Today Netbanker wrote a post about the rapid growth of the financial planning website Mint.com. According to Compete, Mint had 13% more visitors in July than in the month before. That makes a total of 460,000 visitors per month. That made me wonder how popular another personal finance website is: Wesabe. That site differentiates itself from Mint by fostering a lively community.

Compete: Mint vs Wesabe

On Compete it’s easy to compare the popularity of multiple websites. Compete monitors the online behavior of over 2 million Americans (with their permission), which form the basis for these statistics. From the graph it’s clear that Mint has a lot more visitors than Wesabe.

However, it’s always a little unclear how reliable these data are. Therefore I’ve done the same search with several other traffic measurement websites, using AttentionMeter. You can see the results after the break.

Quantcast: Mint versus Wesabe

First of all, Quantcast shows really cool demographic data on either site, such as other sites that are visited by Mint and Wesabe users. Both the Mint report and the Wesabe report show that these sites attract a somewhat male, more educated audience. Anyhow, Quantcast confirms that Mint.com has more traction than Wesabe with 97,000 versus 10,000 US visitors:

Google Trends: Mint compared with Wesabe

Google Trends is using search data for showing the popularity of websites, rather than a consumer panel. The Google search results confirm that Mint is an order of magnitude more popular than Wesabe.

Alexa: Wesabe more popular than Mint???

Alexa was the first website that provided traffic statistics, starting many years ago. It has been criticized for being somewhat unreliable. Alexa certainly defies the trend that we’ve seen with the other traffic measurement sites, with Wesabe overtaking Mint in the past couple of days. Probably not entirely accurate.

Technorati: Mint and Wesabi in the Blogosphere

Technorati is a search engine for weblogs, so it searches for blog posts that mention ‘mint’ and ‘wesabe’. Now, I’m fairly sure that the graph below also tracks articles about ‘mint tea’ and cars that are in ‘mint condition’. In any case, Technorati also lists the number of blog reactions that reference either Mint.com or Wesabe.com, which should more reliable:

• Mint.com: 4,085 blog reactions
• Wesabe.com: 1,507 blog reactions

And here are the graphs (first Mint, then Wesabe):

Conclusion

It is clear that Mint is more popular than Wesabe, although Wesabe has a fair amount of mentions in Blog postings, maybe because of its social nature. Personally I found it easier to import all my accounts with Mint.com, maybe because they use the Yodlee account aggregation technology rather than developing it in-house like Wesabe. I do like the social aspects of Wesabe: there are a lot of intelligent discussions going on there. We’ll keep track of both Mint and Wesabe in future posts, and if you have any feedback, please leave a comment below!