Comparison

Best Budget vs Spending

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Best Budget

This personal finance app helps you manage your money by creating unlimited income and expense budgets. Track transactions, monitor spending against your budgets, and gain insights into your financial habits. It offers robust reporting and data management features to help you become your own financial expert.

Highlights
  • Create unlimited budgets
  • Track income and expenses
  • Set budget details (name, amount, category)
  • Rollover budget amounts
  • Transfer funds between budgets
  • View transaction history
  • Generate income/expense reports
  • Export budgets (HTML, CSV, PDF)
Features
Read full description

Best Budget is an easy to use app to help you keep to a budget, as a personal finance application, you can create unlimited income and expense budgets with or without recurring, and track the transitions of each budget. With Best Budget, you can check your income and expense at a glance, and monitor which transactions are going on a budget. Best Budget will help you to become your own financial expert. Features: ⁃ Create unlimited expense or income budgets. ⁃ Set budget name, amount, type, category, date range and if no cycle or cycle by a specific date range etc. ⁃ Set if budget available amount is rollover or not. ⁃ Transfer available amount from one budget to another. ⁃ Add transactions to each budget. ⁃ View history of past circular budget. ⁃ Time marker to show the status of current date at each budget. ⁃ Custom a reminder to help you manage budgets. ⁃ Report to show your income and expense proportion of a date range. ⁃ Report to show percentage of each budget of a date range. ⁃ Export your budgets in form of HTML, CSV or PDF. ⁃ Custom date range of budgets to be exported. ⁃ Search transactions by name, amount and note. ⁃ Clean and tidy user interface. ⁃ Supports AirPrint. ⁃ Supports WiFi backup & restore. ⁃ Supports Dropbox backup and restore. ⁃ Support migrating data to pro version. ⁃ Supports Apple Watch version. If you have any question or suggestion, please email to userfeed@vip.tom.com.

About

Spending

Easily track your daily and monthly expenses by category. This app helps you understand where your money goes, focusing on small, frequent purchases that can add up. Visualize your spending with graphs and manage multiple budgets for different needs.

Highlights
  • Track spending by category
  • View daily, weekly, and monthly expenditure
  • Spending breakdown graphs
  • Customizable categories
  • Multiple budget management
  • Daily spending limits
Features
Read full description

Ever wondered how a week before pay day your bank account and wallet seem pretty much empty? 'Spending' helps you quickly and easily track what you spend and where you spend it, so those pay day blues might become a thing of the past! Most people know when their utility bills or rental payments leave their account. The thing that makes people go overdrawn, or spend more than they realise, are the little payments; the coffee in a morning, the sandwich at lunch, or the drinks after work. Very quickly these payments mount up, and your wallet seems empty more often than it seems full! Unlike many budget management applications, Spending doesn't want to know which store you were at, which card or account you used, or a host of other things. All Spending wants to know is the category you think the payment relates to, and how much you spent. Using this information, it can tell you that all important information - how much you've spent today and so far this month, enabling you to keep a tighter grip on your financial outgoings. Spending has the following features… - Quickly track the amount you've spent on different categories of expenditure. - See at a glance your expenditure for today, the last 7 days, or the current month. - Graphs that show a breakdown of your spending by category, or date. - Create new categories, and change the order of existing ones. - Have several budgets, e.g. for trips abroad. You can override the currency used for a budget too. - Set a budget amount that applies to each month, but override it for specific months when you know you can spend more, or must spend less. - Quickly see how much money you have left for the current month, and how much you can spend each day.

Screenshots

Best Budget4 screens
Spending4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is ads: Spending at none against Best Budget's shown. Spending also leads on monetization model (free vs free with in-app purchases) and review sentiment (88% vs 76%). Best Budget's advantage is rating (3.9 vs 3.6) and update cadence (every 6 months vs every 18 months). On price and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

ReceptionRating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings

Best Budget holds the better App Store score, 3.9 against 3.6. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Best Budget has 68 ratings behind it against 7, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews complicate that: 76% of Best Budget's written reviews are positive against 88% of Spending's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Best Budget ships an update every 6 months, Spending every 18 months. Both last shipped on October 14, 2026.

Scorecard8 real differences · 2 level
Best Budget versus Spending: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterBest BudgetSpending
PriceFreeFree
Rating3.9 (68 ratings) — better3.6 (7 ratings)
Positive reviews76.2% of reviews87.5% of reviews — better
Number of ratings68 — better7
Update frequencyEvery 6 months — betterEvery 18 months
AdsYesNo — better
In-app purchasesNoNo
MonetizationFree with in-app purchasesFree — better
DevicesiPhone, iPad, iPod, Apple Watch — betteriPhone, iPod
Requires iOS169.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size52 MB4 MB
Age rating4+4+
Developer倩 赵Steve Harris

Customer experience

Best Budget

All ratings68 ratings
Positive69.1%
Neutral13.2%
Negative17.6%
Written reviews227 reviews
Positive76.2%
Neutral6.2%
Negative17.6%

Spending

All ratings7 ratings
Positive71.4%
Neutral0.0%
Negative28.6%
Written reviews8 reviews
Positive87.5%
Neutral0.0%
Negative12.5%

Bugs and requests

Best Budget

Reported bugs

3 issues
  • Transactions not saving properly
  • Budgets disappearing without explanation
  • Incorrect calculations and balance display

Requested features

4 requests
  • Ability to link accounts and sync data
  • More detailed reporting and analytics
  • Recurring income and expense options
  • Improved user guide and tutorials

Spending

Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.

In-app purchases

None

Best Budget

No in-app purchases

None

Spending

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Best Budget free?
Best Budget is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Spending free?
Spending is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Which has better reviews, Best Budget or Spending?
Best Budget is rated higher. Best Budget averages 3.9 out of 5 from 68 ratings, while Spending averages 3.6 from 7 ratings.
Do Best Budget or Spending have ads?
Best Budget shows ads; Spending does not.
Which is updated more often, Best Budget or Spending?
Best Budget ships an update every 6 months, and Spending every 18 months. Most recently, Best Budget was updated on October 14, 2026 and Spending on October 14, 2026.

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