The Demise Of Quicken, And The Rise Of Mint Online
27 Jan
Intuit have announced they'll no longer be marketing their aging Quicken personal finance software suite. It will be replaced by their software as a service solution Mint.com
As a first step towards discontinuation, Intuit have announced they'll no longer be marketing their aging Quicken personal finance software suite. It will be replaced by their software as a service solution Mint.com, which was acquired for $170 million in September 2009. Mint.com had been around for two years only at that point, but in that time it easily surpassed Quicken Online in terms of visitors and assets tracked.
Mint's many uses include:
- Budget tracking
- Investment tracking (brokerage, 401k past and present, IRA, and 529 accounts)
- View all bank accounts in one place
- Bill management and reminders
- Transaction management and reporting
Those features are actually all available in Quicken Online as well, as reported in this thorough comparison on Ars Technica. The biggest difference however is that Mint.com was/is free and, being a smart, small company of talented web developers, they were able to roll out feature parity and improvement pretty quickly against their long standing rival.
Chart comparing traffic for Mint.com and Quicken.Intuit.com.
No doubt the roadmap will be to include more "recommendations". Knowing someone's spending habits means that Mint can look at the financial products used by other users with similar profiles and recommend, among other things, discounts for products you commonly purchase, credit cards to switch to, new savings accounts, reward programs, mortgages, 401K's etc.
Another in the SaaS space, Wesabe.com does this part well but as Techcrunch noted, Wesabe died as momentum and PR grew for Mint.com. Check out the comments on the Techcrunch article to see more in the same space. With Intuit's purse strings, talent and marketing machine, Mint.com will continue to dominate the personal finance software space.
Users of Quicken Online and Quicken desktop software should read these FAQs to find out how and when to start using Mint.
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