That is an odd way to open a comparison page, and it is the honest one. Empower connects your accounts, charts your net worth, tracks cash flow and runs a Monte Carlo retirement projection, and charges nothing for any of it. If you have not used it, use it. Then come back and read the rest of this page, which is about why it is free and what that buys you.
What Empower gives away
Their own tools page lists nine of them: Retirement Planner, Net Worth, Budgeting & Cash Flow, Portfolio Analysis, Savings Planner, Debt Paydown, Emergency Fund, Transactions and Tax filing. The dashboard connects retirement plans, brokerages, mortgages, loans, cards and bank accounts. None of that costs anything, and no comparison page is going to make it sound bad.
Banks, brokerages, retirement plans, mortgages, loans and cards, all connected. The same foundation Rikdom is built on.
Both do this wellThe Retirement Planner is probabilistic and reports a success rate, not a single line. This is genuinely the strongest free projection in the category.
Both do this wellDedicated tools for both, free. If tracking is what you need, the argument for paying anyone is thin.
Both do this wellEmpower is a wealth manager. The tools are the front door, and the business is behind it at a $100K minimum.
The real differenceHow each of us gets paid
Empower says this plainly on its own site, so we will too. The advisory business starts at a $100,000 minimum, with further tiers at $250,000 and $1 million, and it charges an annual fee as a percentage of the assets it manages. The dashboard is excellent and it is also the top of that funnel. That is a legitimate way to run a company, and plenty of people are well served by it. It is worth knowing before you connect every account you own.
Rikdom charges $140 a year and has no advisory arm, no assets under management and nothing to upsell you into. We are not a better business than Empower. We are a different one, and the difference decides what the software is for.
Feature by feature
| Capability | Empower | Rikdom |
|---|---|---|
| What Empower already does | ||
| Bank & brokerage sync | ✓ | ✓ |
| Net worth dashboard | ✓ | ✓ |
| Monte Carlo retirement projection | ✓ | ✓ |
| Budgeting & cash flow | ✓ | ✓ |
| Transaction tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Portfolio analysis | ✓ | ✓ |
| What Rikdom adds | ||
| Zero-based envelope budgeting | Cash-flow style | ✓ |
| Tax-loss harvesting detection | — | ✓ |
| Natural-language queries on your data | — | ✓ |
| Community benchmarks | — | ✓ |
| Contributions separated from market | — | ✓ |
| The business model | ||
| Cost of the software | Free | $140 |
| Advisory minimum | $100,000 | No advisory arm |
| How the company earns | % of assets managed | The subscription |
Contributions vs. market
A connected dashboard makes this question answerable and most of them still do not answer it. A balance that rose $40,000 means one thing if you added $30,000 of it and something very different if you added $4,000. Payroll is where the arithmetic breaks: a 401(k) deduction never passes through a bank feed, so ending balance less starting balance less what you spent quietly files the contribution under market growth. Rikdom measures the two separately and keeps the employer match on its own line, because money your employer added isn't money you decided to save.
The math
We are not going to argue that $140 beats nothing, because it doesn't. If Empower's free tools cover what you need, that is the right answer and you should take it. The case for paying is narrow and specific: you want the harvesting and the envelope budgeting, you want to ask questions of your own data in plain English, and you would rather the company you hand your accounts to make its money from your subscription than from your balance.
Empower details verified against empower.com on 20 September 2026 — the nine free tools and the $100K / $250K / $1M advisory minimums are from their own pages. Their advisory fee schedule is published as an image rather than text, so no percentage is quoted here; ask Empower for their current rates. Plans change, so check before deciding.