About Firefly III
Firefly III runs on your own server and manages your personal finances. It helps you follow what you earn and spend, with the aim of spending less and saving more, and it supports budgets, categories and tags. The project describes itself as free and open source, with no AI and no cloud, and as privacy friendly. It is written in PHP and released under the AGPL-3.0 license.
A set of import tools brings in data from other sources, and the application offers many financial reports to give insight into where money goes. The author built it out of a wish to feel in control of money rather than stressed by it. You can try a public demo, read the documentation, or install it yourself, and the repository topics point to Docker and Linux deployments. The project originates in the European Union and accepts donations.
Key features
- Tracks income, expenses and transfers
- Budgets, categories and tags
- Import tools for bringing in transactions
- Financial reports for spending insight
- Self-hosted with Docker support
- Public demo for trying it out
Good fit for
- →Private personal budgeting
- →Tracking expenses across several accounts
- Tags
- personal-finance
- budgeting
- self-hosted
- expenses
- php
- docker
- accounting
- privacy
Firefly III: questions and answers
- What is Firefly III used for?
- Firefly III is a self-hosted personal finance manager that tracks income and expenses with budgets, categories, tags and reports. It is a good fit for private personal budgeting and tracking expenses across several accounts.
- Is Firefly III open source?
- Yes. Firefly III is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at firefly-iii/firefly-iii and is written mainly in PHP.
- Is Firefly III free?
- Yes. Firefly III is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- Can I self-host Firefly III?
- Yes. Firefly III can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
- What is Firefly III an alternative to?
- Firefly III is an open-source alternative to YNAB, Quicken, Monarch and Rocket Money. Other open-source alternatives to YNAB include Sure, Actual Budget and Paisa.
- Is Firefly III actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Firefly III was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v6.7.6, published on 28 September 2026. The project has 25k stars on GitHub.
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