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Yodlee has dozens more features than Mint does, yet Mint has so many more users. Why is this?

Because personal finance is intimidating, and nobody wants to do it. By having virtually nothing to do in Mint, it lowers the intimidation factor that people have when thinking about managing their money. It's a way to get people in the door, and getting that far has always been the struggle behind personal finance sites.

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I've made use of Yodlee so much so that over the years, I've told it to anyone within earshot. The most common excuse I get from even the tech savvy programming crowd is "I do not want to have all my account information in one place, it's a single point of failure".

While true, the same holds for all information that we have online that is important to us. But it's a big mental block that both these sites need to overcome. Yodlee kinda shifted that burden by selling software to financial providers whom we already trust by opening accounts.

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