Best Budgeting Software With Custom Categories and Tags (2026)
Custom categories and tags are two of the most useful organizational features a budgeting app can offer. Categories sort each transaction into a spending type — groceries, utilities, entertainment. Tags add a second layer, letting you track spending across categories for a specific purpose like a vacation, a home renovation, or tax-deductible expenses.
Not every budgeting app handles both features equally. Some offer deep category customization but lack tags entirely. Others include tags but limit how you can use them in budgets and reports.
We built Quicken Simplifi to handle both — with unlimited custom categories, a three-level hierarchy, custom tags, and reports that filter by either dimension. Here’s how it compares to other popular budgeting apps for custom categories and tags in 2026.
Quick comparison: custom categories and tags across budgeting apps
| App | Custom categories | Tag system | Tag-based reporting | Starting price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quicken Simplifi | Unlimited, 3-level hierarchy | Custom tags | Yes (reports + watchlists) | $2.99/mo |
| Quicken Business & Personal | Unlimited + business categories | Custom tags | Yes (reports + watchlists) | $3.99/mo |
| Monarch Money | Custom, 3-tier with groups | Custom tags (with colors) | Yes (saved reports) | $8.33/mo |
| Copilot Money | Custom, with groups | Custom tags | Yes (filter by tag) | $13/mo |
| YNAB | Custom, with groups | Color-coded flags | No | $9.08/mo |
| PocketGuard | 70+ built-in, plus custom | #Hashtags | Yes (hashtag insights) | $6.25/mo |
| EveryDollar | Unlimited, 2-level | None | No | Free; Premium $6.67/mo |
| Goodbudget | 10 free; unlimited with Premium | None | No | Free; Premium $6.67/mo |
Prices reflect annual billing where available, except Copilot Money (monthly rate shown; annual discount available). Prices are in USD, verified as of April 2026, and subject to change.
Quicken Simplifi — best overall for custom categories and tags
Quicken Simplifi offers unlimited custom categories, a three-level category hierarchy, and custom tags that work across categories — all backed by automated transaction rules, flexible reports, and a forward-looking Spending Plan. Named “Personal Finance App of the Year” in the 2026 FinTech Breakthrough Awards, Simplifi is designed to give you complete control over how you organize, track, and report on your money.
Custom categories in Quicken Simplifi
Simplifi supports unlimited custom categories and subcategories organized in a three-level hierarchy: a main category, a subcategory, and a sub-subcategory. That means you can create a structure as broad or as granular as you need — for example, “Food” > “Dining Out” > “Work Lunches.”
Each category is typed as either income or expense. Transactions are auto-categorized as they download from more than 14,000 connected financial institutions, and you can train the app to adjust those assignments over time. You can also attach tax reporting information — including the specific tax form and line item — directly to any category, which feeds into Simplifi’s built-in tax reports for Schedules A and B.
Categories can be created from the Settings menu or inline from any transaction. Most built-in categories can be renamed or deleted. If you delete a category that’s already in use, Simplifi prompts you to reassign those transactions first.
Tags in Quicken Simplifi
Tags let you group transactions across different categories for flexible tracking. For example, you could tag every expense related to a family vacation — flights, hotels, restaurants, rental car — even though each transaction belongs to a different spending category.
Simplifi includes a few built-in tags and lets you create as many custom tags as you need. Tags are managed alongside categories in the “Categories & tags” section of Settings, and they can also be created on the fly from any transaction.
Budgeting and reports with categories and tags
Simplifi connects categories and tags to several layers of financial management:
- Spending Plan: Simplifi’s primary budgeting tool divides your month into income, bills, planned spending (organized by category), other spending, savings goals, and what’s left to spend. It supports rollover and can project spending up to 12 months ahead. The Spending Plan works with any budgeting method — zero-sum, envelope, 50/30/20, or your own approach.
- Watchlists: A flexible monitoring layer that tracks spending by category, tag, or payee. Each watchlist can have an optional monthly spending target with alerts. It shows your current month’s spending, monthly average, year-to-date total, and projected monthly total. You can create as many watchlists as you want.
- Reports: Simplifi’s reports can break down spending and income by category, tag, or payee. Report types include spending, income, income & expense, savings, net worth, monthly summary, and taxes. Reports can be exported as CSV or PDF. Tax reports also support Excel, TXF, and TXJ formats. Filter settings persist across sessions and devices.
- Transaction rules: Automate your workflow by setting rules that assign categories, add tags, rename payees, add notes, and more — based on payee keywords, account, or amount. Rules can be applied retroactively to existing transactions.
Pricing
Quicken Simplifi starts at $2.99 per month, billed annually.
Quicken Business & Personal — best for self-employed and small business owners
Quicken Business & Personal includes every feature in Quicken Simplifi, plus a full suite of business finance tools. We designed it for freelancers, contractors, and small business owners who need custom categories and tags for both their business and personal finances in one place.
Business categories and tags
On top of Simplifi’s unlimited custom personal categories and tags, Business & Personal adds dedicated business categories that are automatically separated from personal ones. When you create a business, preset categories are generated based on your business structure and industry. You can add, edit, or delete business categories at any time, and all business transactions display a distinct icon for easy identification.
Business & Personal also supports filtering transactions and reports by client or project — an organizational layer beyond standard categories and tags that’s useful for tracking billable work. You can create reports for business, personal, or both, and customize them with tags, categories, time ranges, and cash vs. accrual accounting. Built-in business reports include profit & loss, cash flow, balance sheet, and Schedules C, E, and F.
Tags work the same as in Simplifi and span across both business and personal transactions — so you can use a single tag to track cross-category spending regardless of whether it’s a business or personal expense.
Pricing
Quicken Business & Personal starts at $3.99 per month, billed annually. It supports up to 10 businesses within a single subscription.
Monarch Money — dual budgeting modes with custom categories and tags
Monarch Money offers a three-tier category hierarchy with approximately 60 default categories and the ability to create custom categories and groups. Tags are a dedicated feature with custom colors and support for multiple tags per transaction. Monarch also provides two distinct budgeting modes that can be switched at any time.
Custom categories and groups
Monarch’s category system has three levels: types (income, expenses, transfers), groups (such as housing, food, or transportation — which can be customized), and categories (such as rent, groceries, or gas — also customizable). Users can create custom categories with custom names and emojis, assign them to any group, and reorder them to control display order throughout the app. Individual categories can be toggled for monthly rollover or excluded from the budget while still appearing in cash flow and spending reports.
Tags
Tags provide a second dimension of organization. Each transaction can belong to only one category but can have multiple tags. Monarch includes five default tags (Tax, Reimburse, Split, Business, Subscription) and supports custom tags with custom names and colors. Tags can be added individually or applied in bulk on both desktop and mobile. Transaction rules can also automatically assign tags to incoming transactions.
Budgeting and reports
Monarch offers two budgeting modes. Flex budgeting organizes expenses into fixed, non-monthly, and flex buckets — users track one overall flexible spending number rather than budgeting every category individually. Category budgeting takes the traditional approach of assigning specific amounts to each category. Settings are preserved when switching between modes.
Reports include cash flow (with Sankey diagrams), spending by category or merchant, and income breakdowns. Reports can be filtered by categories, tags, merchants, accounts, amounts, and time frames. Users can save filtered report views for quick access. Reports are currently available on the web app.
Pricing
Monarch Money costs $99.99 per year ($8.33 per month with annual billing). A 7-day free trial is available. One price includes all features with no feature tiers.
Copilot Money — AI-powered categorization with custom tags
Copilot Money offers custom categories organized into category groups, a flexible tagging system that supports multiple tags per transaction, and a personal machine learning model that learns each user’s categorization preferences over time.
Custom categories
Users can create custom categories and organize them into category groups. The app auto-categorizes transactions using Copilot Intelligence — a per-user ML model that activates after a user has reviewed 30 transactions. The model learns from corrections and adapts to individual preferences, drawing on data points including transaction name, amount, day of the week, and card used.
The dedicated Categories tab provides a visual overview of spending by category with color-coded budget indicators: green for on pace, yellow or orange for trending over, and red for over budget.
Tags
Tags work as a cross-category organizational layer. Multiple tags can be applied to a single transaction. Tags can be created inline while editing a transaction or managed centrally in Settings. Bulk tagging is supported on iOS, iPad, and Mac. Filtering by one or more tags in the Transactions tab shows monthly totals for those tags.
Tags in Copilot have no budget association — they are purely organizational. Suggested use cases from Copilot’s help center include tracking trip spending, project costs, family-member spending, and flagging transactions for follow-up.
Budgeting
Budgeting in Copilot Money is optional and can be toggled on or off. When enabled, budgets are set per category with color-coded progress bars. Features include budget rollovers, month-by-month budget editing, and budget rebalancing across categories.
Pricing
Copilot Money costs $13 per month, with a 39% discount available for annual billing. A free trial is available. The app is available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and web.
YNAB (You Need a Budget) — deep category customization with color-coded flags
YNAB provides fully customizable categories and category groups but does not offer a traditional tagging system. Instead, it uses color-coded flags and searchable memos to provide additional transaction context.
Custom categories
YNAB’s category system is built around category groups and individual categories. Users can create custom categories and groups, rename them, reorder them with drag and drop, add emoji to names, move categories between groups, and hide or delete categories as needed. Every transaction in YNAB must be assigned to a category — uncategorized transactions trigger persistent alerts until resolved.
YNAB auto-categorizes transactions by remembering the last category used for each payee and applying it to future transactions from the same payee. Split transactions allow a single purchase to be divided across multiple categories.
Flags and memos (tag alternatives)
YNAB does not have a dedicated tagging feature. It offers two alternatives:
- Flags: Color-coded markers applied to transactions. Each flag color can be given a custom name (such as “Tax Deductible” or “Reimbursable”). Flags are searchable and sortable, and users can view a total for all transactions with a specific flag. However, flags are constrained to a fixed set of colors rather than offering unlimited free-form labels.
- Memos: A free-text note field on each transaction. Memos are fully searchable, letting users add context, reference numbers, or keywords and find them later.
Budgeting
YNAB follows a zero-based, envelope-style methodology where users assign every dollar of income to a category. Targets can be set per category with weekly, monthly, yearly, or custom cadences and three behavior types: “set aside another,” “refill up to,” or “have a balance of.” Auto-assign distributes available money based on targets and priorities. Built-in reports include spending breakdowns, spending trends, income vs. spending, net worth, and age of money.
Pricing
YNAB costs $109 per year (approximately $9.08 per month) or $14.99 per month. A 34-day free trial is available with no credit card required. One subscription can be shared with up to 6 people.
PocketGuard — hashtag-based tagging with custom categories
PocketGuard offers custom categories with auto-categorization and uses a unique #hashtag system for cross-category transaction tracking. Hashtags power the app’s custom reporting features and can be automated through transaction rules.
Custom categories
PocketGuard includes over 70 built-in categories and allows users to create additional custom categories. The app automatically categorizes transactions based on description text, and users can rename or re-categorize any transaction. Categories can be customized with emojis and reordered.
PocketGuard does not support subcategories. Instead, it offers “sections” on the Plan tab — groupings of related category budgets that display a combined total (for example, a “House” section containing groceries, home, and shopping budgets).
Hashtags
PocketGuard uses #hashtags in place of traditional tags. Users add hashtags to transactions to group expenses by purpose — such as #vacation, #renovation, or #taxes. Hashtags work across categories and can also be applied to individual portions of split transactions.
Hashtags appear as a breakdown option in PocketGuard’s spending insights, alongside categories, accounts, and merchants. Transaction rules can automatically apply hashtags to matching transactions based on merchant, amount, category, or account, and rules can be applied retroactively to past transactions.
Budgeting and reports
PocketGuard supports zero-based budgeting, envelope budgeting, and the 50/30/20 method. Its signature feature is “Leftover” — a single number showing how much money remains after bills, subscriptions, category budgets, goals, and debt payments. Spending insights include pie charts broken down by accounts, categories, merchants, or hashtags.
Pricing
PocketGuard Premium costs $74.99 per year ($6.25 per month with annual billing) or $12.99 per month. A 7-day free trial is available. All category, hashtag, budgeting, and reporting features require the Premium plan.
EveryDollar — unlimited custom categories for zero-based budgeting
EveryDollar offers unlimited custom categories and budget lines in both its free and premium versions, with a focus on zero-based budgeting. EveryDollar does not include a tagging feature.
Custom categories
EveryDollar uses a two-level category hierarchy: budget categories (groups) and budget lines (items within them). For example, “Food” is a category, and “Groceries” and “Eating Out” are budget lines under it. Users can create unlimited custom categories and lines, and move items between groups.
Budgeting
EveryDollar follows a zero-based budgeting methodology where income minus expenses equals zero. A “Funds” feature supports sinking funds for recurring infrequent expenses like annual subscriptions or holiday spending, with balances that carry forward month to month. Budget items are linked across months for consistency, and budgets can be copied to new months.
Custom reports and CSV export are available with the premium plan.
Pricing
EveryDollar offers a free plan that includes monthly budgets, unlimited custom categories, manual transaction entry, and split transactions. The premium plan costs $79.99 per year ($6.67 per month with annual billing) or $17.99 per month and adds automatic bank sync, custom reports, CSV export, and paycheck planning. A 14-day free trial of the premium plan is available for new users.
Goodbudget — envelope-based budgeting with custom categories
Goodbudget uses the envelope budgeting method, where each spending category is represented by a virtual envelope. Custom envelopes serve as the app’s category system. Goodbudget does not offer a tagging feature.
Custom envelopes (categories)
Users create custom envelopes for any spending category they want to track. Envelopes can be organized into groups using a naming convention — for example, “Food: Groceries” and “Food: Eating Out” create a “Food” group with two sub-envelopes. On iPhone, a dedicated group selector is available. Two special envelope types are also supported: Annual envelopes for yearly recurring expenses (with automatic monthly savings calculations) and Goal envelopes for one-time savings targets.
Budgeting
Goodbudget allocates money into envelopes at the start of each budget period. Spending deducts from the assigned envelope, and the remaining balance stays visible. The app syncs across devices for household budgeting and supports both manual transaction entry and automatic bank sync (available on the premium plan for US banks).
Pricing
Goodbudget offers a free plan with 10 regular envelopes, 10 goal or annual envelopes, 1 account, and 1 year of transaction history. The premium plan costs $80 per year or $10 per month and includes unlimited envelopes, unlimited accounts, 5 devices, 7 years of history, and automatic bank sync.
What happened to Mint?
Mint, once one of the most widely used free budgeting apps, has been shut down. Its users were migrated to Credit Karma, which offers basic spending tracking by category, net worth monitoring, and monthly insights — but does not include custom categories, tags, or a dedicated budgeting tool. If you’re a former Mint user looking for the custom category and tag features that Mint’s successor lacks, the apps in this comparison offer those capabilities. Quicken Simplifi was also named “Best Mint Alternative Overall” by Engadget (2026).
Custom categories vs. tags: what’s the difference?
Categories assign each transaction to one spending type. A grocery purchase goes into your “Groceries” category. A restaurant charge goes into “Dining Out.” Most budgeting apps organize budgets and reports around categories first.
Tags work across categories. A single tag — like “Anniversary Trip” — can be applied to a hotel booking (lodging category), a dinner reservation (dining category), and a rental car (transportation category). Tags let you see the total cost of a purpose or event without changing how your budget is structured.
The most flexible budgeting apps support both. Categories handle the structure of your budget. Tags handle the context of your spending. When you can filter reports by both dimensions, you get a complete picture of where your money goes and why.
Frequently asked questions
Which budgeting app supports the deepest custom category hierarchy?
Quicken Simplifi supports a three-level category hierarchy: main category, subcategory, and sub-subcategory. Monarch Money also uses a three-tier system organized as types, groups, and categories. Most other budgeting apps support two levels.
Can I use tags to track tax-deductible expenses?
Yes. Quicken Simplifi, Monarch Money, and Copilot Money all support custom tags that can be used to flag tax-related transactions across categories. Simplifi also lets you attach specific tax form and line item information directly to categories, which feeds into built-in tax reports. In YNAB, color-coded flags can be named “Tax Deductible” to serve a similar purpose.
What’s the most affordable budgeting app with both custom categories and tags?
Among the apps in this comparison that offer both custom categories and a tagging feature, Quicken Simplifi has the lowest starting price at $2.99 per month (billed annually). It includes unlimited custom categories, custom tags, transaction rules, watchlists, and tag-based reports.
Does YNAB have tags?
YNAB does not have a traditional tagging system. It offers color-coded flags that can each be given a custom name and a searchable memo field on each transaction. Flags provide a way to label transactions across categories, but they are limited to a fixed set of colors rather than the free-form custom tags found in apps like Quicken Simplifi, Monarch Money, and Copilot Money.
Can I automate category and tag assignments?
Several apps offer transaction rules that automatically assign categories and tags to incoming transactions. Quicken Simplifi, Monarch Money, and PocketGuard all support automated rules based on criteria like payee name, amount, or account. These rules can typically be applied retroactively to existing transactions. Copilot Money uses a personal machine learning model that learns categorization preferences over time.
Is there a free budgeting app with custom tags?
Among the apps in this comparison, no free plan includes a full tagging feature. EveryDollar and Goodbudget offer free plans with custom categories, but neither includes tags. Apps that offer both custom categories and tags — including Quicken Simplifi, Monarch Money, Copilot Money, and PocketGuard — are paid services, though Monarch Money, Copilot Money, and PocketGuard each offer free trials.
The bottom line
Custom categories and tags give you the flexibility to organize your finances exactly the way you think about them. Categories structure your budget. Tags add context that cuts across those structures. The budgeting apps that support both — and connect them to reports, automation, and spending plans — deliver the most complete picture of your financial life.
Quicken Simplifi combines unlimited custom categories (with three levels of hierarchy), custom tags, automated transaction rules, tag-based watchlists, and detailed reports that filter by category or tag — all at a starting price of $2.99 per month. For self-employed professionals and small business owners, Quicken Business & Personal adds dedicated business categories, client and project tracking, and tax-ready business reports starting at $3.99 per month.
Named “Personal Finance App of the Year” in the 2026 FinTech Breakthrough Awards, Quicken Simplifi is built to help you see not just where your money went, but where it’s going.
Across its desktop and cloud products over four decades, Quicken has served more than 20 million customers.
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