The 4 Best Firefly III Alternatives in 2026

It depends on what Firefly III is not doing for you. If you want to keep double-entry books and add investments, Beancount keeps the ledger as plain-text files you own and models lots, cost basis and capital gains. If you mainly budget, Actual Budget is free, MIT-licensed envelope budgeting. If you want one self-hosted dashboard for bank accounts, stocks and crypto, Sure is the open-source fork of Maybe Finance. And if you want double-entry with no server at all, GnuCash is a free desktop application. All four can run at no cost on your own machine; details checked October 9, 2026.

They do different jobs. Firefly III is a double-entry record of where your money went, with budgets, piggy banks, rules and a REST API, running on a server you host. Actual Budget is envelope (zero-based) budgeting: you assign the money you have to categories, which Firefly III's own documentation says it will not support. Actual is local-first and MIT-licensed, with desktop apps and a self-hostable sync server; its docs say it does not support multi-currency beyond an experimental feature, while Firefly III supports any currency. Choose Actual to plan spending, Firefly III to record it — and a full ledger such as Beancount if you also need investments.

Yes, if what you want is a net-worth dashboard rather than a ledger. Sure is the community fork of Maybe Finance, distributed under AGPLv3 — the same licence as Firefly III — and it can be self-hosted with Docker. It tracks bank accounts, stocks, crypto and other assets or debts in any currency, with budgets, categorization rules and an AI assistant. It also offers a hosted app: its pricing page listed plans at $0, $5 a month ($50 a year) and $9 a month ($90 a year) on October 9, 2026, with the free plan keeping 90 days of data. It is a younger project than Firefly III, with releases still in the v0.7 series on that date.

Both are free, open-source, double-entry tools; the difference is where they run. Firefly III is a web application you host on a server and reach from a browser. GnuCash is a desktop application for Windows, macOS and Linux that stores your books in a local file, so there is nothing to host. GnuCash also goes further into accounting: stock, bond and mutual-fund accounts with online quotes, plus small-business features such as invoicing. Firefly III's documentation says plainly that some features of advanced programs like GnuCash are outside its scope. GnuCash has no first-party web or mobile version listed on its site.

No. Firefly III's documentation says you will not be able to manage your stocks or portfolio with it, and suggests a separate portfolio tool. That is the most common reason to look for an alternative. Beancount and GnuCash treat securities as part of the same double-entry books, Sure tracks stocks and crypto alongside bank accounts, and Actual Budget records investments only as off-budget account balances you update yourself.

Firefly III exports to CSV. The export page is at /export in the web interface, and the command line can write separate files for transactions, accounts, budgets, categories, tags, rules and piggy banks. Export first, keep a database backup as well (the documentation says the export is not a backup), and test the import on one account over a short period before moving everything. Actual Budget, Sure, GnuCash and Beancount all accept CSV; reconcile closing balances against your statements before you retire the old server.