I should say a lot of it comes down to the theory of the budgeting system, not the software itself. Monarch is a more traditional cashflow based system, as opposed to the cash system that YNAB uses. You're budgeting your income in a given month in Monarch, vs. budgeting only money you actually have in YNAB. In general the way you're encouraged to set up your budget is different. YNAB and the YNAB community seems to trend toward creating very granular catergories, and every single transaction has to be viewed and approved. In monarch, you start with a set of default categories that are fairly broad, and they encourage you to use these as they seem to have done a pretty good job at designing filters that automatically classify transactions into those categories. You can still add your custom categories though. Transactions get automatically put in categories and you don't need to review them except for certain circumstances where Monarch decides it can't confidentially categorizes them. Some things get improperly categorized sometimes but this isn't that big of a deal because your categories in Monarch are likely broader than they would be in YNAB, and it's also not like YNAB where the total of your budget represents money you literally have on hand so if the numbers don't line up perfectly it's not the end of the world. In the end Monarch isn't super different from more traditional budgeting apps like mint or rocketmoney, it's just the best executed.
I still think YNAB is invaluable for people that have to really tightly manage money to make sure they have enough cash on hand at the end of the month to pay rent, for example. But now that I'm in a position where I have a little more cushion, I've grown tired of the constant queue of transactions to approve and the general micromanagement in YNAB
I switched to Monarch from YNAB a few months ago because I'd been using YNAB for years and wanted something a little less involved. I'm really loving it. Thanks for building it!
I still think YNAB is invaluable for people that have to really tightly manage money to make sure they have enough cash on hand at the end of the month to pay rent, for example. But now that I'm in a position where I have a little more cushion, I've grown tired of the constant queue of transactions to approve and the general micromanagement in YNAB