Last Updated on May 25, 2022
We have all read stories about people who have experimented living without spending any money whatsoever. By growing their own food, washing in the river, using a solar panel to provide electricity, and bartering for certain goods and services, these adventures have met with limited success. However, for us mere mortals the simple fact is that we need money. Money to buy food, to purchase clothes, to pay our bills, as well as indulging in our other infinite wants and desires.
While it can be a struggle to make ends meet, it is possible to make life easier through better money management. Financial management is about planning income and expenditure and making informed decisions that enable you to survive financially. With austerity still with us, it’s even more important to look after your finances, if only to make sure there are no nasty surprises when you receive your next bank statement.
Linux offers a number of really good financial applications that are more than capable of handling both personal and small-business accounting operations. We feature the finest personal finance software.
We also recommend software that helps individuals keep track of stock market movements, analyze the markets, and identify stock worth buying.
There’s software for organizations with excellent open source business software, a couple of Bitcoin clients, and a calculator.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 21 high quality Linux financial software. Hopefully, there will be something of interest for anyone who wishes to organize their finances.
Now, let’s explore the 21 financial applications at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, providing a screenshot of the software in action, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources.
In our Group Tests we regularly provide ratings for each software. These ratings are for comparative purposes. Given that the software in this Group Test is diverse, we’ve separated our ratings into different categories.
Whether you have ample financial means or face the bailiffs knocking on your door, we all need to manage our finances. Naturally, financial management can be actioned with pen and paper, but why not use software which makes your life easier. There’s a good range of personal finance software available. Here’s our recommendations. All of the software is open source goodness.
There’s a fair degree of overlap between personal finance software and accounting software. Both often provide double-entry bookkeeping functionality. Here we recommend some excellent plain text accounting tools which use plain text files to store data. This makes them efficient to use, scriptable, flexible, and most important, your data always remains accessible. There’s also graphical tools included here.
Keeping track of your share and bond portfolio can be a time consuming task. Use this software to monitor performance, and glean technical analysis, hopefully improving your financial outcomes.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) manages the information and functions of a business. It provides an integrated system by which the entire business can be managed. Not only does ERP improve the efficiency of an organization it also serves to help the firm’s management make more informed decisions.
If our recommendations don’t meet your requirements, we’ve previously compiled a dedicated ERP Group Test.
| Financial Software | |
|---|---|
| GnuCash | Personal and small-business financial accounting software |
| HomeBank | Manage your personal accounts at home |
| Money Manager Ex | Cross-platform, easy-to-use personal finance software |
| KMyMoney | Personal Finance Manager for KDE |
| jGnash | Makes tracking personal finance painless |
| Grisbi | Personal accounting application |
| Skrooge | Personal finance management tool |
| Ledger | Powerful, command-line double-entry accounting system |
| hledger | Elegant, versatile accounting program |
| SQL-Ledger | Double entry accounting system |
| beancount | Double-entry accounting from text files |
| LedgerSMB | Double entry accounting system based on SQL-Ledger |
| JStock | Track your stock investments |
| Chart Geany | Stock market charting and technical analysis |
| Market Analysis System | Tools for the analysis of financial markets |
| ERPNext | Full featured business management solution that helps SMEs |
| Odoo | A complete ERP and CRM modular system |
| Apache OFBiz | Enterprise software framework |
| Armory | Bitcoin wallet management with cold storage and multi-signature support |
| Electrum | Lightweight, easy to use, Bitcoin client |
| Qalculate! | Multi-purpose cross-platform desktop calculator |
 Read our complete collection of recommended free and open source software. Our curated compilation covers all categories of software. The software collection forms part of our series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. There are hundreds of in-depth reviews, open source alternatives to proprietary software from large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. There are also fun things to try, hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. |
A spreadsheet is really all that’s needed for personal finance (budgeting, expense tracking and net worth tracking). I use LibreOffice Calc, but Gnumeric would probably work just as well.
A spreadsheet may be all you need for personal finance, but that’s definitely not sufficient for my needs. It’s a common mistake to conflate your own requirements with others.
Josh you’re right. After all, many people manage their finances with a pen, paper and calculator. If your finances can be managed with a spreadsheet, then you probably don’t even need a computer to do it. Spreadsheets are often misused in this way, often as a pseudo database.