Empower Alternatives for People Who Won't Link Their Bank Accounts

Why people look for an Empower alternative

Empower, the app most people still call Personal Capital, is one of the best free financial dashboards ever built. The retirement planner is excellent, the fee analyzer has probably saved users millions of dollars in hidden fund expenses, and the consolidated net worth view is exactly what most people want from a tracker.

So why do so many people search for an alternative?

In almost every case, it comes down to one of three complaints, and none of them is about quality.

The bank linking. Empower only works if you connect your accounts. You hand over credentials for your bank, your brokerage, your credit cards, and your retirement accounts, and the app pulls balances automatically through an aggregation service. For a lot of people, that moment in the signup flow, the one where a third party asks for your bank login, is where the relationship ends. If you've ever hovered over that screen and closed the tab, this article is for you.

The advisor calls. Empower's dashboard is free because it's a lead-generation tool for Empower's paid wealth management business. Once your linked assets cross a threshold (commonly reported at around $100,000), you can expect calls and emails from their advisory team. The advisors are licensed professionals and the pitch is legitimate, but plenty of users just wanted a net worth chart and didn't sign up to be a sales lead.

The complexity. Empower shows you a lot: transactions, cash flow, budgeting, asset allocation, retirement projections. If all you want is a monthly answer to "what am I worth and which direction is it moving," the dashboard can feel like more machine than you need.

If your only complaint is the advisor calls, you can ask to be removed from the contact list and keep using the free dashboard. But if the objection is the linking model itself, no setting inside Empower fixes that. The product is built on aggregation. You need a different tool.

What linking actually involves

It's worth being precise about what you're objecting to, because "linking my bank" hides a few separate facts.

When you connect an account to Empower, the connection usually runs through an aggregator such as Plaid or a similar service. Depending on your bank, you either enter your credentials into the aggregator's interface or approve access through your bank's OAuth flow. From then on, the aggregator retrieves your balances and transactions on a schedule and passes them to the app. Your data now lives in at least two places you don't control: the aggregator's servers and Empower's.

None of this is a scandal. Aggregators are real companies with real security teams, and millions of people use them daily without incident. But read-only access is not the same thing as privacy. In 2022, Plaid paid $58 million to settle a class action alleging it collected more data than users consented to. The broader pattern of what finance apps do with the data they collect is worth understanding before you decide the convenience is worth it. There is also a full breakdown of how bank linking works and what can go wrong if you want the details.

If you've read all that and you're comfortable, Empower remains a strong free product. The rest of this article is for people who aren't.

The honest alternatives

There are four realistic paths for someone who wants Empower's net worth tracking without Empower's linking model. Each has a real tradeoff. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

A spreadsheet

The zero-cost, zero-trust option. Open Google Sheets or Excel, list your assets and liabilities, subtract, and chart the total over time.

The case for it. It's free, your data never touches a fintech company's servers, and you can structure it however you like. For someone with four or five accounts and no unusual assets, a spreadsheet genuinely works.

The case against it. Spreadsheets are fragile and they depend entirely on your own discipline. Formulas break when you insert rows, historical data gets overwritten by a stray edit, and building charts that stay accurate takes ongoing effort. There's no structure pulling you back each month, which is why most spreadsheet trackers quietly die within a year. You also build every feature yourself; there are no built-in milestones or projections, and no allocation view unless you construct one.

Best for: simple finances and people who enjoy maintaining their own systems.

Kubera

Kubera is a premium tracker aimed at people with complex portfolios. It supports linking through aggregators, but linking is optional, and manual entry is a first-class feature. That makes it one of the few paid tools an anti-linking user can actually use as intended.

The case for it. Kubera handles asset types that break other trackers: crypto wallets, international accounts, domains, vehicles, and alternative investments. It also has beneficiary features for passing your financial picture to someone if you die.

The case against it. Price is the big one. Kubera's entry plan runs around $250 a year, which is a lot if you only need core net worth tracking. The interface is functional but utilitarian, closer to a well-organized spreadsheet than a modern app. And if you do use the optional linking, you've reintroduced the exact aggregator dependency you were trying to leave, along with the sync errors that come with it.

Best for: high-net-worth users with complicated, international holdings who don't mind the premium price.

Monarch Money

Monarch is the app most often recommended to former Mint users, and it picked up many former Personal Capital users too. It's a polished budgeting and net worth app with a paid subscription that runs around $100 a year.

The case for it. Monarch is well designed, it has no advisory arm, so there are no sales calls, and because you pay for it directly, its business model doesn't depend on monetizing you in less visible ways. The budgeting features are strong, and the net worth view is a genuine feature rather than an afterthought.

The case against it. For the specific reader of this article, Monarch has a structural problem: it's built around account aggregation. Manual accounts exist, but the product experience assumes linked connections, and you'd be paying for a design whose main value, automatic sync, is the thing you're opting out of. If your objection to Empower was the sales calls, Monarch solves it. If your objection was the linking model, Monarch doesn't.

Best for: people leaving Empower because of the advisor outreach, not because of aggregation.

Steady Wealth

Full disclosure: this is our product, so read this section with that in mind.

Steady Wealth is a net worth tracker built manual-first. There is no bank linking anywhere in the product, no aggregator integration, and no way to hand over credentials even if you wanted to. You enter balances yourself, either by typing them or by uploading a screenshot of your account page and letting AI extract the numbers, with no connection to the underlying institution.

The case for it. The privacy model is structural rather than a settings toggle. Your balances are numbers you typed, not a live feed scraped from your bank, so there are no credentials to breach and no aggregator in the middle. It covers the full balance sheet, including real estate, business equity, and crypto, which even Empower handles poorly. You get trend charts, milestones, growth projections, and a personal financial statement generator. Pro is $99 a year, and there's a free tier with up to 5 accounts to see whether the workflow suits you.

The case against it. Nothing updates itself. A monthly update takes a few minutes of your time, and if you skip a few months, your chart has gaps until you fill them in. Some people find the monthly check-in a feature, since it forces you to actually look at your money, but if you want a dashboard that's always current with zero effort, a manual tool will frustrate you and you should stay with an aggregation-based app.

Best for: people whose core objection to Empower is the linking itself, and who are willing to trade a few minutes a month for a financial dashboard that never talks to their bank.

Side by side

How to actually decide

Start with the reason you're leaving.

If the advisor calls are the whole problem, either ask Empower to stop contacting you or move to Monarch, where the polished aggregation experience continues without a wealth management funnel attached.

If the linking model is the problem, your options narrow to the tools that work without it. A spreadsheet costs nothing and is worth trying first if your finances are simple. Kubera makes sense at the high end, when your portfolio is complex enough to justify the price and you'll use manual mode. Steady Wealth sits in the middle: purpose-built for manual tracking at $99 a year, with screenshot import to keep the monthly update short.

One practical note on switching: before you close your Empower account, screenshot or export your net worth history. Rebuilding your starting point in a new tool takes minutes, but your historical trend line is worth preserving, and it's easier to capture while you still have access.

Frequently asked questions

Is Empower safe to use?

By industry standards, yes. Empower is a large, regulated financial company, and the aggregators it relies on use bank-level encryption. The honest framing is that "safe" and "private" are different questions. Linking your accounts means your balances, transactions, and account details flow through servers owned by the aggregator and by Empower, and both are attractive targets for attackers. Most users never have a problem. The question is whether you want your complete financial picture held by companies you don't control, and that's a decision worth making deliberately.

Why did Personal Capital become Empower?

Empower Retirement, one of the largest retirement plan providers in the US, acquired Personal Capital in 2020 in a deal valued at roughly $1 billion. The Personal Capital dashboard was rebranded as the Empower Personal Dashboard in 2023. The free tools survived the transition largely intact, and so did the business model: the free dashboard exists to identify prospects for the paid wealth management service.

Is there a free Empower alternative?

A spreadsheet is the only alternative that is both free and completely private, and it's a legitimate option if your finances are simple. Steady Wealth's free tier covers up to 5 accounts with no bank linking, which is enough for many people to track their core picture indefinitely. Most other polished trackers, including Monarch and Kubera, are paid products. Be cautious with any free app that requires account linking; if you aren't paying, understand how the company makes money from your data before you connect anything.

Can I use Empower without linking my bank accounts?

Not in any useful way. Empower supports a limited form of manual entry for certain assets, but the product is designed around aggregation, and its best features, including the retirement planner and fee analyzer, depend on linked account data. If you want to track your net worth without linking, you'll get a better experience from a tool built for manual entry from the start.