Wealthsimple has a budget tracker of sorts, but it only sees Wealthsimple money. Spend insights sorts the spending on its own card and chequing account, and the net worth view pulls in your other banks' balances if you give it their sign-in. That also shows Wealthsimple where the rest of your money sits, and its privacy policy lets it use your information to recommend its products.* NBU sorts all of it from the statements you download yourself, once a month, and has no account to move your money into.
Does Wealthsimple have a budgeting app?
Not a separate one. Inside the Wealthsimple app, the Spend tab has spend insights: trends, categories, and transactions you can re-label, tag or leave out of the total. You need a Wealthsimple Visa Infinite card or a Wealthsimple chequing account to use it, and the history only goes back to January 2025.*
That's the catch if you bank in more than one place. Spend insights only reads Wealthsimple accounts. Your TD chequing, your Amex and your Rogers card aren't in it.
What does Wealthsimple's net worth view pull in?
Balances, not transactions. Wealthsimple's net worth feature lets you link outside bank and investment accounts, and you connect each one by signing in with that institution's credentials. Its own help page is upfront that "since open banking isn't yet supported in Canada, external account balances may not update automatically," so you refresh them by hand. You can also add a house, a car or a loan yourself.*
Why I don't link my other banks to it
I do have Wealthsimple accounts. I move money between banks and brokers depending on who's paying a bonus that year, usually a percentage of what I bring in, and only when the money is locked in for 12 months at most, so I usually have several accounts open at once, and I treat each one as just the bank. The tracking happens in one place, from statements, because I don't give my banking login to any app, my broker's included. I ran that setup in a Google Sheet for years, and the longer story is in why I built my own YNAB alternative.
There's a second reason, and it applies to any bank or broker. Linking your outside accounts tells Wealthsimple exactly how much of your money sits somewhere else. Its privacy policy says it uses your information to recommend Wealthsimple products and to work out which ones you might qualify for.* I'd rather not hand a company that wants my money a map of where the rest of it is. NBU has no account to move your money into, it earns nothing from the cards it shows you, and we don't sell your data.
Is NBU a good alternative to Wealthsimple's budget tracker?
Yes, if your money lives at more than one bank. NBU doesn't care where an account is. Your Wealthsimple statement, your TD statement and your Amex statement all go into the same month, and Valerie puts every transaction into one set of categories, learning from your corrections as she goes. When you close the month, every account lands in one net worth. You confirm each balance, and when a PDF statement prints one, NBU shows it so you can accept it in one click. Investment values carry forward until you update them.
That matters most if you carry several credit cards. Your Wealthsimple Visa sits next to your other cards, and NBU follows each card's welcome offer from its statement: the spending still needed, the days left, the annual fee date. When it recommends a new card, it only counts a welcome bonus your normal spending already clears. Budgets are optional, and you can ask Valerie anything about your month instead of digging through screens.
NBU's monthly ritual is free, and so is tracking one card's welcome offer. Plus covers every card for $6 a month, or $60 a year if you switch to yearly at checkout, all in Canadian dollars. See the pricing page.
What NBU doesn't do yet
NBU doesn't update during the month. It sees a purchase when you import that month's statement, while spend insights reads Wealthsimple's own accounts directly.
NBU also doesn't have a shared household view yet. Wealthsimple lets two people in a household see shared accounts together. Shared views are planned in NBU, but they aren't live. Bank sync is something we're looking at too, as an option. If it comes, it will use Canada's regulated open banking and never ask for your banking password.
Using Wealthsimple and NBU together
You don't have to pick one. That's how I use them: Wealthsimple holds the money, and NBU does the tracking. On the web, Wealthsimple lets you download your monthly statements as CSV or PDF, one at a time or in bulk as a ZIP file.* Import those next to your other banks' statements, and your Wealthsimple spending sits in the same categories as everything else.
* Spend insights eligibility, features and household view were read on Wealthsimple's help article on tracking spending, the net worth view on its help article on net worth, and statement downloads on its help article on monthly statements, and its use of your information to recommend products in its privacy policy. All read on 2026-10-19. These pages change, so check them before you decide.