Bilance vs Actual Budget

Actual Budget is free, open-source software you run yourself; Bilance is a paid app that connects your European banks with nothing to host. That is the real choice here: owning your own budgeting server versus opening an app that already connects to 2,300+ banks across the EU/EEA and categorises most transactions for you. We make Bilance, so don’t take our word for anything: each fact below links to an official page, checked on the date above.

What Actual Budget does well

Actual began as a commercial product by James Long and was open-sourced in early 2022. Today it is a genuine community project with real momentum:

• Free software, honestly free. The whole application is MIT-licensed, with no premium tier and no feature gates. Development is funded by community donations.
• Your data stays yours. Actual is local-first: the budget lives on your device, you choose the sync server, and optional end-to-end encryption protects budget data on it. You can export a full restorable backup at any time.
• Deep envelope budgeting. The envelope method (allocating money you already have) comes with editable categorisation rules, schedules that can find apparent recurring transactions, and custom report dashboards including net worth.
• Desktop apps for every platform. Downloads cover Windows, macOS and Linux.
• Active stewardship. Six listed main contributors, monthly releases, and more than 28,000 stars on GitHub as of August 2026.

Where Bilance is stronger

For a European reader, the differences concentrate around bank sync and the work the app does for you:

• Bank sync without a server. In Bilance you pick your bank, authenticate, and transactions flow in, refreshed automatically when you open the app. In Actual, bank sync only works with a self-run server, and you must register with a data provider yourself and configure your own credentials.
• EU bank sync has few options for new users. Actual’s own documentation says GoCardless stopped accepting new Bank Account Data accounts in July 2025 (existing accounts should keep working). The alternative for new European users, Enable Banking, is explicitly experimental: Actual warns of bugs, incomplete functionality and possible removal. To be clear, this closure is about individuals opening their own provider accounts. Bilance also connects through GoCardless and Enable Banking, but under its own agreements, so you never register with a provider yourself.
• Sync runs itself. Actual’s bank import is manually triggered: you press Bank Sync. Bilance refreshes on its own whenever you open the app.
• Credentials are handled for you. In Actual, bank-sync tokens sit on the server outside its end-to-end encryption, so whoever administers the server can read them. With Bilance, read-only bank access runs through licensed providers and there are no tokens for you to store.
• Native mobile apps. Actual’s official mobile apps are deprecated; the supported mobile route is the responsive web app. Bilance is built for iOS and Android in 24 languages.
• A built-in AI assistant. Bilance’s AI Chat is its own tab: ask about your spending, budgets, subscriptions or net worth, and the answer comes from your own numbers, with an explanation.

How we tested

We compared Bilance and Actual Budget across bank sync, automation, recurring payments, budgets, net worth, sharing, platforms, and pricing model. Every non-Bilance fact comes from Actual’s own website, documentation or repository, 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 Actual 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 can categorise transactions and adapt to your choices: Actual with transparent, editable rules, Bilance with a model that categorises most transactions and learns from your corrections.

Switching from Actual Budget

Actual can export any account or filtered view as CSV, and a full budget backup as a restorable ZIP. The CSV files move straight into Bilance: each lands in a dedicated import account, columns are recognised automatically, and category labels from Actual 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 synced history reaches depends on each bank.

Which one is for you?

Choose Actual Budget if you are comfortable running your own server, want free software with no subscription, prefer hands-on envelope budgeting, or want your budget data on infrastructure you control.

Choose Bilance if you want your banks connected without running anything yourself, want subscriptions and bills detected for you and tracked with amount, next date and paid status, or you and your partner want a simple shared view of chosen accounts. 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.

Frequently asked questions

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