I have opened and abandoned more budgeting apps than I can count. Most of them died the same death: I stopped opening them. So this is not a tested ranking. It is the shortlist that keeps coming up when grad students talk about what actually stuck.
YNAB is the favorite of people who like rules. Every dollar gets a job before the month starts, which suits a fixed stipend oddly well. There is a learning curve, and I will not pretend otherwise. Some people love the discipline. Others bounce off it in week two. Both reactions are valid.
EveryDollar keeps it simple, and the free tier covers the basics, which matters when your budget for a budget app is zero. Categories, a monthly plan, done. If you want to plan without reading a manual, this is the easy on-ramp.
Rocket Money earns its spot by finding leaks: the subscriptions you forgot, the bills that crept up. On a stipend, a forgotten subscription is not an annoyance. It is a percentage of your food budget. That reframes the whole feature.
Monarch Money is the one people pick when money is shared, with a partner or a roommate, because it handles joint finances without turning money into a recurring argument. Grad school has a way of merging households. This one saw it coming.
Copilot is the iOS-first option with a reputation for being genuinely pleasant to use. That sounds shallow until you have abandoned three apps because opening them felt like homework. Pleasant is a feature.
Most of these double as an expense tracker app, so you are not really choosing between planning and tracking. And any grad school budget planner app lives or dies on one thing: whether you open it on the first of the month. Pick one, give it sixty days, and switch if it dies on your home screen. For the other half of the equation, the cost-of-living-adjusted offer reports at phdstipend.fyi show what your stipend actually buys in each city.