Best Answer: iBank 4 is an exclusively Mac-based personal finance application, written to take full advantage of Apple's newest technologies - hardware, software and operating systems (both OS X and iOS). Compared to the last full version of Quicken - Quicken 2007 for Mac - the key difference may be that iBank is developed to run on your Mac's Intel processors and is natively Lion-ready. Quicken 2007, written for older PowerPC machines, will not run in OS X 10.7, although Intuit has suggested since summer 2011 that a fix is forthcoming; the latest announcement promises 'early spring.'
A newer edition of Quicken, Quicken Essentials, lacks many features of personal finance management, including investment support and the ability to export data to the most common format (QIF). A trial version of iBank 4 is available from the developer. There's also a companion iPhone app for data sync and mobile transaction entry, which isn't the case for any version of Quicken. Answered by Scott B from Putney. Feb 3, 2012. Not very well, in my opinion.
I switched to iBank from Quicken 2007 a year ago just before I moved to Lion. IBank has a much more attractive, Mac-like interface and was able to import over 10 years of Quicken data with reasonable accuracy. It provides a nice display of up-to-date financial status and has a nice approach to budgeting. There are numerous drawbacks to iBank, however. It is far slower. It can take a couple of seconds (on a Mac Pro) for a new transaction to open. It has very attractive report packages that are nearly impossible to customize or filter to any degree.
It was impossible to create the ad hoc reports that I use to help me a at tax time. Though it's compatible with online banking (Wells Fargo in my case), it does very poorly when it comes to recognizing transactions. The Mountain Lion-compatible version of iBank no longer automatically backs itself up. Their website reports this feature will not return soon.
It lacks the little interface niceties that I had grown used to in Quicken, like using plus and minus keys to increment or decrement fields and optional automatic decimal place insertion (the latter is broken in the current Quicken build, but they're working on a fix). New records aren't created automatically, so if you're not paying close attention, you'll re-edit the same record. Reconciling accounts is far more complicated and in several respects, counter-intuitive. After a year with iBank, I decided to try moving back to the Lion-friendly version of Quicken 2007. It involved some clean-up, but I'm incredibly happy I made the move. Frankly, I complained for years about Intuit's stodgy approach to its Mac software. It's not glamourous, but it does the job incredibly well.
I had been using Quicken since 1995, upgrading ultimately to Quicken 2006 (maybe I bought one version in between). I stayed with Quicken 2006 for years, and I tried iBank when I bought a Lion laptop, but got frustrated with iBank (I continued to use Quicken 2006 on my Snow Leopard iMac). Full details about Quicken's refund policy are available at this link. At some point in the future, if Intuit begins offering a Quicken free trial, we will add the offer on this page. Since they offer free editions for other software like Turbotax, we expect that a free version of Quicken should become available at some point.
Keep in mind that your bank's IT infrastructure is still running much of the same COBOL code that was originally written in the 60's & 70's. Answered by Richard G from Portland.
Aug 26, 2012.
Is a trial version available? Or even a way to see the software? There's a lot of information about the software and obviously in the software, but without seeing how this complex information is presented I'm reluctant to enter into a subscription, a pricing model which I loathe BTW. I used Quicken many years ago until it dropped the Mac for a while when I went to iBank and later Banktivity. My wife doesn't like the new app so we're looking at Quicken again.
Any guidance on a trial version would be much appreciated.