Empower (formerly Personal Capital) has been a leading money management tool over the past few years. They offer great spending and investment tracking, all for free. They also recently launched an online savings account with compelling returns.
My personal love affair with Mint is now over. It’s still a great free money management tool, but I’ve always had a negative view of how Mint handles investments and now it’s shutting down anyway. It wasn’t enough for my investments to really help me with my personal finances. Since investing represents a large portion of my finances, I’ve always relied on Quicken instead.
But in my constant quest to move my money to the cloud and search for it Accelerate replacementsI found a free A tool that really validates everything Mint does, plus investments. It’s called empowerment.
Find out why we like this tool in our Empower review. Plus, learn about their upsell and their new compelling cash account, too. And see how it compares to the best money and other money tracking apps out there.
- Online personal finance tracker
- Excels at investment tracking
- Free to use, expect increased sales of their managed portfolio products
What is empowerment?
Empower is a budgeting app and financial tracking tool, as well as an investment manager. They are famous for their financial dashboard – where you can track your spending, budget, monitor your investment portfolio, and more. The best part is that this tool is currently free.
They are also professional investment managers, where you can meet with a financial planner and let them manage your portfolio for a fee. They effectively use their free control panel as a lead generator for their investment management services.
Empower (formerly Personal Capital) was founded in 2010 and acquired by Empower Retirement in July 2020.
In 2023, Personal Capital was rebranded as Empower.
Empower is also rated one of the best budgeting apps of 2025!
What empowerment he has
The reason I’ve loved Mint for so long is that it automatically updates and categorizes your transactions for you. You always get an up-to-date picture of your spending, and can see where your money is going.
Empowerment covers all the bases. When you log in, you’re greeted with a dashboard that looks a lot like Mint. On the left side, you can see all of your accounts listed, as well as your total net worth at the top. Empower connects to all the same banks and institutions as Mint, and also lets you add asset accounts, like your home. After that, you will see a control panel containing the following:
Basis of your spending:
Enable dashboard [Screenshot by The College Investor]. Source: Tamkeen
They also have an overview of how your portfolio is performing against the overall market:
Enable wallet tracking [Screenshot by The College Investor]. Source: Tamkeen
They also have a useful asset allocation tool:
Enable asset allocation [Screenshot by The College Investor]. Source: Tamkeen
They also have useful budgeting and spending tools. You can see your cash flow each month, as well as details of your spending categories.
You can find this in the Budget tab.
Related to: Best portfolio analysis tools
Investment tools
The best thing about Empower is the investment tools, which are simple but much more powerful than what Mint offers. Empower does investment management right, but with a focus on a few key things:
- The value of your wallet
- Performance of your portfolio (as a whole and for each individual investment)
- An overview of your holdings
- Analyze your customization
- Good transaction management
What has always frustrated me about Mint (and sometimes Quicken) is the transaction management. So far, I’ve found Empower to be excellent at properly managing all of my imported transactions from my brokerages. For one asset, they didn’t get the code (since it was at a carrier, not a brokerage), but I was able to enter the code manually.
How does Empower compare to budgeting and net worth tracking?
Empower offers both a free dashboard and net worth tracker, as well as investment advice. We’ll cover investment tips below, but since most people use their free dashboard, we thought we’d compare just the dashboard first.
Empower’s dashboard is a great option for those looking to track spending and investing. Mint was in second place until it was discontinued, along with Quicken (however, Quicken is a paid product). The other runner-up is Monarch, which has developed a lot of great tools for the competition – but it’s also paid. YNAB is another very popular option, but it is different in its approach. See the full comparison between YNAB and Empower here.
If you’re simply looking to track net worth, Kubera is a solid choice.
The problem with “free” is that these companies cannot afford all the costs of running this type of software while connecting to different platforms. It costs about $0.005 per month per account per connection. Considering that someone like me has 20+ connections (banks and brokerage firms), this means $0.10 per month. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it can add up very quickly!
Hence, Empower is one of the last free tools – because you are actually the product. They will try to sell you on investment management (see below).
If you simply want to compare their free control panel, here are some options. See the full list of mint alternatives here.
Investment advice
For me, it’s always important to know how a company offering a free service makes money. Empower makes money by promoting its financial advisors to help you with your investment portfolio. Their goal is to eventually make you an asset management client – and once your assets exceed $100,000, you can expect their advisors to start contacting you and encouraging you to meet with them to review your investment portfolio.
If you decide to work with them, they charge a fee (quite a bit) to manage your portfolio. Although their fees are comprehensive, you can expect to start paying 0.89% of assets under management (AUM) if you have less than $1,000,000 invested in them.
They actually call you different levels based on the amount you have invested:
- $100,000 to $200,000: Investment Services Client
- $200,000 to $999,999: Wealth management client
- More than $1,000,000: Private client
As you invest more money, your assets under management decrease. Once you reach Private Client status, you’ll start saving quite a bit on AUM fees. However, it is gradual:
How does empowering wealth management compare?
Frankly speaking, Empower’s wealth management services are more expensive than other companies. Although they have a great free dashboard, their investment services are expensive compared to other companies. They are not robo-advisors, but they are also more expensive than other companies that do direct human-assisted investing.
Here’s how it compares to some of its main competitors.
Enable cash
Empower recently announced Empower Cash. This is a cash management account, which serves as a high-yield savings account.
The Empower Cash account earns 3.00 APY – a very compelling offer. The account is also FDIC insured, and since it is a cash management account, there are no transaction limits on deposits or withdrawals.
If you’re an Empower Advisory client, you can actually get a higher rate (0.10% more) – 3.10% APY.
Why should you trust us?
I have deep experience using Personal CFOs or PFMs like Empower. I started using Quicken in the early 2000s to track my personal finances, and since then, I’ve used or tested almost every budgeting and investment tracking app on the market.
I’ve spent over hundreds of hours using Empower to test and track my own finances – using both the web version and the app version on my iPhone.
Combine my personal experience with that of our amazing team of editors and testers, and we have over 100 years of combined experience using, reviewing, and testing budgeting apps and tools!
Who is this for and is it worth it?
Don’t take my word for it – see for yourself. Just like Mint, Empower is free. It only takes a few minutes to enter your bank account login information and get your details straight away. Empower even advertises that it will only take 29 seconds if you have one account to add.
If you’re not convinced by Empower, check out the Mint alternatives that might work for you.
Spend 29 seconds now and check out Empower, then leave your thoughts below! I would love to hear what you think of this product.
