What to use instead of Quicken for investments

The product

Quicken is household bookkeeping software for the US and Canada; its own fine print says its products are "not designed to function outside the U.S. and Canada". It comes in two shapes. Quicken Classic is the desktop program for Windows and Mac. Your data file lives on your own computer, and the program downloads transactions and prices from your bank and broker. Quicken Simplifi is a web and phone app whose data lives in Quicken's cloud. Both track bank accounts, cards, bills and budgets as well as investments. Budgeting and bill-paying are outside this catalogue, so this page deals only with the investment register: holdings, lots, prices, performance and the capital-gains side.

On the investment side, Quicken's comparison page, read on 9 October 2026, sells Classic Premier as "best for serious investors". Its feature table lists portfolio views with cost basis, gain and loss and over 100 fields, a capital gains estimator for selling across lots, Morningstar fund ratings and Portfolio X-ray, performance views such as growth of 10K and average annual return, and real-time quotes. The same table lists built-in Schedule B and Schedule D reports among Classic's tax features.

The subscription. Every current Quicken is a yearly membership. Quicken's discontinuation page lists Quicken 2017 and older as the versions released before the subscription model, and dates the end of support for Quicken 2017 on Windows and Mac to 30 April 2020. A letter signed by Eric Dunn as CEO of Quicken Inc., still on its support site, made the case at launch: annual upgraders would pay a third less, 51.99 dollars for Deluxe against 77.99, and infrequent upgraders more. Quicken's own price feed, read on 9 October 2026, lists Deluxe at 83.88 dollars a year, Premier at 107.88, Business and Personal at 149.88 and Simplifi at 83.88. All are billed annually, with first-year discounts for new members until 6 November 2026, and renew "at the then-current rates".

What a lapse costs. This is the part people search for. On expiry, Quicken's discontinuation page, updated on 5 November 2024, stops these services: online bill pay, "downloading and/or importing financial data", downloading stock quotes and news, uploading portfolio information, live support, and patches and updates. Its Data Access Guarantee, updated on 31 March 2026, keeps Deluxe and higher usable: you can view, edit, export and manually enter data. Starter becomes read-only. Simplifi and Quicken Business and Personal are not covered by the guarantee at all.

For an investment register, the important word is "importing". An expired Classic keeps your history, but it fetches no new prices, downloads no new trades and, by Quicken's own wording, imports no financial data either. You would type every trade and every price.

Platforms. Quicken's system requirements, updated on 2 July 2026, list Windows 10 and 11 (not S mode, Arm through emulation) and the current and two previous versions of macOS. There is no Linux build, and the web and mobile apps are companions that need an active desktop subscription.

What to use instead

Start with the reason you are leaving, because the picks split along it.

The subscription, or the cloud. Portfolio Performance is free and open source, runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and keeps everything in one file on your disk. It computes true time-weighted return and IRR, which is more than Quicken's average annual return tells you. The price is labour: there is no broker connection, so trades arrive as PDF statements, CSV files or an Interactive Brokers Flex Query, and its PDF importers lean European. Wealthfolio is the newer local-first app, keeping holdings, net worth and liabilities in a SQLite file on the same three desktops. It is the only pick that adds broker sync to a local file, through a hosted add-on called Connect: 79 dollars a year for five institutions, routed through SnapTrade and refreshed once a day. Ghostfolio is the self-hosted web answer — Docker, PostgreSQL and Redis on your own machine, open source, with no broker connection at any tier. The three-way comparison sorts those three.

The downloads. If what you valued was opening Quicken and finding yesterday's trades already there, you are choosing an aggregator. Kubera routes connections through nine of them, including Plaid, MX, Yodlee and SnapTrade, and puts banks, brokerages, crypto, property and debts on one balance sheet, at 250 dollars a year with no monthly plan. Stock Rover keeps read-only Yodlee brokerage links even on its free account, refreshed nightly. The analytics on top — IRR and time-weighted return, Sharpe, beta and drawdown — start at Premium, 29 dollars a month billed annually, and it covers US and Canadian listings only. How aggregators reach your brokerage explains why every one of these breaks in the same places Quicken's downloads did.

Dividends and the tax side. Sharesight syncs trades directly from Interactive Brokers and, through SnapTrade, from Robinhood, Fidelity, E*TRADE, Webull and a few others, and records dividends and corporate actions itself. Its free plan holds ten holdings. For US investors its sold-securities report is computed on average cost, a starting point for an accountant rather than Quicken's Schedule D.

What you give up

One ledger for everything. Quicken's investment accounts sit in the same file as your checking account, cards and bills, so a dividend swept to the bank is one transfer, not two entries in two programs. The picks are investment trackers. Kubera and Wealthfolio go furthest toward a whole balance sheet, with debts and liabilities beside the holdings, but neither is budgeting software, and budgeting is outside this catalogue.

US tax output. Quicken Classic lists built-in Schedule B and Schedule D reports and estimates gains across lots before you sell. Nothing here replaces that for a US filer. Portfolio Performance records taxes and computes gains by FIFO or moving average, but nothing shaped for filing. Sharesight's real tax reports are for Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Your broker's 1099-B remains the document that counts, and for wash sales the how-to on reconciling them across accounts applies.

Quicken's download formats. Quicken connects to banks four ways: Express Web Connect, Express Web Connect Plus, Direct Connect and Web Connect, the last of which is a file you download from your bank's website and import, usually offered as a Quicken or QFX download. None of the picks' cards lists QFX or OFX among its import formats, so a broker that only offers a Quicken download leaves you with CSV, PDF statements or an aggregator.

Migration notes

Export before you cancel, but do not rely on it alone. Deluxe and higher keep export after expiry under the Data Access Guarantee, but Starter turns read-only. Investment history is the part that converts worst between programs. Rebuild from the broker's own records where you can — exporting broker trade history covers where each broker keeps them — and Quicken's own connection page notes that most banks offer only the last 90 days for download in any case.

Carry cost basis lot by lot. A tracker that receives only today's positions will compute gains against today's prices. Enter each lot with its date and original cost, and keep the adjustments Quicken holds for splits, return of capital and reinvested dividends. Carrying cost basis across a transfer is the same problem in another form.

Expect a different return figure. Quicken's average annual return, Portfolio Performance's time-weighted return and IRR, and Sharesight's money-weighted figure are three different calculations. None of them is wrong, and they will not match. Why your tracker and broker disagree and the TWR and XIRR how-to explain the gap.

Turn off renewal on Quicken's site. Memberships renew automatically at the then-current price and are managed from the My Account page, per Quicken's pricing fine print. The renewal is charged to the card on file on the expiration date.