Under the hood its mostly tables and reports, so ultimately not much, if you were dedicated enough to using Excel to rebuild GnuCash’s views. It’s more streamlined than excel would be because you won’t have to worry about implementation, overhead of adding a new account, etc. Some things like auto-recommending accounts during import (and import itself) could be arduous in excel if not supported natively. Split transactions could be a headache (think your paycheck, which might be split into 401k contributions, several taxes, money into your bank, etc).

But fully recreating it in excel when it already exists would be a headache. More than likely you will have a more limited view in Excel if you’re just creating a handful of tables to represent all of your many accounts.

I use GnuCash. I typically update every couple weeks up to a month. Beyond that it can be hard to remember what specific transactions were.

It’s double ledger and I really like that it forces strict accounting. That sounds cumbersome but once you’re set up (it may take some trial and error), for me my workflow is essentially:

• Copy prior paycheck splits & update them to reflect new paychecks.
• export QFX files from credit cards
• import QFX, check / set transaction accounts
• any small manual updates (interest payments in accounts, etc)

It’s not automated but my data always remains local, and I can use the Linux or android application. I don’t bother daily tracking on my phone, else it might be cumbersome. I’ve never used any of the budget features, just tracking where my money comes and goes.

I don’t use Trillium, but I’ve enjoyed Logseq. I use it with nextcloud to back up. It is not browser friendly as far as I know when self hosted. It’s primarily just markdown.

This sounds quite interesting!