I tried it. Auto-import never worked reliably. I asked their customer support for help, and they said I should just do it manually.

They seemed like a close alternative, but if I'm doing all this work manually, I might as well use a spread sheet for free.

They've done a bunch of updates to the importing in the last year so it might work better with your institution now. They support Oauth for the bank creds too for those that support it, which is great.

It's still not great. You have to reauth accounts all the time, and I'm constantly getting the little wrench icon telling me they can't pull transactions right now. I've not found a single alternative that will give me a solid overview of all my various accounts as an api that I can build my OWN dashboard off of, otherwise I'd use that. YNAB still gets my money, but reluctantly until then.

How secure is linking your bank account with YNAB?

They use Plaid [0] under the hood. As long as you trust it, it's safe.

[0] https://plaid.com/

so a bit more secure than mint then?

Plaid doesn’t seem very secure reading this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25753935

Importing greatly depends how well your bank/credit card plays ball. Most banks don't have any incentive to participate and newer security features like 2fa have made it harder/impossible. I do have one bank that grants application tokens for read-only access. The setup UX wasn't awesome, but I wish that was standard.

Unfortunately, I doubt YNAB can just ask people to move banks. Honestly, that, a web interface, and how speedy ACH payments are processed are kind of my highest priorities and would switch banks just for that. But those are all hard to impossible to assess without opening an account. I had a credit union get very confused when I asked if they had a demo of their web UI before I opened an account. I imagine I was the first to ask.

They can't ask people to move banks, but TBH I stopped using my credit cards from a certain provider because YNAB wouldn't sync (which drove me to look into other cards and ultimately get a better one that, by chance, would sync).