Monarch Money vs Empower is not really a contest between two budgeting apps — it is a choice between two different jobs. Monarch Money is a paid budgeting and cash-flow app that costs $99.99 a year for its Core plan. Empower's Personal Dashboard is free forever and is built to track investments and net worth, not to help you manage day-to-day spending. If you want to know where your money went last month, Monarch is the one that does that job. If you want to see how your portfolio and retirement accounts are doing, Empower does that job better, and charges nothing for it.
That is the honest headline. The complication — the part most comparisons leave out — is that "free" and "paid" are doing a lot of hidden work in that sentence, and the reason each company charges what it charges tells you more about which one fits you than any feature list will.
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Monarch Money vs Empower at a glance
Here is what each company publishes on its own site, as of September 2026.
| Monarch Money | Empower Personal Dashboard | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is built for | Budgeting, cash flow, spending categories | Investment tracking, net worth, retirement projections |
| Price | Core $99.99/year or $14.99/month · Plus $199.99/year | Free — no subscription tier at all |
| Trial | 7 days, and "payment method required" | Not applicable — the dashboard is free |
| How the company makes money | Your subscription | Advisory services, which start above $100,000 invested |
| Bank connections | 13,000+ institutions | Broad coverage, weighted toward brokerages |
| Partner access | Add a partner free | Built around one individual's accounts |
| Best for | Couples and detail-oriented budgeters | Investors with a portfolio worth watching |
Is Monarch Money better than Empower?
Monarch Money is better than Empower if your problem is spending, and worse if your problem is investing — the two products barely overlap. Monarch gives you category-level budgets, transaction rules, cash-flow views and shared household access. Empower gives you portfolio allocation, fee analysis and retirement modelling, and its budgeting side is thin by comparison. The Monarch dashboard and the Empower dashboard are aimed at two different people.
The question almost answers itself once you name the actual problem. Someone who ends the month wondering where $600 went does not need a retirement projection. Someone with $400,000 across four brokerages does not need to categorise groceries. Most of the page-one comparisons for this query treat it as a horse race and pick a winner; it is closer to asking whether a wrench is better than a screwdriver.
Where it stops being simple is price. Monarch's cost is visible: $99.99 a year for Core, or $14.99 a month if you prefer monthly billing, and $199.99 a year for Plus — and note that second figure is $199.99, not the $199 several comparison sites round it to. Empower's cost is invisible, which is not the same as absent.
What are the cons of Monarch Money?
The main drawbacks of Monarch Money are its price relative to what you actually use, and a trial that asks for your card up front. Monarch's own pricing page is blunt about the second one: the 7-day trial says "Cancel in settings before trial ends. Payment method required." If you have ever signed up for something, forgotten, and found the charge a month later, that is a real consideration — and it is a detail no page-one comparison for this query currently mentions.
The price con is subtler. Monarch is a deep product, and most of that depth is budgeting machinery: rules engines, category groups, goal tracking, two budgeting methods. If you are the kind of person who enjoys that, $99.99 a year is fair value and Monarch is genuinely one of the best-built apps in the category. If you are the kind of person who has downloaded three budgeting apps and abandoned all three, you will be paying for a system you will not run. We went into this in more depth in our look at whether Monarch Money is worth it, and separately at what Monarch actually gives you for free — the short version of the second one is: a trial, and not much else.
The third con is scope. Monarch tracks investments, but nobody switches to Monarch for the investment tools.
Is there a better app than Empower?
For pure investment tracking, Empower is hard to beat at its price, because its price is nothing — Empower's own site answers the cost question with "Nothing! The dashboard experience and financial tools are completely free and take just a few minutes to set up." That is verbatim from the company, and it is true.
What is also true, and what almost no comparison of Monarch Money vs Empower says out loud, is how Empower pays for it. Empower's wealth-management page states that it charges "an annual advisory fee as a percentage of your total assets under management (AUM) using a tiered fee structure." The entry points are published: Personal Strategy advisory services are "available when you invest more than $100,000 with us." The next tier up requires more than $250,000. Empower Private Client requires more than $1,000,000.
So the free dashboard is the front door to a business with a six-figure minimum. That is not a scandal — it is a completely normal model, and the dashboard is a good product that costs you nothing to use. But it does explain two things people notice: why the tool is so oriented toward portfolios rather than spending, and why users with meaningful balances tend to hear from an advisor. If you have $12,000 in savings and a credit card you would like to stop carrying, you are not the customer the free tool was built to eventually convert. You can still use it happily. You should just know which product you are standing inside.
For what it is worth, Empower publishes that its average ETF expense ratio is 0.08%, and notes that your "all-in" cost combines that with the advisory fee — so the advisory relationship, if you ever enter it, is not the only line item.
Is there anything better than Monarch Money?
Whether anything is better than Monarch Money depends entirely on whether you want a budgeting system at all. If you do, Monarch is a legitimate top pick and the honest answer is that most alternatives are sideways moves — we compared several of them in our Monarch Money alternatives guide, and for a certain kind of organised, detail-loving person, Monarch wins that comparison outright.
But there is a third group this query keeps surfacing and neither product serves: people who want neither a portfolio dashboard nor a budgeting system. They do not have a $100,000 portfolio to analyse. They also are not going to maintain category budgets, because they have tried and it did not stick. What they want is to know where the money is going and to be told, in plain language, the one thing worth changing this month.
That is the gap Spendalyst was built for, and it is worth being precise about what that means rather than overselling it. Spendalyst connects your accounts read-only through Plaid, or skips the bank connection entirely if you would rather use manual entry and CSV import. It produces spending summaries with a six-month trend and CSV and JSON export. Once there is enough transaction history, it sends a Monday coach card with specific dollar figures — one observation about your actual spending, not a dashboard to go interpret yourself. It is a web app you can install to your home screen; there is nothing to download from an app store.
The pricing is deliberately simple: a 14-day free trial with no credit card, then $10.99 a month or $89.99 a year — about $7.50 a month, which saves $41.89 against twelve monthly payments. And at the end of the trial, your account pauses rather than converting. Your trial does not become a paid plan automatically. That is the opposite of the "payment method required" pattern, and it is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.
Spendalyst does not track your portfolio allocation. It will not model your retirement. If those are what you came for, Empower is free and better at both, and you should go use it.
So which should you actually pick?
Work backwards from the problem rather than the feature list:
Pick Empower if you have investments you want to watch, want net-worth and retirement projections, and do not need help with day-to-day spending. It is free, it is good, and there is no subscription to weigh up. Just go in knowing the advisory funnel exists above $100,000.
Pick Monarch Money if you want a real budgeting system, you and a partner want shared access, and you will genuinely use category budgets and rules. At $99.99 a year it is fairly priced for what it does, and if you are still weighing the Monarch Money cost against how much you will use it, start the 7-day trial with the cancellation date in your calendar, because a payment method is required to begin it.
Pick something simpler — Spendalyst, or one of the other lightweight trackers — if you have bounced off budgeting apps before and what you want is clarity rather than a system to maintain. If that description makes you wince in recognition, our guide to managing money without budgeting is the better starting point.
The worst outcome here is the common one: paying for a sophisticated budgeting app you stop opening in week three, and concluding that you are bad with money. You were not bad with money. You bought a tool for a job you were never going to do.