Empower Personal Dashboard — formerly Personal Capital — is free because it is the front end of an advisory business. Six alternatives for tracking net worth and investments, ranked, priced, and clear about who ends up holding your holdings history.
Ranked on what net-worth and investment trackers actually need: asset coverage, real cost-basis detail, projections — and nobody phoning you about your portfolio.
Free core · optional hosting
The only option here that models lots, cost basis and realised gains as accounting rather than as a chart — in plain-text files you own, from a company with nothing to sell you but software.
Best for: Investors who want the underlying record — every lot, every dividend, every realised gain — in a format no dashboard can take back.
$250/yr · 14-day trial
The closest like-for-like: everything on one balance sheet — banks, brokerages, crypto, property, vehicles — sold as a flat fee rather than a share of your wealth.
Best for: People who used Empower purely as a net-worth dashboard and want the same view with a bill instead of a sales call.
Free tier · $129/yr Premium
The replacement for the one Empower tool people genuinely miss — the Retirement Planner — built as a full financial-planning model that never asks to link an account.
Best for: People whose real use of Empower was the retirement projection, not the daily balances.
Free to 10 holdings · from $7/mo
Portfolio performance done properly — dividends, corporate actions and capital-gains reporting you can hand an accountant — free up to ten holdings.
Best for: Investors who came to Empower for the portfolio analysis and want reporting that survives a tax return.
$99.99/yr Core · $199.99/yr Plus
The mainstream all-in-one: net worth, budgeting and household sharing in one polished subscription — with the forecasting sitting a tier above.
Best for: Households that want Empower's overview plus real budgeting, and don't mind renting it.
About $83.88/yr at the regular rate
The cheapest paid dashboard that still tracks cost basis and performance alongside everyday spending.
Best for: People who want a competent hosted dashboard for the least money and can live with a vendor's cloud.
The six questions that decide it for a net-worth tracker. Prices checked August 2026.
| What matters | Beancount.io | Kubera | ProjectionLab | Sharesight | Monarch Money | Quicken Simplifi |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it actually costs | Free core; $99.99/yr only if you want hosting | $250/yr flat, whatever you're worth | Free tier; $129/yr for the full planner | Free to 10 holdings; from $7/mo billed annually | $99.99/yr Core, $199.99/yr Plus | About $83.88/yr at the regular rate |
| Do they sell you advice? | No advisory arm; we sell software | None — a flat annual fee, not a share of your wealth | No; there is an advisor edition, but not aimed at you | No; it reports, it doesn't manage | No advisory upsell on the Core plan | No; you can invite your own advisor |
| What can count toward net worth | Anything you can write a posting for | Wallets, DeFi, NFTs, property, gold, LP positions | Whatever you enter by hand | Listed holdings, cash and property | Linked accounts plus manual entries | Linked accounts plus manual entries |
| Lots, dividends and gains | Full lots, cost basis and realised capital gains | Values and IRR; not lot-level tax accounting | Modelled, not tracked | Dividends, corporate actions and capital-gains reports | Holdings and performance; deeper analysis on Plus | Cost basis, performance and real-time quotes |
| Retirement and what-if planning | Not built in; export and model elsewhere | Fast Forward scenario projections | Monte Carlo, backtesting, Roth and ACA modelling | None — reporting only | Retirement forecasting is Plus-only ($199.99/yr) | Projected cash flow and what-if scenarios |
| Who holds your data | You do — plain-text files on your own disk | Kubera's cloud; CSV export | Their cloud; you typed it, so you still have it | Sharesight's cloud; full report exports | Monarch's cloud; CSV in 10,000-row chunks | Quicken's cloud; CSV export |
The most polished hosted dashboard against a ledger you own, including where Monarch genuinely wins.
Read comparisonWant the monthly budget as well as the net-worth picture? The post-Mint budgeting apps ranked on price, free tiers and who ends up holding your history.
Read comparisonThe export has six columns and no ticker, quantity or price. Here is what it does carry, and how to turn it into balanced double-entry transactions.
Open the converterIf you want the same everything-in-one-place balance sheet without the advisory relationship, Kubera is the closest match at a flat $250 a year — its own pitch is "$250 a year, not 1% of your wealth". If what you actually used was the Retirement Planner, ProjectionLab replaces that specifically and never asks to link an account. And if you want the underlying record — lots, cost basis, realised gains — in a file that is yours, Beancount.io is the only option on this page that treats investments as accounting rather than as a chart.
Because the dashboard is the front end of an advisory business. Empower's Personal Strategy service is offered to people with "$100,000 or more in investable assets" and charges 0.89% a year on the first $1 million — about $4,450 annually on a $500,000 portfolio. Once six figures of linked investable assets show up, reviewers consistently describe a call within days offering a free portfolio review. You can decline and keep using the free tools indefinitely; it is worth knowing what the tools are for.
Yes. Personal Capital was acquired by Empower and rebranded — Empower's own transition page lists "Personal Capital app → Empower Personal Dashboard app". Same tools, same accounts, same login. The free net-worth and portfolio tracking people knew as Personal Capital is what is now called the Empower Personal Dashboard, and the wealth-management service alongside it is Empower Personal Wealth.
Only partly, and this surprises people. You can export transactions to CSV from Overview then Transactions, but the file mirrors whatever date range and account-type tab you have selected, and it carries six columns — date, account, description, category, tags and amount. There is no quantity, price or ticker, so a stock purchase comes out as money leaving an account rather than as shares arriving. Your balances are portable; your holdings history essentially is not. That is the argument for keeping the record somewhere you control.
A few, with trade-offs. ProjectionLab's Basic tier is free and deliberately has no account linking. Sharesight is free up to ten holdings and reports performance, dividends and capital gains without selling anything. Beancount is free open-source software whose ledger is a plain-text file; hosted sync is optional and priced separately. None of them will phone you, because none of them earn a percentage of what you own.
Start free with a plain-text ledger that tracks lots and cost basis properly — bank sync, mobile apps and imports are there when you want them.
