Firefly III

Firefly III is a self-hosted personal finance manager for tracking income, expenses, budgets, and net worth without uploading financial data to a third-party cloud. It's built as an alternative to tools like YNAB or Quicken for people who want double-entry bookkeeping and detailed reporting while keeping their financial records on infrastructure they control. The project originates in, and is maintained from, the European Union, and is aimed at users who are comfortable tinkering with a self-hosted server in exchange for full ownership of their data.

Key features

• Double-entry bookkeeping: every transaction is recorded as a transfer between two accounts, which keeps balances consistent and auditable.
• Budgets, categories, and tags: organize transactions multiple ways at once to see spending from different angles without picking a single taxonomy.
• Recurring transactions: set up recurring income and expenses so regular bills don't need manual entry each month.
• Rule-based transaction handling: write rules that automatically categorize or tag transactions as they're imported, reducing manual cleanup.
• Piggy banks: track progress toward savings goals separately from regular budgets.
• REST JSON API: nearly every part of Firefly III is accessible through the API, which has enabled a third-party ecosystem of import and reporting tools built around it.
• Two-factor authentication and multi-currency support: secure the instance with 2FA and track accounts in any currency you use.

Ideal use cases

People who've outgrown a spreadsheet but don't want a subscription budgeting app use Firefly III to get double-entry accounting, recurring transaction tracking, and rule automation while keeping every record on their own server. It suits anyone comfortable running Docker who wants full ownership of sensitive financial history instead of trusting it to a SaaS budgeting tool.

Self-hosting and deployment

Firefly III can run via Docker, the most common path, a self-managed server install, Kubernetes, or app-store style installers like Softaculous, AMPPS, Cloudron, Lando, and YunoHost. A public demo site with example financial data lets you try the interface before committing to self-hosting. Because it's fully isolated by default, Firefly III never contacts external servers unless explicitly configured to, which is a deliberate design choice for a tool that handles sensitive financial records.

The Firefly III ecosystem

Beyond the core application, users have built additional tools around the Firefly III API for importing bank data and generating reports, which the documentation catalogs as third-party apps. Support and contribution happen through the main GitHub repository, Gitter, and Mastodon, alongside a documented contributing guide and code of conduct.

Tech stack

Firefly III is written in PHP, licensed under AGPL-3.0, and exposes nearly every feature through its REST API alongside the web interface. Code quality is tracked publicly through Sonarcloud scans covering bugs, code smells, and vulnerabilities.