What's the best tool to get started keeping track of our finances using double entry accounting?
Ideally, I'd love a tool that lets me import data from my credit card and/or bank accounts through something like Plaid rather than having to manually enter every transaction I make.
Beancount, software written by the author of the parent piece, is a terrific "plain text" double entry accounting system. I've used it for more than a decade on both personal finances and non-profit treasury projects. It was many tools in its ecosystem for reformatting (single entry) transactions into double entry.
GnuCash is a decent tool. I use it for my simple personal finances and it's good enough. I don't know if its import/export will suit your needs, but I think it's worth a try.
I chose Xero for a nonprofit whose books I keep. I had heard negative things about QuickBooks Online, but I also have qualms with Intuit over their tax shenanigans.
I do think Xero tends to overprioritize acquisition at the expense of providing a complete product to its users. Too many times, I have found some quirk or half-assed feature that Xero refuses to fix. That said, I have no doubt Intuit is worse at this.
If Your needs are simple, Xero works. But the moment you reach even slightly less than simple, you're going to need to work around quirks very quickly.
I was using Quickbooks Self Employed and must recommend to stay far away. Besides there being no way to migrate to the other Quickbooks services, the xls report export feature was broken for me and gave me incorrect amounts. After some time explaining the situation to a support person I was told the bug was an ongoing issue with some user accounts, and the support person had to manually calculate and edit cells in the xls document. It blows my mind that such an important feature can be so broken. There was no forthcoming information about the bug and I had no other way to send a report to my accountant.
I don't hate Quickbooks; I love it. But I hate Intuit.
I've been using QB both personally and professionally for over 15 years, it has just about every feature a small to medium sized business could want, and it's a default in the sense that you can go to just about any tax professional who prepares business tax returns and they will have no problem using your QB data, often by working with a copy of your actual company file, and providing year-end journal entries for you to reflect various tax adjustments.
The current problem is that Intuit is forcing everyone to subscription-only, even for the desktop product, and they've nearly doubled the annual license fee, mostly to try to force people to QB Online.
Ideally, I'd love a tool that lets me import data from my credit card and/or bank accounts through something like Plaid rather than having to manually enter every transaction I make.