Actual

Actual Budget is a personal finance management tool built around envelope budgeting, the method where you assign every dollar you actually have to a specific category before spending it. No projected income, no made-up numbers. You budget what's in your accounts right now, which keeps your plan grounded in reality.

It's local-first by design. Your data lives on your device, and the app works fully offline. Sync happens in the background across as many devices as you want, but a dropped connection doesn't stop you from using it. For people who've grown uncomfortable with cloud-first finance tools, that's a meaningful distinction.

Key capabilities:

• Envelope budgeting assigns real cash on hand to categories, so overspending in one area is immediately visible
• Bank sync connects to goCardless (EU/UK) and SimpleFIN (US/Canada) for automatic transaction imports
• Transaction imports support QIF, OFX, QFX, CAMT.053, and CSV files
• Split transactions and transfers are handled in the same editor, with linked entries on both sides of a transfer
• Reports include built-in net worth and cash flow views, plus a custom report engine for anything else
• End-to-end encryption is optional but available, keeping data unreadable even to the sync server