Monarch Money Alternative for Wealth Tracking (Not Budgets)

COMPETITOR

Monarch Money

Budget-first product — investment and wealth tracking is limited to account balances without analytics

What Monarch Does Very Well

Monarch Money is the best budgeting app that followed Mint’s shutdown. The spending categorization is accurate, the transaction management is clean, and the collaborative household finance features are well-designed for couples managing shared finances. If you have been looking for a Mint replacement that handles the day-to-day mechanics of budget tracking — where your money went, whether you’re overspending in categories, how your cash flow has changed month to month — Monarch is a strong option.

The account connection coverage through Plaid is broad. Bank accounts, credit cards, and retirement accounts connect reliably. The mobile app is well-maintained. At $99.99/year, the product is priced like a premium tool and largely delivers on that for its intended use case.

What “Investment Tracking” Means in Monarch

Monarch includes an “investments” tab and a “net worth” view. It is worth being precise about what these show.

The investments tab shows your brokerage and retirement account balances. Total account value, the change over time, and the accounts that make up that value. It is balance aggregation.

What it does not show: asset allocation breakdown across accounts, individual holding detail, performance attribution vs benchmarks, fund expense ratios, or any analytics on whether your portfolio is doing what you intend it to do.

This distinction matters for tech professionals who are trying to understand their actual wealth picture. Knowing your Fidelity 401(k) is worth $380,000 is useful. Knowing whether that $380,000 is concentrated in target-date funds with high expense ratios, appropriately diversified for your age, or underperforming its benchmark requires analysis tools Monarch doesn’t provide.

The Equity Compensation Blind Spot

For tech professionals, there is a more fundamental gap: Monarch does not track equity compensation.

Your RSU grants, vesting schedule, and unvested share value live in your equity portal (Fidelity NetBenefits, ETrade at Work, Morgan Stanley at Work). Monarch connects to these platforms at the balance level — it can see that your ETrade account holds X shares worth Y dollars. It does not show your grant dates, cliff date, quarterly vest amounts, or the value of unvested shares that are two years out.

For someone mid-career at a tech company where RSUs are a meaningful portion of total compensation, this means Monarch’s net worth view is systematically incomplete. The tool is showing you the assets you already own, not the equity you have earned but haven’t yet received.

The Right Tool Depends on Your Primary Concern

Monarch is priced at $99.99/year — comparable to Thalvi and most other premium personal finance apps. At that price point, you should be buying the tool that solves your actual problem.

If your primary concern is: where is my money going, am I spending too much, how do I manage our household cash flow together — Monarch is well-matched.

If your primary concern is: what is my actual net worth including equity comp, how is my portfolio performing, am I on track for the wealth timeline I have in mind — Monarch is answering adjacent questions but not the ones you’re asking.

Thalvi is being built for the second case: wealth aggregation across standard accounts plus equity compensation, without the budget-management framework that Monarch organizes its product around.