Presumably, the last third either loses interest in tracking their bills or switches to something like Mint. She said Mint has more than 7 million users.Ībout a third of Quicken customers buy a new version every year, and another third upgrade every three years, said Eddy Wu, an Intuit senior product manager. At least three versions of Quicken 2012 appear in the top 50 for software sold on, but an Intuit spokeswoman declined to provide sales data. Quicken still has a sizable customer base, and people keep buying it because access to online services expires after about 31/2 years. They don’t want to track or check anything.” “Mint is for the person who doesn’t want to think.

“Changing people’s habits is hard,” Intuit co-founder Scott Cook said in a recent interview. Quicken has been around for nearly 30 years, whereas Mint was founded in 2006 and was acquired by Intuit just a couple of years ago. The two tools take different approaches to money management and have each found niches.

Mint seems to push out updates to its website and mobile apps constantly, but the iPad version was a long-awaited release for many people who use the service regularly. On the other hand, Mint’s website and applications, which can all provide access to a single account’s information stored on Intuit’s servers, are free with ads for cards, banks and insurance companies tailored to a user’s spending habits sprinkled throughout. It’s only available for Windows, and it stores data on the user’s computer, which is important for the security-minded but prevents people from accessing their accounts from multiple devices. Quicken comes in many flavors and can cost anywhere from $30 to $150, with one advertisement for a Quicken credit card shown infrequently. Quicken 2012 has a revamped look and a new debt-reduction-planning feature. Intuit, which also makes TurboTax, maintains the two personal-finance tools in tandem, and recent updates to each, such as the free Mint iPad app that launched on Wednesday or the major new version of Quicken that hit stores last month, are indicative of how different their audiences think about their money. Many families use either Quicken or year-round to track budgets and review billing statements. Software developer Intuit isn’t concerned about which of the two most popular applications for personal finance people choose.

Intuit mint competitors