Kemback vs Tiller

The verdict

Choose Tiller if you love spreadsheets, want your bank transactions to land in a Google Sheet or Excel workbook every day, and enjoy building your own formulas, charts and layouts. For $99 a year you get daily bank feeds into a file you own, and nothing about your data is locked inside an app.

Choose Kemback if you’d rather the structure were built for you: a budget, a register, bills, reports and a shared household, without maintaining a workbook, and without a subscription. The trade-off today is that Kemback doesn’t connect to banks yet, so you import a file from your bank each week until its Plus plan brings automatic sync.

Who Tiller is for

Tiller is for people whose natural habitat is a spreadsheet. It connects to your bank and credit card accounts through Yodlee and Plaid (US only) and adds new transactions to your own Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel file every day. Its Foundation Template gives you monthly and yearly budget sheets, and AutoCat rules categorize transactions as they arrive.

The appeal is control. Everything is a cell you can see, change, chart or pivot. You share the file with Google or Microsoft sharing, and if you cancel, the spreadsheet and all its data stay with you. Tiller costs $99 a year after a 30-day trial, with no monthly plan listed, and it’s funded only by those subscriptions. There’s no native mobile app; on a phone you use your spreadsheet.

Who Kemback is for

Kemback is for people who want the depth a good spreadsheet can give, without being the one who maintains it. The budget has two modes on the same data: envelope mode, where every dollar of income is assigned, and category mode, where you set a monthly plan per category. You can switch without losing anything.

Underneath sits a register with splits, transfers, cleared and reconciled status, and statement reconciliation that locks reconciled transactions. Rules rename payees and set categories, a review inbox holds new transactions for a quick look, and bills and recurring transactions appear on a calendar, with a warning when a bill or subscription goes up. Safe to spend, a 90-day projected balance, savings goals, net worth and reports by category, payee or tag are there from the first day, with no formulas to write.

A spreadsheet or an app

The real choice here is less about features than about how you like to work.

A spreadsheet is endlessly flexible. If you want a chart nobody else has thought of, you build it. The cost is upkeep: when a formula breaks or a sheet grows unwieldy, you’re the one who fixes it, and sharing means giving someone access to the whole file.

An app trades some of that flexibility for things a spreadsheet finds hard. In Kemback each person in a household signs in separately, accounts can be shared or kept private, and roles (owner, editor, viewer, advisor) decide who can change what, with a tamper-evident activity log behind it. Reconciled transactions are locked, so last year’s numbers can’t drift by accident. And if you still want a spreadsheet for your own analysis, Kemback exports everything as JSON or CSV whenever you like.

Sync today, or files today

Tiller’s daily bank feed is its core, and Kemback doesn’t have an equivalent yet. With Kemback you download an OFX, QFX, QIF or CSV file from your bank’s website and import it; Kemback skips anything it has already seen, and your rules tidy up what’s new. For many households that’s a few minutes once a week.

Kemback’s Plus plan, planned at $79 a year or $7.99 a month, will add automatic bank sync through Plaid. It isn’t on sale yet; you can join the waitlist on the pricing page.

Moving from Tiller to Kemback

Tiller keeps your data in your own spreadsheet, so there’s no special export step:

1. Open the sheet that holds your transactions and save it as a CSV file from Google Sheets or Excel.
2. Create a free Kemback account and add your accounts.
3. Import the CSV. The column mapper lets you tell Kemback which column holds the date, the payee and the amount.
4. Kemback skips duplicates when you import again, so you can add newer files from your bank on top.
5. Recreate your most useful AutoCat rules as Kemback rules, then set up your budget.

Your spreadsheet stays where it is, so you can run both side by side for a month before deciding.

Bottom line

Tiller gives spreadsheet people exactly what they want: daily bank feeds into a file they own, for $99 a year. Kemback gives you a ready-made budget, register, bills and household sharing for free, with export of everything when you want a spreadsheet, and a weekly file import until Plus brings sync. If you enjoy building the sheet, Tiller fits; if you’d rather just use one, try Kemback.

Questions

Is Kemback a free alternative to Tiller?

For budgeting, yes. Kemback's Free plan has no time limit and includes budgets, a register, bills, reports, rules, import and export. It doesn't sync with your bank yet, which is the main thing Tiller's $99 a year pays for.

Can I keep using spreadsheets with Kemback?

Yes, alongside it. Kemback exports everything as JSON or CSV at any time, so you can open your transactions in Google Sheets or Excel whenever you want to do your own analysis.

Does Kemback sync with my bank every day like Tiller?

Not yet. Today you import OFX, QFX, QIF or CSV files from your bank, and Kemback skips anything it has already seen. Automatic bank sync through Plaid is coming with the Plus plan, which isn't on sale yet.

How do I move my Tiller history into Kemback?

Save the sheet that holds your transactions as a CSV file from Google Sheets or Excel, then import it into Kemback and use the column mapper to match the date, payee and amount columns.

Which works better on a phone?

Tiller has no native mobile app; you use your spreadsheet. Kemback runs in a phone's browser and has an iPhone app in beta that works offline for accounts, the register and the budget. Its Android app is in development.