Actual Budget vs Firefly III

Actual Budget and Firefly III are both self-hosted answers to handing your financial life to YNAB or a bank's dashboard, but they are built for two different kinds of person. Actual is a budgeting app: it wants to help you decide what this month's money should do, and it is friendly enough that most people are budgeting within minutes. Firefly III is a personal accounting system: it wants a complete, auditable ledger of every transaction, and it gives you the double-entry machinery to build one. The choice is less "which is better" than "do you want a budget or a book of accounts?"

Budgeting vs. accounting

This is the fork in the road, so it is worth being precise. Actual Budget is built around envelope budgeting — every dollar you have is assigned a job before you spend it, and the interface is organized around categories you fund and draw down each month. If you have used YNAB, it will feel immediately familiar; the whole app is shaped to make the give-every-dollar-a-job workflow fast and forgiving.

Firefly III is built around double-entry accounting. Money always moves from one account to another, everything balances, and on top of that ledger it layers budgets, bills, categories, rules, and reports. It is the tool for people who want the full picture — net worth over time, where money actually goes, precise reconciliation — and who are comfortable thinking in accounts and transactions rather than just envelopes.

The stack you have to run

The apps' philosophies show up directly in what you operate. Actual is a JavaScript / Node.js app that is local-first: the real work happens in your browser or desktop client against a local copy of your data, and the piece you self-host is a small sync server that keeps your devices in step and holds an encrypted backup. There is no separate database to provision — the sync server manages its own storage — so the whole thing is a single container you point at a data volume. It is licensed MIT, a permissive license, and rates just 1 / 5 on difficulty for good reason.

Firefly III is a PHP / Laravel application backed by a real database — typically MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL — plus the usual Laravel setup concerns like generating an app key and running migrations. Its official Docker Compose bundles the app with MariaDB, which keeps it manageable, but it is fundamentally a two-service deployment with more to configure. It is licensed AGPL-3.0 and rates 3 / 5 on difficulty. Both apps start comfortably around 512 MB of RAM, so the gap here is operational complexity, not raw resources.

Features where each one wins

They are strong at different things, and pretending otherwise helps no one:

• Speed to first budget — Actual, decisively. Import or start fresh and you are budgeting the same session. Firefly expects some accounting setup first.
• Depth and reporting — Firefly, decisively. Rich reports, budgets, bills, rules that auto-categorize transactions, and a full audit trail.
• Bank import — Firefly has a mature importer ecosystem (CSV plus community data-importer tooling); Actual supports file imports and, via community add-ons, bank syncing, but Firefly is the more serious importer.
• Offline and privacy — Actual's local-first model means the app keeps working with no server at all, and your data lives on your device by default.
• Multi-user / household — Firefly leans more toward structured, account- based management; Actual is squarely aimed at one person or one household budget.

Which should you self-host?

Pick Actual Budget if…

• You want to actually budget — envelope-style, YNAB-like — and be up and running in minutes rather than an evening.
• You prefer the lightest possible thing to host: one MIT-licensed container, no separate database, local-first with an encrypted sync backup.
• You value a fast, friendly interface over exhaustive accounting features you will not use.

Pick Firefly III if…

• You want real double-entry accounting with a complete, reconcilable ledger.
• You care about deep reports, automation rules, and mature bank-import tooling.
• You do not mind running a PHP + Laravel + database stack to get that depth.

Running either on a VPS

Both are light enough for a small server — a 512 MB box handles either without complaint, so this is not a horsepower decision. The difference is how much you are keeping healthy: Actual is a single self-contained sync server with its own storage, while Firefly III is a PHP app plus a database you will want to back up together. Give Firefly a little more attention at setup and around upgrades for its migrations; give Actual almost none. The step-by-step setups are linked below, and any of the VPS options here has plenty of room for the app plus its database, with headroom left for the rest of your self-hosted stack.