The ability to manage finances has always been one of the great selling points of personal computing, and selling copies of the Quicken personal accounting program made Intuit a very profitable company.

Then the cloud came along, and with it a free cloud-based personal-finance service called , which rendered Quicken obsolete in the minds of Web-savvy users. Mint has all the features that most users need to keep track of their personal finances, it's accessible from multiple PCs and mobile devices, and it's free. And Mint--which Intuit later acquired--offers the same level of security as most online banking services do.

Yet Mint is different from your bank's online services, because it brings together all of your various bank and credit card accounts in one place in the cloud. If you're at all uncomfortable with the idea of a single Website tracking all of your personal financial data and knowing every single transaction you make, Mint might not sit well with you.

Mint isn't so great for people who own rental properties or who run home-based businesses or the like. Those people probably need to stick with the desktop version of Quicken.