Turbobulls vs YNAB
YNAB is the envelope method, and it budgets better than we do. Turbobulls puts budgeting next to your portfolio in one place no server can read. Which matters more is the whole decision.
14 days of everything · Then a permanent free plan · Nothing deleted, export always included
Turbobulls if you want investments, spending and net worth in one encrypted place, and a free plan you can stay on.
YNAB if budgeting is the job, you want your spending imported automatically, or your bank is outside our adapters.
Spending, cash flow and investments on one screen. Demo data.
Below it sits a free plan: no card, no time limit. Above it, Turbo Pro at €6.66/mo billed yearly opens both the spending and the investing side.
Which one fits you?
Three questions. We will say so when the answer is YNAB, and it often is.
Answer the three questions and a recommendation appears here.
Side by side
YNAB details are from its own pricing, features and security pages as read in August 2026. Where a page does not describe something, this table says so rather than treating silence as absence. The Turbobulls column describes Turbo Pro, the plan that covers both the spending and the investing side.
Prices are in different currencies and move with the exchange rate, so this page does not claim a percentage saving. YNAB may have changed since this was compiled; its own pages are the authoritative source.
What the difference looks like
Four views from the app, on demo data. The demo is read-only and needs no signup.
Envelopes, including the month they go wrong
Money assigned to categories each month, with what is left tracked per envelope. This is a real July: four categories are over, and last month’s overspending of €1,227.11 has already come out of this month’s pool. That is the envelope rule working rather than failing, and it is the same rule YNAB teaches, which we are not claiming to have invented.
The budget and the portfolio, one net worth
Income, expenses, savings rate and real cash flow, in the same encrypted account as your holdings. This is the reason to choose Turbobulls over a budgeting app: you can see whether the investing is actually outrunning the spending, without reconciling two products.
This is what you see once your device decrypts it.
Policy, or architecture
YNAB states its team does not access customer data in normal operations, that access requires approval, and that it is documented. That is a real commitment and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What differs is the row itself. Flip the toggle and you get what our database actually holds: the action and the timestamp sit there in the clear, and the part that would tell you anything, which holding and how much at what price, is ciphertext. Nobody has to keep a promise about data they cannot read.
Twelve metrics, four of them free
Free keeps wealth velocity, CAGR, time-weighted return and portfolio share of net worth. Paid opens the other eight, including the Sharpe ratio, maximum drawdown and return volatility. This is the investing side a budgeting app is not trying to serve.
The long version
Everything behind the table, one topic at a time.
A budgeting app and a tracker that also budgets
YNAB is a budgeting product, and the envelope method is the product. It has the teaching, the community and the track record behind it, and if what you want is to get a grip on your spending, it is very good at exactly that.
Turbobulls is a portfolio tracker that also does envelope budgeting, encrypted on your device so the server cannot read either half. Spending, salary, cash accounts and debt sit next to holdings, and net worth is reported across all of it.
So this is not a fight over who budgets better. On budgeting alone, YNAB is the stronger product and this page will not argue otherwise. The question is whether you want the investing side in the same place, and whether you want a server that can read any of it.
Where each one is weaker
No tool wins everywhere, and on budgeting alone we do not win at all.
- No bank connections at all, and none possible under the encryption model
- File adapters cover Romanian and EU banks only; everywhere else is generic CSV or manual
- Budgeting is read-only on free, and the wallet caps at 120 transactions and 10 categories
- No named budgeting method, and no user community built around one
- A 14-day trial against YNAB’s 34
- No student pricing
- No permanently free plan, only a 34-day trial
- Portfolio tracking is not described on its features page
- A server-side model rather than end-to-end encryption
- Priced in USD and not adjusted for other regions
Read from YNAB’s own pricing, features and security pages in August 2026. A feature absent from a page is not the same as absent from the product, and this list says only what those pages describe.
Switching from YNAB
Export your budget and register data from YNAB, then bring the transactions in through the generic CSV adapter, which lets you map the columns yourself. The import preview marks duplicates before anything is written, and the commit is atomic, so a bad file does not leave you half-imported.
Set your categories up before the first import rather than after. Turbobulls budgets in envelopes the same way YNAB does, so your category structure carries over conceptually even though the file does not carry it for you.
Worth planning for: from this point on, spending arrives by file rather than automatically. If your bank is ING Romania, Raiffeisen Romania, Salt Bank or Revolut personal there is a dedicated adapter; otherwise budget for a monthly CSV export. Excel export from Turbobulls is available on every plan, so nothing you put in is trapped.