A little over a month ago, I wrote an article about trying to decide between iBank 4 and SEE Finance. I finally made a decision and just purchased a license for SEE Finance.
Here are my Top 4 Reasons for picking SEE Finance over iBank 4:
1) Vanguard Direct Download support
As I said in the previous part, this wasn't originally on my mind, but after realizing how much of a pain it is to manage manually and the fact that SEE Finance already supports Direct Download for Vanguard, this really became the clincher for me.
2) Customer Service/Support
I had a few questions, discovered a few bugs, and had a few feature requests, so I emailed SEE Finance's support. They answered my questions and even fixed one of my bugs in their last release.
3) No 30-day expiring trial
I've been really busy recently with other things (you can get a glimpse from the most recent entries I've posted) so I actually ran out of time with my iBank 30-day trial. I really hate limited time trials for this very reason so I am generally resistant to trying software with trial periods. Sure enough, I ran out of time. It doesn't help that this kind of software is something I might run once a month to coincide with billing cycles and not every day. Anyway, SEE Finance did not have a trial expiration, so I got to evaluate it on my time schedule instead of theirs which I appreciate.
4) Price
SEE Finance is half the price of iBank 4. That combined with the previous 3 reasons I just cited made it hard to pass up.
I have no animosity towards iBank. I hope both products continue to develop and improve. Competition is good and I hope to always have a good fallback in case I must suffer through another Quicken-like situation/disaster again.