Quicken Online Review

Earlier this year, Intuit released a new Web-based version of its legendary personal finance management software Quicken called Quicken Online Edition. Created especially for newbies to managing money, Quicken Online can help you tackle your financial challenges with simple, user-friendly features.

In this Quicken Online Edition Review, I take a look at some of Quicken Online’s features, strengths and weaknesses, and possible uses.

What Quicken Online Offers

For just $2.99 per month (after a 30-day free trial), Quicken Online will automatically update itself from your bank accounts and credit cards every night, provide bill payment reminders via text message or email, and allow you to create and track detailed personal budgets, all while protecting your financial information with state-of-the-art security features.

Quicken Online allows you to view invoices, transaction details, account balances, and more anywhere you can get online. You can also create charts and graphs that quickly analyze your spending habits.

What Quicken Online Lacks

Due to its fairly low price and younger target audience, users experienced with Quicken desktop software will find Quicken Online to be fairly “light” on features. Quicken Online does not support investment tracking, nor can it export data to Quicken Desktop or integrate with TurboTax. Expect some of these features to be added, however, as Quicken determines what users want.

Quicken Online Security

Quicken Online is as secure as any financial institution’s website, perhaps even more so. Quicken requires more than just a username and password to login to your account. In addition, Quicken will not store your account numbers, and SSL and 128 bit encryption makes your financial data unreadable as it is transferred to Quicken online.

The only downside to all this security is that it can be difficult to initially link some bank accounts to update Quicken. (Though this is not unique to Quicken – it also happens with similar programs like Yodlee, Mint, and Mvelopes). The good news is once your accounts are linked, updates will be automatic going forward.

Final Thoughts

Quicken Online is the perfect introduction to using technology to manage your money, and a great deal for just $2.99 per month. If you’ve never used Quicken before, I strongly recommend you try Quicken Online Edition for free.

You may also want to compare Quicken Online to Mvelopes, another online budgeting tool that also offers a free 30-day trial.