Free Budgeting Checkbook Software Tested | Alternative to Quicken

I recently went through a "battle" with the tech support reps from Quicken for one of my customers. We were trying to get a backup database to restore after a hard drive failure. The backup database was only a few days old and actually we had several copies of backups from the previous week. All told between the customer and I, we spent about 5 hours of time working with tech support and pretty much got fed up. I have restored hundreds of Quickbooks and Quicken data files and this one would just error out, nothing we tried helped. We ended up sending the data to Intuit to be repaired for a price.

On that thought I went in search of some free budget software to test and see what I could find out. The main goals were to have bank connections, and maintain all finances such as mortgages and checking accounts. Also to not use any Intuit/Quicken/Quickbooks products whatsoever. Here is what I found out that I liked.

Home / Personal Free Budget Software:
GnuCash
I dig GnuCash it was my favorite free budget software. Being a computer guy helped though cause there is some foot work for importing or exporting data from banks but if you have a knowledge of csv file manipulation then you can get this to work. BUT the brilliance in GnuCash is that the software is a close tie to Quicken and Quickbooks molded together. Being that the software is distributed free and under the GNU Public License there might be some bugs in some things you try, there were none for me. I loved it. The ease of use was nothing short of brilliant. This one ranked tops for me as a free budgeting software.

Business Free Budget Software:

OK not usually one to usually tout the abilities of Microsoft, they do have a nice product in Office Accounting Express. It is pretty rocking for what you get in their free budgeting software, you get accounting staples like GL, A/R, A/P, invoicing, and online banking. Also had good integration with other Office products. All this is for FREE, yep go to the link in this paragraph and try it for yourself. Their info page has a nice comparison between the two products and each set of features. They have an upgraded version that includes a bunch of data modeling stuff for $199 too. I would definitely jump on this product over using Quickbooks that is hugely more expensive.

Hopefully this will save you some time in your search to replace Intuit's products. I would definitely suggest trying a few of the products out that you find for awhile though as there are differences in each as far as capabilities for budgeting and bookkeeping. If you want to check out some other free stuff ideas go here Free Swag. Also watch out for the ICF World Homes Scam. Good luck!