Monarch Money vs Empower for Wealth Tracking (2026): Which Handles Investments Better?

Setting Up the Comparison

Monarch Money and Empower are solving different problems, and this is the most important thing to understand before comparing them.

Monarch is a budgeting app that includes account balance aggregation. The product is organized around spending management, transaction categorization, and cash flow visibility. Net worth tracking is a feature within that framework.

Empower is an investment analysis tool that funds itself through wealth management advisory conversions. The free product is genuinely built around portfolio analysis — fee auditing, allocation breakdown, retirement planning — not around daily spending.

If you are looking at both and trying to choose, the question is: what problem are you solving? Budgeting or investment analysis?

What Monarch Actually Shows for Investments

When you connect your brokerage or 401(k) to Monarch, you see the account balance, its change over time, and its contribution to your net worth. That is the extent of the investment functionality.

You cannot see your asset allocation across accounts. You cannot see whether your 401(k) funds have high expense ratios. You cannot see your portfolio’s performance against an index benchmark. You cannot see your individual holdings in meaningful detail.

This is not a knock on Monarch — investment analytics is not what the product is built for. But if you are paying $99.99/year expecting investment depth, the product does not deliver that.

What Empower Actually Provides

Empower’s investment tools are more substantive than most users expect from a free product. The fee analyzer scans the investment funds in your connected accounts and calculates your annual expense ratios. For investors inside 401(k) plans with poor fund options, this can identify real costs — and Empower uses the insight to demonstrate advisor value.

The asset allocation view shows your equity/bond/cash distribution across all connected accounts and flags concentration issues. The portfolio performance section shows returns over various periods. The retirement planner lets you model different scenarios with enough specificity to be useful for planning purposes.

The trade-off: Empower’s business model requires that some percentage of free users become advisory clients. Advisor outreach is persistent and cannot be fully opted out of.

The Equity Compensation Gap in Both

For tech professionals with RSU grants, ESPP participation, or stock options, both products have the same blind spot. Neither connects to equity compensation portals in a meaningful way. Neither shows your unvested RSU value. Neither tracks your ESPP purchase windows or cost basis.

This means both tools are systematically understating the net worth of a tech professional mid-career at a company with equity compensation programs. The gap between your self-perceived net worth in these tools and your actual net worth — including unvested grants — can be significant.

Which to Choose

Choose Monarch if: household cash flow management, budget tracking, and spending visibility are your primary needs. The net worth view is a bonus, not the reason to subscribe.

Choose Empower if: you want investment analytics for your traditional accounts, are comfortable managing advisor outreach, and do not want to pay a subscription fee.

Consider looking beyond both if: you are a tech professional whose equity comp is a meaningful portion of your compensation and you need a wealth view that includes it.

Where Thalvi fits

We built Thalvi because Monarch does not track investments and Empower pays for its analytics by selling you an advisor. Thalvi is a wealth aggregator — brokerages, 401(k)s, real estate, crypto, all in one dashboard. The Pro plan ($14/month) adds RSU/ESPP tracking and tax optimization insights for tech professionals whose equity comp is a material part of their net worth. No ads, no advisor calls. From $9/month.

Verdict

For someone primarily managing household budgets and spending: Monarch. For someone who wants investment analysis across traditional accounts at no cost and can manage advisor outreach: Empower. For a tech professional trying to see their full wealth picture including equity compensation and portfolio analytics without advisor solicitations: neither product is the right fit. Thalvi (from $9/month) is built for that exact gap — wealth aggregation with equity comp tracking, no budget-first design, no advisor calls.