Bilance vs Bankin'

Bankin’ and Bilance both sync European bank accounts and categorise transactions automatically, but they are funded in opposite ways. Bankin’, built in Paris since 2011, gives away its core for free and earns money through ads, cashback and partner offers, with Plus and Pro subscriptions on top. Bilance is one paid subscription with everything in it. Coverage differs too: Bankin’ advertises banks in France, the UK, Spain and Germany, while Bilance publishes a list of 2,300+ banks across the EU/EEA. We make Bilance, so judge for yourself: every fact below links to an official page, checked on the date above.

What Bankin’ does well

• A genuinely free core. Bankin’s terms make account aggregation, categorisation and recommendations free, and its App Store page adds budgets, graphs and alerts. Among bank-sync apps, that is rare.
• Categorisation that learns. Corrections feed a shared algorithm that categorises similar future transactions better for everyone.
• A very strong iPhone rating. 4.7 out of 5 from about 92,000 ratings on the French App Store. The Android rating is lower: 4.2 from about 61,000 reviews on Google Play.
• Unusual transparency about sync problems. A public incident page lists connector faults bank by bank, which helps users diagnose issues most apps hide.
• More than a dashboard. Cashback, savings suggestions and a new AI assistant (a paid feature its help pages call Premium, opt-in). Note that several features are French-only, including cashback.

Where Bilance is stronger

• Coverage published, not promised. Bilance’s bank list is browsable by country across the EU/EEA before you install anything. Bankin’s own pages conflict: the stores say 350+ institutions in four countries, its help centre says 300.
• Funded by its subscription. Google Play labels Bankin’ “Contains ads”, and its terms describe partner offers and cashback intermediation. Store reviews repeatedly mention ad and partner pressure, including from paying users (a review theme, not a measured fact). Bilance is funded by its subscription.
• Strictly read-only bank access. Bankin’ connects through Bridge and Powens, and at eligible banks the app can also initiate payments and savings transfers, so its connection is not read-only in the strict sense. Bilance’s connections can only read transactions and balances; moving money is not possible from the app.
• Custom categories and export included. Bankin’ puts custom categories and data export behind Plus. In Bilance both are part of the one subscription. Bilance also imports CSV files; we could not find a file import in Bankin’s published pages.
• Built for two. We found no published couples feature in Bankin’; its terms describe individual accounts. Bilance lets two people share chosen accounts while everything else stays private.
• Everything included. Bilance has no permanent free tier: it is one paid subscription with everything in it, and most new users start with a full-featured trial; the exact terms are shown in the app before you pay.

How we tested

We compared Bilance and Bankin’ across bank coverage, business model, automation, recurring payments, budgets, sharing, platforms and languages. Every non-Bilance fact in the table comes from the vendor’s own website, help centre, legal documents, or app store listing, opened on the date shown with that cell’s source link. Where we could not verify a point, the table shows a dash instead of a guess. Bilance behaviour was checked in the current product. We did not run hands-on device tests of the other app for this article. The verdict is our editorial judgment, not a scored ranking, and we recheck the facts every two months.

Side by side

Both apps categorise automatically and learn from corrections, and both detect recurring payments from your transactions. Those are ties. A dash means we could not verify the point from the vendor’s published pages, not that the feature is proven absent.

Switching from Bankin’

Bankin’ can export selected accounts and date ranges by email as Excel or CSV files, but only on Plus or Pro; free users have no export. The CSV file moves straight into Bilance: it lands in a dedicated import account, columns are recognised automatically, and Bankin’s category labels are matched onto your own categories. For everything current, you connect your banks and recent transactions sync in directly, most of them categorised automatically; how far back the history reaches depends on each bank.

Which one is for you?

Choose Bankin’ if you bank in France, the UK, Spain or Germany and are comfortable with an ad- and partner-funded free app, or extras like cashback and savings transfers appeal to you (several of these are French-only).

Choose Bilance if your banks are outside Bankin’s four advertised countries and on Bilance’s public list, you prefer a paid app with strictly read-only bank access, you want custom categories and export included, or you and your partner want one shared view of chosen accounts. Bilance also works in 24 languages, where Bankin’ offers French and English.

Frequently asked questions

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