Empower vs Monarch Money: Price, Tools Compared

Empower Personal Dashboard and Monarch Money show up in the same searches because they solve overlapping problems from opposite business models. Empower is free software that funds itself by referring linked accounts into a paid advisory business once a balance looks large enough. Monarch is a flat subscription with no free tier and no advisory arm at all. That difference in structure shapes almost every feature gap below. Figures here were checked against monarch.com and empower.com in September 2026.

Price

Monarch dropped its old single-plan pricing for a two-tier structure. Core costs $99.99 a year, billed as $8.33 a month, or $14.99 a month on the monthly plan, and covers net worth tracking, budgeting, custom reports and savings and debt goals. Plus costs $199.99 a year, billed as $16.67 a month, and adds retirement forecasting, business income tracking, tax-prep exports and investment analysis on top of everything in Core. Both tiers start with a seven day free trial, and Monarch requires a payment method up front, per monarch.com/pricing. There is no free plan; the trial reverts to a required subscription rather than a limited free version.

Empower's dashboard costs nothing at any tier. Account aggregation, net worth tracking, Retirement Planner, Investment Checkup and Fee Analyzer are free with no card required, per empower.com/tools. The cost only appears if a user opts into Empower's advisory business, covered below, and that is a fee on managed assets rather than a subscription.

Aggregation provider

Both products are middlemen to a third-party aggregator rather than a direct pipe to a bank or broker. Empower's terms of use state plainly: "For aggregation services, Empower utilizes Yodlee, Inc's Fastlink platform," an Envestnet company, and that Empower does not store the underlying account credentials itself (empower.com/hpc/terms-of-use).

Monarch spreads the same job across three vendors. Its help center states: "Monarch works with three data providers: Plaid, Finicity, and MX," each acting as an intermediary that retrieves account data and passes it to Monarch, which never accesses accounts directly (help.monarch.com, Understanding Data Providers and Connections). Monarch's own marketing calls this "industry-best data connectivity" and ties it to the "never any ads" pitch on its pricing page (monarch.com/pricing); the practical upside of three providers instead of one is that a connection outage at any single vendor affects fewer accounts.

Budgeting depth

This is Monarch's strongest category, because budgeting is its original product. Its features page describes two methods side by side: category budgeting with fully customizable groups, categories and even emoji, and a separate "Flex Budgeting" approach that buckets spending into fixed, flexible and non-monthly categories and reduces daily tracking to "a simple focus on just one number, your flexible expenses." Quarterly and annual costs get rollovers "so they don't break your budget," and the tool forecasts spending forward against upcoming bills (monarch.com/features/budgeting).

Empower's free tier has one budgeting tool, Budgeting and Cash Flow, described on its tools page as a way to "spend smarter when you know what's coming in and out," with a Transactions view that auto-categorizes spending (empower.com/tools). Neither of Empower's own pages describes a flexible-budget method, envelope-style categories, or rollover logic for irregular expenses. For someone whose main job is running a monthly budget, Monarch's tool is built for that job; Empower's is a secondary feature attached to a net worth product.

Investment view depth

Both products aggregate holdings from linked brokerage and retirement accounts, but they stop at different depths.

Monarch's tracking page describes portfolio consolidation "across multiple financial institutions and accounts," asset allocation with the ability to "adjust your risk profile," and surfacing "top movers" (monarch.com/features/tracking). Monarch Plus adds a named investment layer on top: analysis "powered by Morningstar" with fund diversification breakdowns, plus a "Gains & Losses" feature that shows holdings' worth "based on what you originally paid" (monarch.com/blog/monarch-plus). That is unrealized gain against original cost, not a tax lot ledger; Monarch's own pages do not describe lot-level detail, short versus long-term holding periods, or wash-sale tracking anywhere.

Empower's free Investment Checkup scores a linked portfolio against a target allocation, letting a user "assess your portfolio risk," "analyze past performance" and "get an alternative allocation," and its net worth page separately promises to "monitor all of your investments in real time" (empower.com/investment-checkup, empower.com/net-worth). Empower's page does not mention tax lots, cost basis or wash sales at the free tier at all; that language only shows up on the Private Client advisory page, discussed below. Between the two, Monarch Plus's Morningstar-backed analysis is more explicitly investment-focused for a subscriber; Empower's free version is closer to an allocation and risk check attached to the net worth number.

Retirement planning

Both call out retirement by name, on different sides of a paywall.

Empower's Retirement Planner is free and runs off linked accounts. Its own page describes it as letting a user "test-drive what retirement could look like," "explore different ways to retire" and set up "retirement withdrawals to balance daily expenses with other goals," with the tool citing outside recognition from NerdWallet and Forbes Advisor (empower.com/tools/retirement-planner).

Monarch's equivalent, Forecasting, is a Plus-only feature. Income, expenses and account balances "are pulled in automatically" and projected forward, with life events like a home purchase or a career break addable to the timeline so a user can "watch your projection update in real time" (monarch.com/blog/monarch-plus). The functional difference is access: Empower's version is free to anyone who links accounts, while Monarch's requires the $199.99 annual tier on top of Core.

The advisory upsell, only on Empower's side

Monarch has no advisory arm; it sells software, not managed accounts. Empower's free dashboard is also the intake funnel for Empower Advisory Group, a human advisory business with three named tiers. Personal Strategy opens at a $100,000 minimum with a dedicated advisor, tax optimization and rebalancing, at 0.89% annually on assets from $100,000 to $999,999 (empower.com/products-solutions/personal-strategy). Personal Strategy Wealth Management opens at $250,000 and adds a second dedicated advisor plus specialists in areas like real estate and stock options (empower.com/products-solutions/wealth-management). Empower Private Client opens at $1,000,000 and drops the fee on a tiered schedule, 0.79% on the first $3,000,000, 0.69% on the next $2,000,000, 0.59% on the next $5,000,000 and 0.49% above $10,000,000, while adding tax-loss harvesting: the page states Empower will "automatically capture loss opportunities throughout the year to offset gains" (empower.com/products-solutions/private-client). The full picture on how that upsell shows up in practice, and what the free dashboard leaves out, is in the Empower Personal Dashboard review.

Mobile and data export

Both have native iOS and Android apps. Monarch's are synced with the web version and listed on its download page as available on the App Store and Google Play (monarch.com/download). Empower's dashboard is also on both stores, but its export feature is currently split by platform: a support article for exporting net worth and transaction history states the feature is "limited to our iOS application, and will be available on Android in a future update," with net worth exporting as a PDF and transactions as a CSV (support-personalwealth.empower.com, Export Net Worth/Transactional Data Through The Mobile Application). Monarch's own export path runs through Settings, downloading transactions as a CSV that can be re-imported after editing, and its help pages describe it as a general-purpose export rather than a platform-limited one.

Comparison table

Who each fits

Empower fits someone who wants one net worth number pulled from every account, a free retirement projection, and a free allocation check, and who does not mind that a large enough balance turns the dashboard into a lead for human advisory outreach. It fits poorly for anyone who wants to run a real monthly budget or see investment detail beyond allocation and risk scoring.

Monarch fits someone whose main problem is budgeting: a couple splitting categories, someone who wants a flexible-spending number instead of twenty line items, or someone who wants business income tracked separately from personal spending on the Plus tier. It is a worse fit for someone who wants a free option, since there is no free tier at all, and the investment side, while real, is secondary to the budgeting core even after paying for Plus.

Where Helm fits

I build Helm Terminal, so weigh this section accordingly. Helm is neither a budgeting app like Monarch nor a net worth dashboard like Empower. It does not track spending categories or aggregate every account type into one number. It reads brokerage and retirement accounts read-only and does position-level work neither product does: concentration and earnings exposure across accounts, tax-loss harvesting candidates with wash-sale screening, and a written daily brief. Someone who wants Empower's free net worth view or Monarch's budgeting still needs one of those two products; Helm picks up after the accounts are already linked somewhere, for the question of what is happening inside the positions themselves.

Related reading

• Empower Personal Dashboard Review
• Best Monarch Money Alternatives
• Best Empower (Personal Capital) Alternatives
• Best Net Worth Tracker