Ascent vs Honeydue for Couples Managing Debt

If you’re tackling finances as a couple, you’ve probably stumbled across both Ascent and Honeydue. They’re both designed for two people, but they solve fundamentally different problems. Picking the wrong one wastes your time. Here’s how to figure out which one you actually need.

The Core Difference

Ascent is a debt payoff tracker. It helps you and your partner build a plan to eliminate debt using specific strategies (snowball, avalanche, and seven others), track your progress, and stay accountable. It’s built around the question: “When will we be debt-free, and what’s the fastest path to get there?”

Honeydue is a shared finance dashboard. It helps you and your partner see each other’s accounts, track spending, manage bills, and have money conversations. It’s built around the question: “What does our combined financial picture look like?”

These are related but different needs. Ascent doesn’t track your daily spending. Honeydue doesn’t calculate your optimal debt payoff strategy.

Head-to-Head Comparison

Feature	Ascent	Honeydue
Primary purpose	Debt payoff planning and tracking	Shared financial visibility
Debt payoff strategies	9 strategies (snowball, avalanche, stress-based, etc.)	None
Bank account syncing	No (manual entry, privacy-first)	Yes (auto-syncs transactions)
Partner features	PartnerSync with individual privacy controls	Shared dashboard with per-account visibility
Spending tracking	No	Yes
Bill reminders	Payment due dates for debts	Bill reminders across all accounts
In-app chat	No	Yes
What-if scenarios	Yes	No
BNPL tracking	Yes (promo deadline awareness)	No
Platforms	iOS only	iOS and Android
Pricing	$29.99 one-time; Premium subscription for PartnerSync	Free
Data approach	All data stored in iCloud, nothing on servers	Bank credentials shared with app
Active development	Yes	Questionable (reduced activity)

When to Choose Ascent

You have a specific debt goal. If the central challenge in your relationship’s finances is paying off debt — credit cards, student loans, a car loan, BNPL balances — and you want a structured plan with a clear timeline, Ascent is purpose-built for this.

You want strategy options. Ascent’s nine payoff strategies go well beyond the standard snowball/avalanche choice. The stress-based prioritization is particularly interesting for couples: you can rank debts by emotional weight, not just interest rate or balance. If one debt keeps both of you up at night, you can prioritize it even if it’s not the mathematical best move.

Privacy matters to both of you. Ascent doesn’t connect to your bank accounts. Your data stays in iCloud. For couples who want to work on debt together but aren’t ready to share everything — or who are wary of giving bank credentials to a third party — this model makes sense. PartnerSync lets each person control what the other sees.

You’re both on iPhone. This is a hard constraint. Ascent is iOS only. If one partner uses Android, PartnerSync won’t work.

When to Choose Honeydue

Your challenge is visibility, not debt strategy. If the main issue is that you and your partner don’t know what each other is spending, where the money is going, or when bills are due, Honeydue solves that. It’s a shared financial picture that helps you have better money conversations.

You want automatic transaction tracking. Honeydue syncs with your bank accounts and shows transactions automatically. If you want to see “here’s what we both spent this week on dining out” without manual entry, Honeydue does that. Ascent doesn’t.

Budget is a hard constraint. Honeydue is free. Not freemium — actually free, with no premium tier. If you can’t justify $29.99 plus a subscription for PartnerSync, Honeydue costs nothing.

You need cross-platform support. One partner on iPhone, the other on Android? Honeydue works on both. Ascent doesn’t.

The Honeydue Concern

We need to be honest about something: Honeydue’s long-term viability is uncertain. The app’s development has visibly slowed. Customer support has become increasingly unresponsive. Bank syncing connections break and may not get fixed. The social media presence has gone quiet.

None of this means Honeydue will disappear tomorrow. But when you’re trusting an app with your bank credentials and financial data, an unresponsive development team is a legitimate risk factor. We’ve seen this pattern before — Mint showed similar signs before Intuit shut it down.

If you choose Honeydue, we’d suggest not relying on it as your only financial tool. Have a backup plan for your data.

Can You Use Both?

Yes, and for some couples this actually makes sense. Use Honeydue for day-to-day spending visibility and budget tracking. Use Ascent for the specific debt payoff plan, strategy, and payoff timeline.

The overlap between them is minimal. Honeydue shows you your full financial picture. Ascent gives you a focused plan to eliminate debt from that picture. They complement rather than compete.

The downside is maintaining two apps, which is more friction than one. If you’re going to pick one, pick based on your primary pain point: if it’s “we need to pay off debt together,” choose Ascent. If it’s “we need to see our finances together,” choose Honeydue (with the caveats above).

Other Options for Couples

If neither Ascent nor Honeydue fits, a few alternatives:

• Monarch Money — Comprehensive finance app with partner features, bank syncing, and some debt tracking. $14.99/month subscription. Best if you want one app that does everything but doesn’t go as deep on debt strategy.
• Goodbudget — Envelope budgeting for couples. Manual entry, syncs between partners. Good if you want budgeting with some debt awareness.
• YNAB — The gold standard for budgeting with partner support. $14.99/month. Doesn’t have dedicated debt payoff strategies but its budgeting methodology naturally directs money toward debt.

See our full best debt apps for couples guide for more options.

Our Recommendation

If your goal as a couple is to get out of debt, and you’re both on iPhone, start with Ascent. The focused debt payoff tools, strategy variety, and PartnerSync features make it the strongest option for couples with a specific debt elimination goal.

If your goal is broader financial visibility — seeing combined spending, tracking bills together, having a shared financial dashboard — and you need cross-platform support, Honeydue is still a reasonable choice. Just go in with eyes open about the development activity concerns, and don’t make it the only place your financial data lives.

The worst choice is no choice. If you’re arguing about money or avoiding the conversation entirely, picking either app and starting a shared plan tonight will move you forward more than another week of analysis paralysis.