Empower (Personal Capital) Review: Pros and Cons

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 the way Mint handled investments and now they’ve shut it down. It just didn’t help my investments enough to really help me in my personal finances. And because investing is such a big part of my finances, I always relied on Quicken.

But in my ongoing quest to move my finances to the cloud and search Quicken AlternativesI found one free tool that really does everything Mint does, PLUS investments. It’s called Empowering.

Find out why we like this tool in our Empower review. Plus, read more about their upsells and their new attractive cash account. And see how they compare to the other best money and financial tracker apps out there.

Empower is a budgeting app and financial tracking tool as well as an investment manager. They are best known for their financial dashboard, where you can track your expenses and budget, monitor your investment portfolio, and more. The best part is that this tool is currently free.

They are also a professional wealth manager, where you can meet with a financial planner and have them manage your portfolio for a fee. They effectively use their free dashboard as a lead generator for their investment management services.

Empower (formerly known as Personal Capital) was founded in 2010 and was acquired by Empower Retirement in July 2020.

In 2023, Personal Capital was renamed Empower.

Empower was also named one of the best budgeting apps of 2025!

What has power

The reason I loved Mint for so long is because it automatically updates and categorizes your transactions for you. You always get an up-to-date picture of your expenses and you can see where your money is going.

Empower covers all the bases. When you log in, you’ll be greeted with a dashboard that looks very similar to Mint. On the left side you will see all your accounts listed, as well as your total net worth at the top. Empower connects to the same banks and institutions as Mint, and also lets you add asset accounts, like your home. You will then be presented with a dashboard showing the following:

A basis of your expenses:

They also have an overview of how your portfolio is performing compared to the overall market:

They also have a useful asset allocation tool:

They also have useful budgeting and spending tools. You can see your cash flow every month, as well as an overview of your spending categories.

You will find this under the ‘Budgeting’ tab.

Related: The best tools for portfolio analysis

Investment tools

The best part of Empower is its investing tools, which are simple yet much more powerful than what Mint offered. Empower does investment management the right way, but focuses on a few basic things:

• The value of your portfolio
• The performance of your portfolio (as a whole and of each individual investment)
• An overview of your assets
• An analysis of your allocation
• Good transaction management

What always frustrated me about Mint (and sometimes Quicken) was the transaction management. So far I have found Empower to be excellent at properly managing all of my brokers’ imported transactions. For one asset they didn’t get the symbol (because it’s in a transfer company and not a brokerage), but I was able to enter the symbol manually.

How does Empower relate to budgeting and net worth tracking?

Empower offers their free dashboard as well as net worth tracking, as well as investment advice. We’ll discuss the investment advice below, but since most people just use their free dashboard, we thought we’d compare just the dashboard first.

Empower’s dashboard is a great option for those who want to track both their spending and investments. Mint was a close runner-up until the shutdown, as was Quicken (Quicken is a paid product, though). Another runner-up is Monarch, which has developed a lot of great tools to compete, but it also gets paid. YNAB is another very popular option, but the approach is different. Check out our full comparison between YNAB and Empower here.

If you’re just looking at tracking net worth, Kubera is a solid option.

The problem with “free” is that these companies can’t cover all the costs of running this type of software with connections to the different platforms. It costs approximately $0.005 per month, per account, for each connection. Since someone like me has 20+ connections (banks and brokers), that’s $0.10 per month. Doesn’t sound like much, but it can add up very quickly!

That’s why Empower is one of the last free tools, because you are actually the product. They are going to try to sell you on investment management (see below).

If you simply want to compare their free dashboard, here are some options. See the full list of Mint alternatives here.

Investment advice

For me it is always important to know how a company that offers a free service makes money. And Empower makes money by promoting their financial advisors to help you with your portfolio. Their goal is to eventually get you as a wealth management client – and once you surpass $100,000 in assets, you can expect their advisors to start calling you and encouraging you to meet with them to review your portfolio.

If you decide to work with them, they will charge (quite a bit) for managing your portfolio. Although their fees are all-inclusive, you can expect to pay 0.89% AUM (assets under management) if you have less than $1,000,000 invested with them.

They actually call you different levels depending on how much you invested:

• $100,000 to $200,000: Investment services client
• $200,000 to $999,999: Wealth management client
• More than $1,000,000: Private customer

As you invest more money, your AUM decreases. Once you reach ‘Private Client’ status, you’ll start saving a bit on AUM fees. However, it is layered:

How does asset management compare?

To be honest, Empower’s wealth management services are more expensive than other companies. Although they have a great free dashboard, their investment services are more expensive than other companies. They’re not a robo-advisor, but they’re also more expensive than other companies that make direct, human-backed investments.

Here’s how they compare to some of their top competitors.

Make cash possible

Empower recently announced Empower Cash. This is a cash management account and acts as a high-yield savings account.

The Empower Cash account earns 3.00 APY – which is a very attractive 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 are an Empower Advisory customer, you can actually earn a higher rate (0.10% more) – 3.10% APY.

Why should you trust us?

I have in-depth experience using “Personal Financial Managers” or PFMs such as Empower. I started using Quicken to track my personal finances in the early 2000s, and since then I’ve used or tested almost every budgeting app and investment tracking app on the market.

I’ve spent over hundreds of hours using Empower for both testing and tracking my own finances – using both the web and app versions 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 just take my word for it, see for yourself. Like Mint, Empower is free. It only takes a matter of minutes to enter your banking details and get your data live. Empower even advertises that it only takes 29 seconds once you add one account.

If you’re not sold on Empower, check out these Mint alternatives that might work for you.

Spend 29 seconds now and check out Empower, and leave your thoughts below! I’d love to hear what you think of this product.