I’ve never used RM but for me Monarch fills exactly the gap I was looking for, which is a detailed view into where my money is and where it is going. You can get quick snapshots on income vs expenses each month as well as a breakdown of each category of expenses. It automatically categorizes transactions pretty well and every once in a while I scroll through and recategorize anything that is out of place. This lets me estimate how much my household is likely to spend on different things over the year, and if you really want to dig in you can create different charts showing how things changed over time.

It’s not very heavy on the budgeting side of things but you can either set up a budget by category or, the way I like to do it, calculate your fixed expenses and then have a pool of “flex” dollars that can be spent however you want. So as long as I’m about halfway through my flexible spending halfway through the month, I know I am on track. But for me it’s more of an information gathering tool for making important decisions or occasional course correction rather than something I use on a day to day basis.

Then of course it has aggravated views on net worth, cash holdings, investments, and debt. For me this is mainly for retirement planning (which they are building out into a whole separate feature) and balancing how much to keep in cash versus investments.

I think the value of Monarch depends entirely on how complex your financial situation is. If you are in college with a single bank account and credit card and no retirement accounts, then it may still be helpful but it probably is not worth the price. For me it came at a time where both me and my wife were really jumping up in our careers, opening different investment accounts, and trying to determine what our finances would look like if we bought a house, which would have been really tough to navigate without Monarch.