Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Self-hosted personal finance tools like Firefly III are gaining attention as privacy-conscious alternatives to services such as Mint and YNAB, but users report trade-offs between automation, budgeting style, and ease of setup. Commenters praise Firefly III’s flexibility, multi-currency support, and rules-based categorization, yet note its lack of native bank integrations, opinionated handling of budgeting and refunds, and maintenance overhead. The thread also surfaces a broader ecosystem of options — from Actual Budget, Buckets, GnuCash, and beancount to various bank-connectors — and highlights how hard it is to find a long-term, interoperable tool that balances robust features with simplicity.

Overall impressions & use cases

  • Many self-hosters use Firefly III as a Mint replacement for expense tracking and visualization, not full-featured budgeting.
  • Users praise its rule-based auto-tagging, multi-year stability, good docs, and Docker-based setup (for some it’s “a few minutes”).
  • Others found setup/upgrades frustrating or fragile (especially multi-instance setups for partners and bank importers) and switched away.

Integrations, imports, and automation

  • Core limitation: no built-in, first-party automatic bank sync; users rely on:
    • Manual CSV exports/imports.
    • Scripts and rules to auto-categorize.
    • Third-party connectors (Plaid, Nordigen/GoCardless, SimpleFin bridge, Spectre).
    • Companion tools like Waterfly III (from SMS notifications).
  • PSD2 and 2FA in the EU make direct automation hard; users complain about needing third-party aggregators and recurring re-auth flows.
  • Handling Amazon orders is a major pain; users discuss scraping, browser addons, and Amazon data export, but note refund-matching and split charges are messy.

Budgeting model and comparisons

  • Firefly is seen as more “bookkeeping/analytics” than “budget-first.”
  • Several users prefer YNAB or Actual Budget for zero-based / envelope budgeting and smoother budgeting UX.
  • There’s debate over Firefly’s critical stance on zero-based budgeting; some argue zero-based makes overspending harder, gives clearer visibility, and that dismissing it as “nonsense” ignores its audience.
  • Some dislike Firefly’s treatment of reimbursements and refunds (e.g., inbound cash forced as “income,” inflated category spending).

Multi-currency, shared accounts, and multi-user

  • Firefly is reported to support multi-currency across accounts, budgets, and bills.
  • Multi-currency is widely described as a “make-or-break” feature that many apps get wrong; some users instead rely on GnuCash, Beancount, or custom tools.
  • Shared accounts / multiple users are desired; Firefly can do some of this, but other OSS tools (e.g., Gnomeshade) are mentioned for better shared-account support.

Self-hosting vs desktop and long-term concerns

  • Strong interest in self-hosting for privacy and control, but debate over why so many tools are web apps vs native desktops.
  • Arguments for web: dev familiarity, multi-device access (including partners’ phones), central backups, reuse of infra.
  • Skeptics worry about complexity, heavy stacks, long-term maintainability, and painful migration between tools; some prefer spreadsheets or plain-text accounting for longevity.