Meet Maggie, PCMag'sRocket Money is a comprehensive personal finance solution that offers helpful tools for automating saving and budgeting, checking your credit score, and tracking your financial accounts and transactions. It does so within a colorful, lively user experience that provides feedback quickly. And if you are trying to get out of debt, its features for canceling subscriptions and negotiating (some) bills add extra appeal. The latest version offers several new features and enhancements, including Apple Card linking, a dark interface mode, improved transaction and tag organization, and a Learning Hub. However, its odd (and slightly expensive) premium pricing model means it falls just short of our Editors' Choice winners, Monarch and Quicken Simplifi.
Rocket Money provides basic account management features and balance alerts for free, but its best tools, including advanced budgeting and transaction management, a comprehensive dashboard, subscription cancellation assistance, and shared accounts, require a Premium account. This tier also lets you check your credit score and get a breakdown of its contributing factors. As with a few competitors, some Premium tools are available only via Rocket Money’s mobile apps. Subscribers to the free version can’t access the website; they can only use the mobile app.
Rocket Money's Premium plan uses an atypical pay-what-you-wish pricing model. But it limits the acceptable range between $11 to $13 per month; you can't pay less. This price scale doesn’t appear until after you begin the setup process, which demands a credit card. You can try it for seven days, but only by manually canceling after you subscribe to the premium tier.
Even the low end of Rocket Money's scale seems a bit high compared with competitors, which are also more straightforward about subscription costs. Simplifi is just $6.99 per month (billed annually), while Monarch starts at $8.33 per month (billed annually). Credit Karma and NerdWallet are free, though they lack Rocket Money’s wealth of features and friendly user experience. They cover operational costs by serving targeted ads for financial products, such as credit cards. (Rocket Money now has a similar page of offers.)
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The site’s setup is similar to that of most other budgeting apps. First, connect your online financial accounts so you can import transactions. It uses Plaid, a secure, well-known third-party service, to establish these connections. Once you complete that step, you're ready to start working with the app. Rocket Money begins to give feedback on your finances immediately.
The app's interface is attractive and easy to understand. Its designers managed to include the most important data on the main dashboard without making it feel crowded. Links from the dashboard take you to pages with deeper information, such as account balances, budget data, and recent and upcoming transactions.
The dashboard on the mobile apps (available for Android and iOS) has more content. For example, it shows your credit score (coming soon to the web version), net worth, and Smart Recommendations (suggestions for improving your financial management by using tools such as savings goals). It displays recent and upcoming transactions, along with links to other components, such as the subscription management tool. The latest version of the dashboard includes several challenges that you can interact with to improve your financial habits, such as Bad Habit Breaker and Weekly Snapshot. Beginners might find these helpful, but I don’t think more sophisticated users will find them valuable. The iOS version of the app also offers new widgets for your home screen that show important data. Examples include Recent Transactions, Safe to Spend, and Upcoming Bills.
Rocket Money offers more help resources than in the past. For example, its new Learning Center features articles on various aspects of personal finance. A decently comprehensive Help Center is available, but I didn’t need to consult it often because of the app’s intuitive design. Finally, you can reach support via chat; this is not a chatbot, nor an instant form of help. In testing, I entered a message about my billing account when no one was around. I was pleased to get an email from a Rocket Money rep a few hours later with a friendly response. You can also explore Rocket Money in demo mode if you want to poke around without connecting your data.
Transaction management is one of Rocket Money’s strengths. It automatically sends imported transactions to three places: the transaction register, a list of recurring transactions (such as subscription fees), and your budget. The site does an excellent job of guessing transaction categories, though I still recommend you check them.
In the transaction register, you can mark items as recurring or tax-deductible, and remove them from your budgets or other areas as needed. Rocket Money lets you add notes to a transaction and split one if, for example, you buy $100 of stuff from a store and want to classify $60 as groceries and $40 as pet food. You can also create a rule that triggers a specific activity (such as a category assignment, a renaming, or a tax-deductible status change) for every transaction with the same vendor name, date, account, or amount. Tags are more flexible now, too.
As mentioned, Rocket Money identifies recurring transactions, such as subscription fees, and lists them. The app asks whether you want to cancel any of these, then helps you do so. The service provides instructions on how to cancel a subscription in case it can't. No personal finance app I've tested is perfect at finding all recurring transactions, but Rocket Money lets you move misclassified transactions from Inactive to Active.
Rocket Money takes a fairly standard approach to budgeting. The browser-based version and mobile apps provide roughly comparable tools and data, though with slightly different designs. Both allow you to create individual budgets for spending and earning categories, such as Auto & Transport, Charitable Donations, and Pets. Rocket Money automatically starts an overall budget for you in multiple categories based on your current and previous spending. Each budget category has a dedicated page with charts showing your past spending.
You can adjust your budgets as you determine how closely they match your actual spending. Rocket Money allows only one budget at a time, so you have to wipe the slate clean and start over if you want a new one. It's possible to assign budgets to earnings or expenses and mark them as tax-deductible. These tools work well for people who want help assembling and monitoring a basic budget, though YNAB provides more advanced tools. It delivers unparalleled feedback and guidance (once you get past its learning curve).
Rocket Money doesn't have dedicated reports for budget versus actual spending like Quicken Classic, but it does show related financial breakdowns via charts, lists, and tables throughout the site.
The service also offers a non-interest-bearing savings account tied to a goal-setting tool (Rocket Money Financial Goals) through NBKC Bank, an FDIC-insured institution. You fund it by linking it to an external account. You have two transfer options here. If you choose Smart Savings, Rocket Money will put you on Autopilot, set up a savings plan for you, and make small deposits every few days based on your spending. Or you can choose Custom Savings, in which you set the transfer schedule and amounts for Rocket Money to move. I like Rocket Money’s automation and concepts here, but I’m surprised the savings account doesn't earn interest. Credit Karma's equivalent Savings account does. PCMag doesn't evaluate financial products.
Rocket Money isn't as inventive with investment tracking. It only lists account activity and displays a simple chart. It lacks some tools competitors offer, such as regular reporting of gains and losses, related news, and research aids.
If you can't make your regular bill payments, Rocket Money might be able to help. You can ask it to try to negotiate lower bills directly with your billers. The service charges a percentage of the amount you save in the first year and doesn’t charge anything if it isn't successful. If you're trying to get out of debt, and Rocket Money can cut down more than one of your bills dramatically, splitting your savings might be worth it. However, the list of billers it supports isn't lengthy. I found just three of mine: Comcast (Xfinity), The New York Times, and Verizon. But there are now 60 total.
Rocket Money’s mobile apps are visually compelling, especially thanks to the new Dark Mode. As mentioned, their dashboards have more content than the equivalent on the desktop browser, and the iOS app gains new widgets. Although I generally find it easier to work on desktop browser versions of financial apps, I gravitate toward Rocket Money’s mobile apps because they are so appealing, comprehensive, and usable.
Rocket Money says it uses the most up-to-date industry protocols for storing your data, including bank-level 256-bit encryption. Your online banking credentials never touch Rocket Money’s servers, and the company doesn't store them in any way. Rocket Money doesn't allow any other party to access your financial data, either. It supports multi-factor authentication, and you can read more about Rocket Money's security policies here.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Rocket Money)
Rocket Money
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
Rocket Money makes it easy to quickly see your financial profile, and it offers a fantastic user experience. It excels at standard money management tasks, while its innovative extras help you stay on top of bills, subscriptions, and savings goals. Its Investment management tools could be stronger, and its premium plans could be priced more clearly, but the site provides a strong combination of tools and data insights overall. That said, Monarch and Simplifi are our Editors’ Choice winners because they excel in every area of personal finance management and offer unbeatable user experiences on mobile and the web.
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About Our Expert
I write about money. I’ve been reviewing tax software and services as a freelancer for PCMag since 1993. Along the way, I took on reviews of other types of business and personal finance technology. Prior to that, I had spent a few years writing about productivity and entertainment applications for 8-bit personal computers (my first one was a Commodore VIC-20) as a member of the editorial staff at Compute!Â
After working at Lawson Associates, now Lawson Software, I switched my focus to accounting but learned that personal computer applications were more progressive and interesting to cover than mainframe solutions. So I served as editor of a monthly newsletter that provided support for accountants who were just starting to use PCs. I still ghostwrite monthly how-to columns for accounting professionals. From there, I went on to write articles and reviews for numerous business and financial publications, including Barron’s and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine.
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