Firefly III
Finance & AccountingA self-hosted personal finance manager for tracking income and expenses, with budgets, categories, rules and a REST API.
What the free edition leaves out
The free edition covers the features teams usually need; we found nothing important held back. “Not confirmed” means the official pages we read did not say, so we do not guess.
| Feature | Free edition | Details | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| SSO / SAML | Not confirmed | Firefly III supports login through a REMOTE_USER header set by an authentication proxy such as Authelia. Native SAML or OIDC is not described on the page read. | Source ↗ |
| Role-based access control | Not confirmed | Roles and permissions are not described. The docs mention an owner who is the first registered user. | Source ↗ |
| Audit logs | Not confirmed | Audit logs are not described on the pages read. | Source ↗ |
| Multi-user / teams | Free | Unlimited users, each with a separate financial administration. It is off by default and the owner can enable registration. Sharing one administration between users is not possible. | Source ↗ |
| Backups and restore | Not confirmed | The docs say there is no built-in backup routine; you back up the database, uploads and .env yourself. CSV export exists but the docs say it is not a backup and cannot be re-imported. | Source ↗ |
| API access | Free | A REST JSON API covers almost every part of the app, using OAuth2 clients or personal access tokens. | Source ↗ |
| Support SLA | Not confirmed | The README lists GitHub Discussions, Gitter and issues for support, and calls the project a side gig. No paid support or SLA is described. | Source ↗ |
Best for
Tech-comfortable people who want detailed, double-entry style tracking of their own finances on their own server.
Why choose it over YNAB
The code is AGPL-3.0 and the README says it is self-hosted and will not contact external servers unless you tell it to. It has double-entry bookkeeping, recurring transactions, rules, piggy banks, multiple currencies, two-factor login and a REST API. The project describes no paid edition.
Where it falls short
It is not YNAB-style zero-based budgeting, and the docs say it will not support that. It is aimed at people who do not mind running a PHP and database server. There is no built-in backup routine, and you cannot share one administration between users. Bank import goes through the separate Data Importer. There is no official hosted service; the README points to third-party hosts. It is maintained mainly by one developer.
Open-source alternative to
- YNAB — The Firefly III FAQ compares itself with YNAB, but it budgets differently: you set an amount to spend instead of assigning every coin.
- Mint — The Firefly III FAQ compares itself with Mint, and the Data Importer has a Mint import configuration.
Category
Finance & AccountingTopics
Tech stack
PHP
JavaScriptLanguages as reported by GitHub for the repository.
