Martia vs Sure: hosted European personal finance vs open-source self-hosted
Sure is for engineers who want to run their own server. Martia is for everyone else.
Sure and Martia solve similar problems — they aggregate bank accounts, categorise spending, and let you ask questions about your money. The difference isn't what they do. It's who runs the infrastructure.
Sure is an open-source personal finance app you download, install on your own server (Docker, Railway, or PikaPods), and run yourself. The code is public. Security, updates, backups — all yours. Martia solves the same problem the other way: a hosted service, hand-crafted per country, where we run the infrastructure and you just use the app.
This article isn't trying to convince you Martia is better than Sure. It's trying to help you pick the one that fits how you want to spend your time. If configuring Docker on a Saturday morning sounds like a good time — you'll probably want Sure. If you'd rather someone else handled the server — Martia.
Key takeaways
- Sure is open source under AGPLv3 — a community fork of the archived Maybe Finance project, around 7.9k GitHub stars, fully self-hostable
- Martia is a hosted service for people without an engineering background — we run the infrastructure, manage bank integrations, and operate the app country by country
- Both have an AI chat you can ask in plain language, and multi-bank aggregation. That's not the difference — it's the shared baseline
- Sure connects via Plaid (10,000+ banks globally). Martia connects via GoCardless Open Banking (2,410+ banks across Europe and the UK), tuned for each country specifically
- The choice isn't "better/worse". It's "do you want to run a server, or not". If you're comfortable with Docker — Sure is a great choice and we genuinely recommend it
What is Sure and where does it come from?
What is Sure?
Sure is an open-source personal finance app under the AGPLv3 licence, available at sure.am. It started as the community-maintained continuation of the Maybe Finance project — when the original commercial version shut down, the code was open-sourced and the community picked it up as Sure. It's volunteer-maintained, hosted on GitHub (we-promise/sure) with around 7.9k stars (as of April 2026).
Sure lets you track all your accounts — bank, investment, crypto, cash — in one view. It connects to banks via Plaid (a US-based open banking aggregator) which provides over 10,000 integrations across the US, EU, and other regions. Inside the app you'll find expense categorisation, budgets, charts, and an AI Assistant — a chat where you ask questions in English and get answers grounded in your data. Their own tagline: "Real answers really fast".
What Sure does genuinely well
Sure offers something almost no other personal finance app does: full code transparency. You can audit every line, fork the project, run it on hardware you physically own. Your financial data never leaves your infrastructure. For people with a technical background, that's an argument Martia won't replicate — and isn't pretending to.
The second strong point: no vendor lock-in. If the Sure community disbands a year from now, or the licence changes, you still have a local backup and you can run it anywhere. Most commercial finance apps — including Martia — give you a CSV export, but not a working product on your own hardware.
Who Sure is a natural fit for
Developers, sysadmins, privacy radicals, self-hosting enthusiasts, people who already run Home Assistant or Nextcloud at home and for whom spinning up another Docker container is a 20-minute job. If that sounds like you — we genuinely recommend Sure. Not as a polite hedge — as a real recommendation. It's a good app for that audience.
Where Martia takes a different approach
Martia solves the same problem as Sure — multi-account aggregation, spending control, a chat where you ask about your money — but for a different person. Three differences that define how.
Hosted, not self-hostable
Sure you spin up yourself. You pull the Docker image, read the docs, set environment variables, wire up the Plaid API, look after database backups, upgrade when a new version drops, patch when something breaks. None of that is hard for an engineer — and all of that is unrealistic for most people. Martia removes that whole layer. You connect a bank account in two minutes. Everything else happens in the background, run by us.
Hand-crafted per country, not global
Sure is a global project. Plaid covers a lot of banks, but the experience is uniform — English-first interface, expense categories designed around US spending habits, no understanding of local transaction formats (a line like "PRZELEW WEBOSO" in an mBank statement is just a generic description to Plaid). Martia goes the other way: one country at a time, polished to the end. Poland first; other European countries follow at the same depth. For a Polish user that means category names actually fit, transactions parse correctly, and Martia knows the difference between Biedronka and Lidl without your help.
Native local voice (more European languages on the way)
Sure speaks English. The community provides translations (German, Spanish, French, Japanese, and others), but those are translations — not native voice. Martia speaks Polish first because it was written in Polish, not localised from English. You ask "ile wydałem na jedzenie w marcu?" and the answer comes back in Polish financial idiom. As Martia expands to other European markets, each language is built natively, not translated. The kind of nuance — coffee shop vs lunch spot, supermarket vs convenience store — only shows up when someone has sat down and tuned the app to the local market by hand.
None of this is "Martia is better". It's "Martia solves a different side of the same problem". Sure says: "you have full control if you know how". Martia says: "you don't have to know how — we'll handle it".
Don't want to run a server? We'll handle it.
Connect a bank account in two minutes. We handle hosting, country integrations, and updates. You ask Martia about your money.
Sure vs Martia — feature comparison
Ten criteria, from hosting model to interface language. The accent colour marks where each option wins.
| Criterion | Sure | Martia |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting model | Self-hosted — Docker, Railway, PikaPods | Fully managed cloud |
| Time to start | ~30-60 min — install, configure, connect Plaid | 2 minutes — connect bank via open banking |
| Code transparency | Open source AGPLv3 — full audit | Closed source, FCA-regulated infrastructure |
| Bank coverage | 10,000+ globally via Plaid (US, EU, more) | 2,410+ across Europe & UK via GoCardless, hand-crafted per country |
| European bank depth | Generic Plaid coverage — works, but uniform across countries | Per-country tuning — categories, parsing, voice localised |
| Interface language | English-first + community translations | Native Polish (more European languages by country) |
| AI chat | Sure AI Assistant — off by default, opt-in | Chat as primary interface — on by default |
| Multi-currency | Multi-currency, automatic FX | Multi-currency, automatic FX |
| Pricing | Free (self-host) or third-party hosting cost | Free during early access |
| Who runs the infrastructure | You | Adam, Bart and the Martia team |
How to read this: Sure wins where the value is full control — over hosting, code, data, cost. Martia wins where the value is not having to control any of those — country tuning, zero ops, native language. Bank coverage and multi-currency are neutral — different strategies, same problem.
When to use which
The choice between Sure and Martia isn't about "which is better" — it's about how you want to spend time with a finance app. Three profiles.
Sure is for you if...
You're a developer, sysadmin, or self-hosting enthusiast. You already run Home Assistant, Nextcloud, or something similar at home. You value privacy enough to prefer full control over your infrastructure, even when it means more work. You read changelogs, you like managing versions, and a database backup is a five-minute routine for you. You want the certainty that ten years from now this same code still runs, regardless of what the community is doing. That's a good fit. Genuinely.
Martia is for you if...
You're not a developer — or you are, but you don't want your personal finances to be another project to maintain. You live in Europe (Poland today, more European countries to come), you have multiple bank accounts in your country, and you want to see them in one place. You'd rather ask the app a question in your own language than click through dashboards. Your ideal weekend doesn't include the word "Docker". You want the app to work, while you make financial decisions — not manage the app.
Both — if you live between worlds
Some users go hybrid: Sure for data they want entirely on their own hardware (investments, crypto experiments, anything they don't want on a managed service) and Martia for everyday banking with European accounts. Both tools export to CSV, so you can move between them without losing history. If you already run Sure and like it, but you're missing local-market depth — Martia can sit alongside, not replace.
The 30-Minute Test
The 30-Minute Test is a simple way to choose. Open the Sure docs (docs.sure.am) and set a 30-minute timer. If after half an hour of reading about Docker compose, ENV vars, and the Plaid API you're smiling — Sure is for you. If after five minutes you're tired — Martia is for you. There's no third option, and there's no shame in either answer.
European personal finance, without the ops
Martia is hand-crafted per country. Poland first, more on the way. No Docker required. Connect a bank, ask a question.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use Sure and Martia together?
Yes. Some users run Sure for the data they want to keep entirely on their own hardware (e.g. investments or crypto experiments) and Martia for daily personal finance with European bank accounts. Both tools export to CSV, so you can move between them without losing history.
How is Sure's AI Assistant different from Martia's chat?
Both let you ask questions about your money in natural language. Sure's AI Assistant is off by default and runs against your self-hosted data — you decide when to switch it on. Martia's chat is the primary interface, on by default, and tuned for European personal finance language. The paradigm is similar; the difference is the default and where your data lives.
Why would I pick Martia if Sure is free and open source?
If running a server, securing it, and doing version upgrades sounds like a fine way to spend a Saturday — Sure is genuinely a great choice and we recommend it. If you'd rather have someone else handle the infrastructure side and just use the app — that's what Martia does. (There isn't really a winner here. Just a different day of the week spent on different things.)
Does Sure work well in Europe?
Sure connects via Plaid, which has growing European coverage. European banks are supported, but the experience is generic — not tuned for individual countries' banking conventions, language, or financial idioms. Martia is built per country, starting with Poland and expanding to other European markets one at a time. For a French, German, or Polish user, that means category names, transaction parsing, and the app's voice are localised rather than translated.
Is Sure secure?
Sure uses Plaid (a regulated US-based aggregator) and gives you full control through self-hosting. Whether that's "more secure" depends on whether you trust your own infrastructure better than a managed service. Both Sure and Martia (via GoCardless, FCA-regulated in the UK) use read-only bank connections — neither can move money.
Will Martia ever be open source?
Not currently planned. Martia's bet is that for non-technical European users, the real value isn't access to source code — it's hand-crafted per-country tuning and a real team behind the product. If code transparency is a hard requirement for you, Sure is the right tool.
Sources and references
- Sure — official site, sure.am
- Sure AI Assistant — feature page, sure.am/features/assistant
- Sure — GitHub repository (we-promise/sure), github.com/we-promise/sure
- Sure — pricing & self-hosting, sure.am/pricing_free
- GoCardless Open Banking — documentation, gocardless.com/bank-account-data
- Plaid — European coverage, plaid.com/docs
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