Emma (Account Synching App) Alternatives?

bozo007

I have been using Money Dashboard for many years and have struggled to find an equivalent replacement; I even invested a tiny amount in their earlier crowd funding round. A year ago, they were bought by ClearScore and investors from the more recent crowd funding rounds lost money (I made a microscopic profit ). While there has been no update to the app, it is working well and support queries are still getting answered. There are occasional sync issues with Amex and Starling but in my experience, those get resolved within a few days. There are some minor differences in how spend gets categorised - in the app, supermarket spends go under a "Food, Groceries, Household" while the web version has a further drilldown to just "Grocery".

They have two app versions - Classic which hasn't been updated in almost 3 years and Neon which was last updated in late 2021. My account was created when there was only Classic and it can't be moved over to Neon. That being said, I have tried both by creating another account on Neon and chose to stay with Classic.

@Nick_C and @SaintAlf   - you can't link supplementary cards since the transaction flows to the main card anyway.

Apologies in advance if I don't respond to any questions quickly as I am not a frequent visitor to MSE.

quirkydeptless

I've now completed setting up Money Dashboard. Much simpler interface than Emma, which was pretty but had a lot of clutter I didn't care about.

Minor quibble in that I preferred Emma's sorting by account value rather than Money Dashboard's by account name and I can't see a way to change that, but that's no big deal as it's easy to scroll through and see balances at a glance.

ozaz

In the past I've tried the following:

* Yolt (now defunct)
* Moneyhub
* Money Dashboard (both Classic and Neon)
* Snoop
* Various free aggregators built into bank apps

I didn't really like any of them as alternatives to Emma. The reason varied from app to app but it was either due to a clunky interface, poor sync reliability, or missing some feature that I liked in the Emma app.

Lumio is a more recent alternative not yet mentioned in this thread. I haven't tried it myself.

May be worth noting that it's been almost 5 months since Moneyhub received an update and it's been over a year since Money Dashboard received an update. Emma, Snoop and Lumio seem to be getting regular updates.

Nick_C

ozaz said:

In the past I've tried the following:

* Yolt (now defunct)
* Moneyhub
* Money Dashboard (both Classic and Neon)
* Snoop
* Various free aggregators built into bank apps

I didn't really like any of them as alternatives to Emma. The reason varied from app to app but it was either due to a clunky interface, poor sync reliability, or missing some feature that I liked in the Emma app.

Lumio is a more recent alternative not yet mentioned in this thread. I haven't tried it myself.

I wouldn't use an Open Banking aggregator provided by my bank.  I don't want them having all that data!

quirkydeptless

I hadn't heard of Snoop until mentioned on this thread. I found a site describing it and comparing it with Emma and Money Dashboard here

https://moneytothemasses.com/banking/snoop-app-review

I'll stick with Money Dashboard for now as I only want a simple balance list read out rather than fancy budgeting stuff, but useful to know of another alternative.

RG2015

Nick_C said:

ozaz said:

In the past I've tried the following:

* Yolt (now defunct)
* Moneyhub
* Money Dashboard (both Classic and Neon)
* Snoop
* Various free aggregators built into bank apps

I didn't really like any of them as alternatives to Emma. The reason varied from app to app but it was either due to a clunky interface, poor sync reliability, or missing some feature that I liked in the Emma app.

Lumio is a more recent alternative not yet mentioned in this thread. I haven't tried it myself.

I wouldn't use an Open Banking aggregator provided by my bank.  I don't want them having all that data!

I was under the impression that the banks only facilitated the access to other banks and that the data was only visible to the user.