Quicken Deluxe Review (2024)

Quicken is the oldest personal finance app available today. It’s had 30-plus years to add features, which can be both good and bad. While it’s the most capable and feature-rich personal finance app you can find, that depth can be intimidating, especially to people who aren't trying to micromanage their finances. Since last year, the software has added or enhanced several features, including the dashboard, transaction registers, reports, and investment tracking. While Quicken is among the very best personal finance apps you can find, Simplifi by Quicken is a better place for most people to start tracking their income and expenses, especially if they're doing it on a phone. For that reason, Simplifi is an Editors’ Choice winner. If Simplifi is too lightweight for you, though, we recommend Quicken without hesitation.

How Much Does Quicken Cost?

Quicken is very reasonably priced, considering its depth. Quicken Deluxe, which we reviewed, costs $59.88 per year (it's listed as $4.99 per month but you have to pay for a year upfront). The cost works out to be just $1 more per month than Simplifi. You can track all your accounts and your net worth, manage spending and savings, create budgets, track bills, do tax and general financial planning, download investment transactions, track your portfolio, and generate reports.

Quicken Premier ($83.88 per year) and Quicken Home & Business ($119.88 per year) add more flexibility and functionality in all these areas.

Where Do You Start With Quicken?

Despite its relative depth, you get started with Quicken the same way you do with many other personal finance apps, like Mint—by logging in to your online bank accounts through the app. By the time you start using the app, you already have a lot of financial feedback waiting for you.

Quicken’s developers have enhanced the dashboard since last year, improving the view of the data shown, such as net worth, top spending categories, and portfolio value. You can select which accounts to display and duplicate the dashboard widgets (sometimes called cards) to compare views from different periods. You can get information you might need quickly, such as account balances and bill-and-income reminders.

(Credit: Quicken)

How Does Quicken Track Income and Expenses?

Quicken began its life as a simple tracker of money in and money out. The software has built up around that task to include many others, but income and expense management is still the core function.

When you log in, Quicken quickly answers on one page (in the mobile app) the top five questions you likely have about your money:

• What are my account balances, particularly the account(s) I use for spending?

• Do I have any bills due soon?

• When will I get paid next?

• Do I have any room left in my [category] budget?

• What transactions have cleared recently?

Quicken answers these questions by displaying registers (that is, the line items of transactions from your connected financial accounts), charts, and lists. Transaction management, the heart of your spending records, is especially robust on the desktop version. But the mobile app’s registers contain the transaction data you likely need when you're away from your computer, including each line item's categorization.

The category list has options that are appropriate for personal income and spending, such as Entertainment, Gifts & Donations, and Health & Fitness, but also includes business categories that are important in reports and in preparing for income taxes. So, you might be able to run a very small business using Quicken.

(Credit: Quicken)

Your income entries should come through with your other bank transaction line items in your registers. Quicken uses that information along with your scheduled bills to create a projected balance chart, which is something you don't typically see in today's personal finance apps.

Does Quicken Tell You Your Credit Score?

Quicken does provide credit score information from Equifax, but it’s only updated quarterly. For some people, that may be more than enough. However, you can get far more thorough credit score data and frequent updates from NerdWallet, WalletHub, and Credit Karma. Credit Karma even shows you your score from two bureaus instead of just one.

Can Quicken Help You Plan for the Future?

Quicken includes a whole suite of tools that help you plan financially, with budgeting features being the key ones. The software lets you create multiple budgets based on categories that you choose or that Quicken chooses for you based on your income and expense patterns. You can view your progress in an easy-to-understand graphical format and adjust your budget when needed. If you want to micromanage your budget, Quicken has a spreadsheet-like table.

(Credit: Quicken)

While Quicken lets you go pretty deep here, it's easier to build and analyze budgets in Mint and Simplifi by Quicken. Those apps are more intuitive for budgeting, too.

Other features in this section help you reduce debt, make a lifetime financial plan, track and project income taxes, and establish savings goals. These interactive tools combine fill-in-the-blank fields with sophisticated calculators and reports. They then feed your responses back to you as graphs and tables. No other personal finance app I've tested offers such detailed planning tools overall.

Can You Track and Pay Bills With Quicken?

Quicken Deluxe offers two levels of bill management. Using Quicken Bill Manager, which is free, you can see each bill’s due date, amount due, and last payment made for the billers you’ve connected to online. If you pay bills offline, you can mark them as paid in Quicken and add other bills manually. Paying bills electronically through Quicken Deluxe costs an additional fee, starting at $9.95 per month.

Very few other personal finance apps include bill payment, and certainly none of the free apps do. You can record your bills in Mint, but not pay them through the app. Both Mint and Rocket Money have an optional feature where you ask the app to negotiate your bills for you and try to get your payments down, but I have not been able to test it.

How Good Is Quicken’s Investment Tracking?

Investment tracking tools are what set Quicken apart from the competition. Most of the investing tools are only available in the desktop version, though. Besides offering an extraordinarily customizable portfolio view, Quicken includes Morningstar’s lauded “X-Ray” analysis of your holdings and numerous other ways to evaluate the strength and possible future performance of your portfolio. You must have Quicken Premier or Home and Business to get X-Ray. It's not included with the Deluxe package.

New features since my last review include expanded customization for the Income by Security, Portfolio Value, and Transactions reports, as well as the ability to create a report of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). The Quicken mobile app displays only a simple holdings page with quotes and a Watch List. You can now get real-time quotes (unique to Quicken), but you have to keep refreshing them manually. Support for new cryptocurrency types and cryptocurrency quotes allows users to track and update the value of the crypto holdings in their portfolios. You get all these features in the Deluxe version of Quicken except for real-time quotes. For that, you need Premier or Home & Business.

(Credit: Quicken)

Can I Access My Quicken Data on the Web?

Quicken does offer a companion web page that you can access from any device that has an internet connection. The page includes the data you would most likely want to see when you are away from your computer, including your account balances, the current month’s budget, and how much you have left to spend. It shows a very simple investing summary and list of top movers, and your top spending categories for the current month. You can dig deeper in areas like bills and income.

New filters have been added to the spending report, and a new calendar view has links to transactions and projected balances. The web version of Quicken has more budget data than it did before, too. It's different enough from the mobile app that it’s worth exploring, but you really have to do it from a desktop or laptop, since the page is not optimized for mobile.

Customizable Reports in Quicken

Desktop Quicken is awash in customizable reports. If you want to do some deep digging into your finances, you should explore them. Every element of your finances is covered, including Spending, Tax, and Investing. None of the personal finance apps I've tested comes near to providing that kind of robust reporting.

What reports are available on the mobile app suffice for getting a quick look at your key numbers. There’s the Monthly Summary, Net Income and Net Worth, and Spending by Category, Payee, and Over Time. I’d like to see a budget vs. actuals report, too.

Is Quicken Safe to Use?

Quicken has been in the business of securing online financial data for three decades. Online components of the software use multi-factor authentication (MFA), and Quicken securely transmits data from your bank servers using robust 256-bit encryption. The information downloaded from your banks is confidential and used only to update your accounts.

You still need to be vigilant about keeping sensitive data safe on any financial app by, for example, never accessing your financial accounts on a public Wi-Fi network. You should also take steps on your own to protect yourself, like using a unique password generated and stored in a password manager, and not clicking suspicious links in email.

Should You Pay for Quicken?

Quicken was revolutionary when it first launched, sparking the field of personal finance apps. These days, we recommend Quicken for power users who want the most feature-rich, flexible personal finance management available. For everyone else, we recommend Simplifi by Quicken, our Editors' Choice winner. And if you're just getting started with personal finance, you may want to ease into it with an even more lightweight and free app, such as Rocket Money, NerdWallet, or Mint.