Although I switched to Macs many years ago, there is still one last application that stops me from getting rid of the 9 year old Dell running Windows – Quicken. Now, I know you can buy Quicken for the Mac, but if you’re in the same boat as I am, you’ll think twice before you pull the trigger and spend the money. Quicken on the Mac is not the same as Quicken for Windows.

I thought I would do a little research before I made the switch and boy am I glad I did. Reading the support forums at Quicken.com I quickly found that there are not too many happy Quicken for Mac people hanging out over there. That’s pretty typical, since most forums are used for support and most people without problems don’t hang out on support forums, you tend to only get the bad news and upset customers when you use the forums.

I can almost understand that the Mac and Windows versions are not 100% feature by feature identical. Almost. But what I think is unforgivable is that the file formats between the Windows and Mac version are different. This means you cannot just take your Quicken for Windows files and use them on Quicken for Mac. You have to go through the process of exporting everything from Windows, creating new files on the Mac, and then importing everything. Even this wouldn’t be that bad if it actually included everything. But it doesn’t.

Check out the official support document from Quicken and you’ll see all of the things you get to recreate. I think Quicken says it best:

Quicken for Windows and Quicken for Macintosh have different features and data file structure. Due to the differences in the programs, not all data can be converted from Quicken for Windows to Quicken for Mac. The following information shows the data that will NOT convert from Quicken for Windows to Quicken for Mac. This information will need to be re-entered in Quicken for Mac after converting your file.

Then the list begins. These are the 2 main items that are just show stoppers for me –

Add to these that the Mac version is still not feature complete with the Windows version and I have to wonder how serious Quicken is about supporting the Mac platform. To me it feels more like they are doing the absolute minimum necessary to keep Mac customers hanging on in the hopes that some day it will be what most of us expect – feature complete with the Windows version. Don’t hold your breath.

I’m not willing to run a virtualization product just so I can keep Quicken around – yet. I think I’ll take a look at competing personal finance products for the Mac and see where that leads me, or I may just switch us over to the web based online banking that our bank offers and see if that works well enough to allow us to get rid of Quicken completely – and Windows. Complaining on a Blog that nobody reads really won’t make a difference, so I’ll have to let the money do the talking. Maybe it’s time to break the endless cycle of upgrading to the latest and greatest version every year. Shame on you Quicken.