It’s a new year. Time to take stock of your assets, take a look at your spending, and set yourself on a course for financial success in 2025. Luckily, it’s never been easier. There are high-quality, easy-to-use apps and software to handle all of your budgeting, investing, and payment needs. But which apps are the best for the job?
This is our second year of Readers’ Choice surveys covering personal finance, digital wallets, and payment apps. And we’ve adding a new category this year: stock trading. The days of Gamestop meme stock trading may be (mostly) over, but according to Statista, in 2024, 62% of all US families dabbled in the stock market. That number’s been growing since 2016, but hasn’t yet reached the highs of 2007, the year before the recession. Barring catastrophe, it will.
When it comes to your finances, you need to have full faith in all the apps you use. Your personal information and, indeed, all your money are literally invested in these services. This survey highlights the brands you, our readers, find the most worthy of your trust and which deliver the highest customer satisfaction. The winners will help you handle almost every aspect of personal finance.
(Last year, this story included income tax preparation software, but this time around, we’re running that survey through tax season. If you’d like to contribute to our future story, rate your tax prep app now.)
The Top Personal Finance Apps for 2025
While there are many players in the world of personal finance apps, two names have long reigned over the rest, Intuit and Quicken. In fact, Intuit developed the Quicken budgeting software more than 40 years ago but sold it off a decade ago to focus on its software for taxes (TurboTax) and businesses (QuickBooks). But Intuit couldn’t help itself; it bought the free credit and finance manager platform Credit Karma in 2020, putting it back in competition with Quicken, which is now a separate company selling it’s eponymous software.
This year, Credit Karma and Quicken both saw drops in their overall scores, but are tied on our most important metric: Overall satisfaction. Nevertheless, Quicken earns our Readers’ Choice award for its leads in several subcategories, including bill payment, investment tracking, and security.
(Note: Click the down, left, and right arrows in our interactive charts to view various elements of our survey results.)
Behind Quicken, Intuit’s Credit Karma fares well overall for personal finance this year. We’re also handing Credit Karma an award based on one particular important rating: credit monitoring, which has become increasingly important as data breaches become more frequent. It is also on top for financial advice, cost (it’s free with ads), and its mobile app, which scores almost two full points ahead of Quicken.
Notable this year: Despite it not being classified, even remotely, as a dedicated finance app, we gave readers the option in our survey to choose Microsoft Excel because we received so many write-in votes for Excel last year. And this time around, Excel earns our top overall satisfaction score and ranks highest for reliability and trustworthiness. That said, Excel does not receive a high recommendation rating—a key factor for an overall Readers’ Choice winner. This could be because Excel users know better than to recommend that newbies learn how to customize a spreadsheet this versatile and powerful for budgeting or finance tracking. If you use Excel to track money, you’re on your own in figuring out how to get it to do what you need. Microsoft 365 subscribers, however, should consider checking out the Money in Excel dynamic template to build a spreadsheet finance tracker.
For more in-depth reviews, read The Best Personal Finance and Budgeting Apps.
The Top Stock Trading App for 2025
This is the first year our survey has included brokerage apps, the software used to manage investments in stocks and index funds and, in some cases, even cryptocurrency—though it is telling that across all five brands in our results, none earn enough ratings to score for crypto management.
The clear leader here is Fidelity. It’s on top across almost all ratings, including the particularly important overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend categories. It has scores above 9.0 in select sub-categories such as trustworthiness (where it’s tied with Vanguard), reliability, security, investment tracking, and straightforward trading. One commenter says, “Fidelity is all you need to completely integrate all your finances and investments, including personal and business banking.” Fidelity’s high scores back up that claim.
In second place, Vanguard isn’t far behind with the top score for cost and value over Fidelity. Vanguard, however, doesn’t score very well for investment management on your mobile device. Charles Schwab has the rating for the best mobile app, if that’s a priority. Otherwise, it and Merrill sit in the middle of the list for almost every subcategory. E*Trade takes last place on most measures except cost and recommendation, keeping just ahead of Merrill.
The Top Digital Wallet Apps for 2025
Do you still carry a wallet? Phone makers don’t want that for you, not when you can put your credit cards, debit cards, and even all your loyalty cards on your mobile device. They might be right: Vibes, a messaging platform, says digital wallet use is soaring, with 17% of consumers using them daily.
Last year’s digital wallet winner returns with some company. Apple is once again our readers’ pick. It scores even higher this time around, taking the top score in all but one category (desktop or web-based access). Its highest ratings are for cost (it’s free), reliability, trustworthiness, and making payments (both online and in-person).
Recommended by Our Editors
Last year, the only other digital wallet besides Apple’s that made the cut was Google Pay, which paled in comparison. This year another player takes second place and shares the award with Apple: PayPal. Google and Samsung’s wallets don’t score as well in most of the ratings, making PayPal the best option for Android users. It outscores third-place Google Pay more often than not, though Google has higher ratings for value and fees.
Where PayPal stumbles is where you would expect if you know the platform—it’s not as good for making payments in person because it’s not built into a mobile operating system like Google or Samsung Pay. Nevertheless, PayPal ties Apple Pay for making payments online.
The Top Online Payment Apps for 2025
Payment apps, also known as cash apps (which is confusing because one of them is actually named Cash App), are all about making it easy to send and receive money digitally. They overlap with and are sometimes offshoots of digital wallets. The difference is that you usually can and do use multiple payment apps to ensure the ability to give or receive funds from anyone.
PayPal has taken this award in the past, but no longer. Many new names are now on the list. Top among them are Apple—for of its Apple Cash feature—and Zelle, a service owned by a consortium of US banks. Both are co-winners for this year’s Readers’ Choice award for payment apps.
Zelle’s overall satisfaction score is the same as last year, but PayPal’s fall puts Zelle in the top spot. You can download the Zelle app, but it also integrates with many online banking systems. That’s why Zelle has top marks for desktop access and financial account integration, among other things. A stand out is its score for cost—Zelle is almost always free since you’re typically just using it for bank transfers. Just be careful of banking fraud schemes that involve Zelle.
Apple Cash scores high in almost every measure, especially reliability, trustworthiness, and likelihood to recommend. Naturally, it’s on top for ease of use—all it takes to use it is to pull it up in iMessage on an Apple device. It only works on Apple devices, but that doesn’t bother our readers happily ensconced within that ecosystem.
For more in-depth reviews, read The Best Mobile Payment Apps.
The PCMag Readers’ Choice survey for Finance Apps was in the field from October 21, 2024 until January 6, 2025. For more information on how we conduct surveys, read our survey methodology.
PCMag Readers’ Choice: How Our Surveys Help You Find the Best Products
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About Eric Griffith
Senior Editor, Features
