Bilance vs Buddy

Buddy is a friendly Swedish budgeting app for Apple devices; Bilance works on both iOS and Android, publishes its full bank list, and automates categorisation and subscription tracking. Buddy’s custom budgets and shared-budget workflow are genuinely well designed, but it publishes very little: no bank list, no free-tier limits, no current trial duration. We make Bilance; every fact here comes from an official page, checked on the date above.

What Buddy does well

• Budget flexibility. Custom categories, multiple budget plans, a custom month start day, and bi-weekly budgeting. Reviewers consistently praise how pleasant it is to use.
• Sharing with settlement. Shared budgets sync between partners or roommates, and its Split feature calculates who paid what and how to settle up. Bilance’s Shared Finances shares chosen bank accounts between two people, but it does not do settlement maths; if splitting costs with roommates is your main need, Buddy does that better.
• Deep Apple integration. iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch from one listing, plus compatibility with Apple-silicon Macs and Apple Vision.

Where Bilance is stronger

• You can check coverage before installing. Bilance publishes its bank list: 2,300+ banks across the EU/EEA, browsable by country. Buddy names its connection providers (Plaid and Salt Edge) in its terms but publishes no bank count and no country list, so the only way to know if your bank works is to install and try.
• Published terms. Buddy’s terms say a trial may be offered, but they do not publish a current duration, and its free-tier limits are not published. Bilance is plain: a paid subscription, no permanent free tier, and most new users start with a full-featured trial; the exact terms are shown in the app before you pay.
• Automation. Bilance categorises most transactions automatically, improves with your corrections, and detects subscriptions and recurring bills from your real transactions. Buddy’s terms describe automatic categorisation through Open Banking, but whether it learns from corrections is not documented.
• Both major phone platforms. Bilance runs on iOS and Android. We could not verify an Android app or web version for Buddy, so a household with both iPhone and Android should check with Buddy before relying on it.
• Net worth. Both track accounts and debts; Bilance adds manual assets like your home or investments to a full net-worth picture in 24 languages.

Side by side

Numbered links open the official page each claim was checked against (on 2026-08-12). A dash means we could not verify that point from the vendor's published pages.

Both apps’ bank sync depends on each bank’s own interface quality, so sync reliability varies by bank for both.

Which one is for you?

Choose Buddy if everyone involved uses Apple devices and your main job is a shared budget with roommate-style settlement, or you want a hand-crafted budget with maximum flexibility and do not mind testing your bank connection after installing.

Choose Bilance if you want to verify your banks are covered before you start, want categorisation and subscription detection done for you, or your household mixes iPhone and Android. Doing the work for you across European banks is the whole point of Bilance.

For the wider field, see the best budgeting apps in Europe.