SEE Finance is a wonderful program. I've been using it full time now for the past two months. Before that I used MoneyDance for 5 years and Quicken for many years before that.

MoneyDance is also a great program but it had a few quirks with online importing and such that caused me to look around. SEE Finance is probably not as powerful as MoneyDance yet but it is getting there (MoneyDance can do lot matching when selling stocks for instance). Things like tagging (classes in Quicken) are coming. I certainly like the road map for SEE Finance and their customer service is very responsive.

I really like SEE Finance's approach of using filters to match categories to transactions and the built in browser simplifies the process of downloading transactions from banks that do not support Direct Connect. The just added ability in 0.9.13 to select a range of transactions and then get a total just on these is pretty useful as well.

Aabel is really an amazing program. I found Aabel because I was looking for a graphing program that would make high quality graphs (those of you who have tried to use Excel graphs within InDesign know how problematic printing can be). Aabel's interface can be a bit quirky, especially the first time you use it. However, the program is extremely powerful and is fairly ease to use for many tasks (once you gain some experience using it). After working with Excel graphics, my first thought is to want to click on the graph to change something. With Aabel you have to retrain yourself to how you create a graph. This is not a bad thing, just different.

Aabel is more than a graphing program though and can do quite a bit of statistical analysis as well as data manipulation. One super cool feature is the button above the data columns in the worksheet view. Click on this button and you get a graph that combines a PDF, a CDF, as well as an adjustable histogram and other basic statistics. This sounds wierd but the graph is very easy to intrepret. It is a great way to see how your data is distributed without having to do anything other than getting the data into Aabel. As an economist, looking a a PDF and CDF is often the first thing I want to do, so this feature alone is quite valuable.

The product has potential but there are two factors that limit its usefullness. First, I just can't copy and paste tab or comma separated data into the window. It appears I must have a text file to drag into the window. Second, I can't copy anything out of the program for use with another program.