Quick Summary
Empower and Monarch Money take different approaches to personal finance. One is free and built around investments, the other is paid and built around budgeting. Here is how they stack up.
Empower and Monarch Money both live in the personal finance app space, but they arrived there from opposite directions. Empower is a wealth management company that built free tools to attract clients. Monarch is a software company that built a budgeting tool and charges for it directly.
That distinction shapes everything about how the two products feel in daily use. One is a portfolio dashboard with budgeting tacked on. The other is a budgeting app with investment tracking as a secondary feature. Neither does everything well, and knowing where each one excels saves time and frustration.
Follow the Money
When a product is free, you are not the customer. You are the audience. Empower’s personal dashboard - net worth tracking, investment analysis, retirement planning, spending summaries - costs nothing to use. It is genuinely useful. But Empower is a wealth management firm, and the free tools exist to funnel people toward their advisory service. That means occasional emails, in-app prompts, and sometimes phone calls from advisors. Some people find this mildly annoying. Others find it crosses a line.
Monarch Money charges $9.99 per month or $99 per year. You pay, they build the product. No advisory upselling, no subtle nudges toward a paid tier that changes the experience. The subscription is the business model, which keeps the incentives clean.
This is not a moral judgment on either approach. Empower’s free tools are legitimately useful, and the advisory pushes are ignorable. But knowing the dynamic explains why each product emphasizes what it does.
Where Empower Pulls Ahead
Investments. If tracking portfolio performance, analyzing asset allocation, and running retirement simulations matter to you, Empower’s free tools are hard to match at any price.
The fee analyzer alone is worth connecting your accounts for. It scans your holdings and flags hidden fees - expense ratios, advisory fees, transaction costs - that many investors never notice. The investment checkup tool compares your allocation against target mixes and highlights drift. The retirement planner uses Monte Carlo simulations to model thousands of possible futures, showing the probability of your money lasting through retirement.
For someone whose primary financial concern is “am I saving and investing enough for retirement?” Empower answers that question with surprising depth for a free product.
Where Monarch Pulls Ahead
Day-to-day money management. Monarch treats budgeting as its core mission, and the difference in quality shows.
Category-based budget creation, recurring transaction detection, cash flow analysis, spending trend reports, and visual goal tracking - Monarch handles all of these as first-class features. The interface is designed for someone who wants to understand and control their spending, not just observe it after the fact.
Empower has a spending tracker, but it feels like something the team built because a finance dashboard without one would seem incomplete. Budget targets are basic. Category management is limited. Many Empower users describe the budgeting features as an afterthought, which is exactly what they are.
Monarch also has collaborative features for couples sharing finances - joint budgets, shared visibility, and collaborative planning. Empower does not prioritize this.
Net Worth: A Draw With Different Angles
Both platforms track net worth over time, and both do it well. The difference is emphasis.
Empower’s net worth view is investment-heavy. The charts focus on how financial accounts - brokerage, retirement, savings - contribute to the number. It is the view an investor wants.
Monarch’s net worth view is broader. It integrates with budgeting data, so you can see how monthly spending patterns affect wealth accumulation over time. It is the view someone working on both earning and saving wants.
The Retirement Planning Gap
Empower has a dedicated retirement planner. It pulls in actual account data, lets you adjust assumptions for retirement age, spending, and Social Security, and models probability of success. For a free tool, it is remarkably capable.
Monarch does not have this. Goal tracking exists, but it does not model retirement scenarios or run simulations. If retirement planning is a priority, Empower fills this need and Monarch does not.
Using Both
Some people land on a setup that uses both: Empower for investment tracking and retirement planning (free), Monarch for budgeting and spending management (paid). This works - the two platforms do not conflict - but it means maintaining two sets of connected accounts and switching between apps depending on the question being asked.
What the Reviews Do Not Tell You
Online reviews of both platforms tend to focus on features and interface. What they miss is the relationship you build with the tool over time.
Empower users who stick around for years accumulate rich investment history - allocation changes, performance over multiple market cycles, fee evolution as they optimize their portfolio. That history has genuine value and creates meaningful lock-in. Leaving Empower means leaving that timeline behind.
Monarch users who commit for years build deep spending history - category trends, seasonal patterns, multi-year spending evolution. The budgeting insights improve with more data, and starting over in a new tool resets that perspective.
The choice between these platforms is not just about today’s features. It is about which financial conversation you want to have over the next several years, and which tool you want accumulating that history.
The Spreadsheet Option
For people who want investment tracking and budgeting without sharing bank credentials with any third party, spreadsheets remain a viable path. The Net Worth Tracker handles asset and liability tracking with historical trends. The Financial Planning Template combines net worth tracking with income projections, expense planning, and long-term financial modeling.
Both are one-time purchases, run in Google Sheets, and keep all data in your own account. No subscriptions, no upselling, no bank connections required.
Related
- Net Worth Tracker - Track assets and liabilities over time
- Financial Planning Template - Comprehensive financial planning in Google Sheets