The 7 Best Personal Capital Alternatives For 2022

When it comes to personal finance software and tools, Personal Capital is undeniably an industy leader. It offers an impressive number of free financial tools and calculators to help you organize your finances and plan for the future. And it also has an excellent wealth management side of the business where you can work with a financial advisor to build a custom investing plan.

We think everyone should try out Personal Capital, even if it’s just to use its free tools like an investment fee analyzer or net worth tracker. However, if you’re just looking for one specific service or feature, it’s sometimes better to pick a more specialized option.

That’s why we’re breaking down some of the best alternatives to Personal Capital you can use to manage every area of your finances. We’re also including free and paid options, so you can find the right tool or software that matches your needs and budget.

The Best Personal Capital Alternatives Right Now

Personal Capital has a few main categories for all of its features, including:

• Budgeting
• Investing help
• Net worth tracking
• Cash management

We’ve chosen several alternatives apps and software providers that specialize in one of these categories that you can use if Personal Capital isn’t for you.

1. Best For Creating Budgets: YNAB

Out of all the budgeting apps on the market, YNAB, or You Need A Budget, is one of the more popular alternatives to Personal Capital. But YNAB’s focus is on budgeting, whereas Personal Capital simply includes various budgeting tools and calculators, as well as other features.

With YNAB, the philosophy is that every dollar needs a job. The app assigns tasks for your entire income, which can include paying off debt, building up your emergency fund, paying bills, and discretionary spending. If you’re trying to become debt free as fast as possible, this style of budgeting could be for you.

The downside of YNAB versus Personal Capital is that YNAB costs $14.99 per month or $99 if you pay annually. But YNAB claims its users save $600 on average within their first two months of using its software, which could justify the monthly price if you really need help with your budgeting.

2. Best For Automated Investing: Betterment

Personal Capital has an excellent wealth management service where you can work with a financial advisor to create a custom investing plan. However, you need to invest $100,000 or more to become a client, and annual management fees start at 0.89% for the first million you invest.

In comparison, robo-advisors like Betterment are significantly more affordable and beginner-friendly. There’s no minimum investment requirement with Betterment, and fees start at just 0.25% per year.

The starter plan is fully automated, but there’s a range of portfolios you can invest with after answering a questionnaire about your risk tolerance. And you benefit from features like automatic rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting as well.

3. Best Cash Management Alternative: Aspiration

Another popular feature of Personal Capital is its cash account. This cash management account lets you earn 2.60%, even as a non-Personal Capital Advisory Client.

This is a very competitive interest rate. But true Investor Junkies can take it one step further by opening an Aspiration Spend & Save account instead. This account starts ay 3.00% APY, but if you upgrade to Aspiration Plus for $7.99 per month, you earn 5.00% instead.

You only earn these high interest rates on your first $10,000. But you can use Aspiration as a home for you emergency fund or idle cash as an alternative to Personal Capital. Plus, there’s a cash-back program that pays you for shopping at certain environmentally-friendly merchants.

4. Best Financial Advisor Alternative: Facet Wealth

As mentioned, Personal Capital offers a wealth management service where you work with a financial advisor to create a custom investing plan. But it’s not the only company that offers online, one-on-one access to a financial advisor.

With Facet Wealth, you get to work with CFPs who can help you with areas of personal finance like retirement planning, asset management, tax planning, and estate planning. Facet advisors are also fiduciaries, so they have a legal duty to put your needs and interests ahead of their own. And your Facet advisor can work directly with your brokerage accounts to help manage your investments and build a portfolio that suits you goals and risk tolerance.

In terms of fees, Facet Wealth charges a flat annual fee between $1,800 and $6,000 depending on your needs. This is very different from Personal Capital, which charges fees based on total assets under management. Depending on your portfolio size and needs, this means Facet Wealth can be more cost effective than Personal Capital.

5. Best For Spreadsheet Planning: Tiller

If you’re a fan of spreadsheet budgeting, Tiller Money is hands-down the best Personal Capital alternative. This automated software pulls your financial data from 10,000+ institutions, organizing all of your income, expenses, and liabilities into a spreadsheet for you. Plus, you can view a simple breakdown of expenses by category, your monthly and yearly budgets, and overall net worth.

Tiller Money isn’t flashy, but it helps you organize your financial information and crunch some numbers. And like Personal Capital, it also has a retirement planning feature that you can use to forecast your future earnings as you plan for retirement.

It costs $79 per year to use Tiller’s paid plan. But there’s a 30-day free trial you can take advantage of to test out its software.

6. Best Free Budgeting Alternative: Mint

Mint is one of the most popular bugeting apps out there, and it’s hard to beat a pricetag of $0. This app helps you track your spending, categorize expenses, and stay on top of your various financial goals. And, like Personal Capital’s free budgeting tool, you don’t have to pay to get a helping hand with your finances.

Personal Capital is still superior to Mint for retirement planning. But Mint is another excellent, free tool you can use to budget, track your net worth, and monitor your investments.

7. Best For Crypto Investors: Kubera

One popular reason people use Personal Capital is its free net worth tracker. However, while Personal Capital lets you add cryptocurrencies as a manual asset to track, it’s definitely not crypto-focused.

In contrast, Kubera is the best portfolio and net worth tracker for digital assets. It focuses on all things crypto and DeFi, letting you add popular coins and NFTs to your portfolio to track. But stocks and more traditional assets aren’t left on the sideline; Kubera still works with 20,000 banks and brokers.

The downside of Kubera versus Personal Capital is that Kubera costs $150 per year. But if you’re a serious crypto and NFT investor with a large portfolio, it’s the best tracker out there.

Bottom Line

As an all-in-one financial toolkit, it’s hard to beat Personal Capital. And the fact it offers most of its tools and services for free is truly what makes it one of the best in the businesses.

But as the saying goes, it’s possible to be a “Jack of all trades, master of none.” In other words, sometimes, a more specialized, niche service might provide a better solution for your financial management than Personal Capital.

You can always try out Personal Capital’s free tools and then compare them with some of the options on our list. Hopefully, you find the right combination of apps and software to make managing your finances a breeze.

Personal Capital Disclosure – Personal Capital Advisors Corporation (“PCAC”) compensates Webpals Systems S. C LTD for new leads. Webpals Systems S. C LTD is not an investment client of PCAC.