As I gave away in the beginning, it turns out that Quicken is still the best. But the details as to why are still interesting, and even if the competitors don’t work for me, they might work for you. Stay tuned to this blog for what I found out about GnuCash and iBank.