I’m going to chime in despite being a broke college student. I’ve been using ledger for about 2 years now, and daily reconciliation of what I actually spent is more helpful to me than having a budget, or anything else, it forces me to acknowledge how much I spent, and on what. Personally, it short circuits the easy swiping of plastic that leads to a ton of unnecessary spending, kinda like using cash.

Ledger has budgeting features, allows me to use multiple commodities (I even wrote a script to get stock prices and help ledger value them). I can’t comment on bigger things, but for my use case, I really enjoy it.