Instead YouTube gives me literally nothing but AI spam. :/
I scrolled down a bit more and got this: https://i.postimg.cc/fJcPhG45/Screenshot-20251118-150802.png
Scrolled down some more and this: https://i.postimg.cc/v1khnhRp/Screenshot-20251118-151325.png
I kept scrolling until I ran out of relevant results. Not a single video was legit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much AI slop in one search term and by the gods there is a lot of crap on YouTube.
Anyone have a good comparison video? I’m just wanting a decent comparison of Actual, Firefly III and possibly HomeBank. Feel free to also give me your 2 cents on whatever you use :)
You tube as research platform ?🤔
No shit. The most gen z comment…
No shit ,im born before epoch time in computing , Never used yt for research ,used lib then , now annas lib en Z lib
Once upon a time yes. But then once upon a time the whole internet. I used to hate watching videos for learning but I have cognitive issues now that makes visual learning easier for me. Actually written is now extremely difficult for me. So I will use reviews of things to see how they work before I try them out myself. Just a shame that its so hard to find a real human being to learn from online anymore.
Start a no server demo here and you can try Actual out yourself:
https://demo.actualbudget.org/That way you can try out the Starting fresh steps for real or go through their Tour interactively instead of just reading:
https://actualbudget.org/docs/getting-started/starting-fresh/
https://actualbudget.org/docs/tour/I have, but I find it easier to understand if there’s a human being explaining things as well. I can flounder pretty quickly now if I’m just dropped into it without any guidance :(
This is all just Capitalist slop. Has nothing to do with AI or llms, just the kind of society it exists in and the type of psychopath corporations that delivers. We seem to forget that all other tool we use to de-shittify the net, ALL fight capitalist tendencies, but when AI comes along and gives the Capitalist believers a new tool for scamming people, then it is suddenly the tools fault !!
People hate Capitalism, not the tool…
When we get good, ethical and competitive AI we can execute locally on Linux I’ll be a fan of that. But…
I remember people making this same argument but for social media, doesn’t make any more sense now than it did then. Corpos are the ones in control of that tool, using it helps them so much more than it does you. If you don’t want to support the ideology that developed it, you really need to just not engage.
I’ve got a family member interested in switching to Linux but the finance software is an obstacle. I had a look and landed on gnucash which I thought I would trial myself and then see if if would work for them. I like it!
Ufff. Yeah, I also hit a slop mountain of videos when searching for Seafile comparisons…
Im reasonable happy with Actual Budget. I like that it has desktop apps that can sync woth a server that was easy to set up, I can import various things via .csv, rules to automatically categorise stuff are nice. I dont care about the envelope budgeting or whatever it’s called they’re on about but it’s easy to ignore / turn off.
I have been self hosting fireflyIII for almost 2 months now, I like it, my wife is an accountant and she likes it. I didn’t want to have to pay for an accounting service, and my credit union doesn’t have an api that I am aware of to connect to the paid services anyway.
Would recommend 👍
Have you had to deal with refunds yet? I see that as a criticism and I would have to agree that the official doc’s way of handling them is not ideal for our situation or the way refunds are handled in my country. Interested in knowing if anyone has come up with more creative solutions.
I have not had to do a refund yet
Maybe something from this list could fit your requirements better. I’ve been using Firefly for a couple years now and in combination with 3rd party Android app(s) it’s been okay for me. But refunds have always been hacky for sure.
Thanks, that list is really helpful :)
I got so many AI slop videos regarding tech lately… it’s turning everything into shit :(
At least on YouTube you can tell at a glance that it’s AI.
There’s also text-based tools - not sure if they fit your needs. beancount (with ‘fava’ has a nice web UI), ledger, hledger. Good thing about text based is: you can easily use git.
Not sure if they go as ‘budgeting’ software. ‘Accounting’ might be more accurate.
Why do you think it’s AI?
This shit pre-dates “AI”. AI just lets them do it faster and cheaper.
Multiple videos that have the same style of thumbnail (AI generated face excepted). Multiple videos with a very similar thumbnail and exact same wording. They’re all within the past year, mostly within the past 6 months (this software has existed for many years, why all of a sudden do multiple channels want to do vs or review videos of them). They’re all short videos and its just not possible to give a proper breakdown of feature or a review of budgeting software in that amount of time. The few videos I tested used AI voices and all had a similar start (I didn’t waste my time watching the whole video). The faces on the videos look AI generated or modified…
Thanks for elaborating! I am in no way great at spotting such slop videos, but I did notice some of the stuff you mentioned.
In some of the videos, they have a little “self-cam” in the corner - is that artificial too?
Regarding artificial voicing, I did test a few videos - the phrasing, punctuation and sound effects were similar. Is that how you figure it is artificial?
And what gives away the faces are generated? Most videos even have comments - everything is fake?!
Thanks in advance. If I came across only one of the videos - and did not see all thumbnails in a search for instance - I must shamefully admit that I probably would not have spotted it.
deleted by creator
I’ve been using Actual for a while now, probably close to a year. Before that I was on YNAB, which isn’t FOSS but does have a huge library of material for how to make your budget work for you instead of the other way around.
I got off YNAB after they kept raising their subscription fees for seemingly no reason. Actual is not nearly as feature-rich but you can’t really argue with the price.
I don’t have a video for you but I’ve been using Actual for over a year and really like it. I recommend it. Caveat, I very actively interact with my budget (inputting things manually) and cannot speak for it’s account linking features.
I use actual as well.
The docker compose works really well, basically set it up once and then it works, even with running updates by pulling new container versions.
I used the account importing to start but now input everything manually and don’t do live sync.
Never heard of the other options so didn’t know about them to compare before setting up actual. I do like the methodology of actual, where it has you only budget money that actually exists in your account, that feels very sane to me.
I just installed Firefly yesterday, and I can say that the docker compose setup was easy. I’ve got no real opinions yet, just wanted to mention this for OP in case he reads your experience as it being easier. I imagine they’re both easy.
I’m curious, when you say you stopped importing, does that mean you were getting info from your banks, and stopped doing that? Why did you stop? My next step was to set up the automated importer for Firefly.
I never set up the actual bank sync, I think what I did was basically a CSV export and then import, rather than the bank sync.
But it’s been about a year so not remembering exactly how the import was.
Got it. Thanks.
I use it as well with automation and can confirm. Unfortunately with Simple fun you do have to manually sync accounts but it’s a small price to pay. Just have to remember to hit the sync button when you open the dashboard.
Maybe not what you’re looking for, but there’s a program called “Money Wallet” on Android. It’s on F-Droid and free software. Maybe my favourite because every time I spend cash I just open it up and I enter what I just spent.
For professional use, I’d recommend GNU Cash, though.
I think its budgeting features are lackluster, but I have highly enjoyed gnucash for tracking my expenses, incime & where everything goes.
It’s all manual more or less, and you do double ledger accounting, so all the money is accounted for somewhere.
Seconding gnucash, there’s modern stuff that’s slicker but nothing that works better imo
We need platforms where AI content is just banned. We’re past the point we need to start systematically excluding all this crap.
We need more PeerTube devs to develop it further
Also to switch everybody to Vanillo (not open source but definitely a way better alternative)
Best if they make it so there is no AI Content allowed too or at very least segmented away from human content





