When Mint and Intuit announced the latter would be acquiring the former, the Quicken team and Aaron Patzer, the CEO of Mint, now a vice president of Intuit’s personal finance division, claimed that their two similar online product offerings, Mint and Quicken Online, would continue to co-exist. This made little sense to me.
In fact, I asked, “How long will it continue to make sense to maintain two highly similar services under one roof?”
We now know the answer is, “Not long at all.” The acquisition has passed regulatory requirements and is now official. With this news, Intuit has also announced that Quicken Online will cease to exist within six to nine months. This phase out will move Quicken Online users over to the Mint software.
It makes more business sense for Intuit to consolidate these similar product offerings, and I figured that in time either this would be the case or Mint’s software would be re-branded with the “Quicken Online” name.
I am not a heavy user of either Mint or Quicken Online. I prefer the desktop software. With Patzer heading the development of the desktop software as well, I expect some improvements in a year or so with the next or subsequent yearly release.
Updated March 21, 2011 and originally published November 6, 2009. If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the RSS feed or receive daily emails. Follow @flexo on Twitter and visit our Facebook page for more updates.
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Luke Landes founded Consumerism Commentary in 2003 and has been building online communities since 1990. Luke, also known as Flexo, has contributed to PC World Magazine, US News, Forbes, and other publications. 
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I have an account with both, though I do not use either any longer. When I was trying out these services I used Mint more, but liked both.
Now-a-days I just track everything with pen and paper! Old school baby! :-)
I have an account with both, though I do not use either any longer. When I was trying out these services I used Mint more, but liked both.
Now-a-days I just track everything with pen and paper! Old school baby! :-)
I prefer it this way rather than the other way around. I've tried both and I definitely prefer mint. It's cleaner, easier to use and has some great features!
I like Mint a lot better, too, but I hate its lack of support for manually-entered transactions.
I prefer Mint's interface, but use Quicken Online for one reason, and one reason only: it supports linking to ING Direct.
Hopefully they'll address that before switching over.
I'm impressed that Mint was able to effectively kill Quicken's online offering.
I don't know why Flexo expects changes to be better after the Mint takeover. Mint got itself going with younger users who had never tracked their finances before. But Mint did not give them any way to enter checks written that had not yet cleared (I guess they figured no one actually wrote checks anymore and that all transactions were debit cards or online bill pay). So I can't see how they expected users to actually know how much money they had and/or owed. They also provided very minimal report facilities, which would be useless at tax time for gathering data.
Min has a lot to learn about how veteran Quicken and MS Money users actually use the programs, IMHO!
They need to combine the best of both worlds. Mint is great about tracking simple checking and savings accounts, but it doesn't have the power of Quicken when it comes to stocks and other investments. However, Mint's online updating system also seems more reliable.
Hopefully they merge the right offerings together when they combine.
Robert
I expect eventually the online product will combine the best features of Quicken Online and Mint.
I expect eventually the online product will combine the best features of Quicken Online and Mint.
I do like the quicken online format much better. Mint would not follow through on my request to add a bank. I hope they merge the best of each system.