Monarch Money is a good product. Genuinely. It does budgeting, net worth, investment tracking, and account aggregation in one place — which is exactly what Rikdom does. The difference shows up when you ask what happens next: Monarch puts retirement projection in Plus, a second subscription at $199.99 a year on top of Core. Rikdom puts projections, tax-loss harvesting and AI insights in the one plan.
What Monarch does well
We'd be dishonest if we didn't acknowledge what Monarch gets right. It's the product most people recommend when Mint shuts down, and for good reason.
Monarch connects to virtually everything — banks, brokerages, crypto, loans. Their Plaid integration is solid and reliable.
Both do this wellThe net worth view is well-designed. You can see assets, liabilities, and trends at a glance without clutter.
Both do this wellMonarch does project retirement. It lives in Plus, at $199.99/yr on top of Core. Rikdom runs 10,000 simulations, modelling sequence-of-returns risk, in the plan you already have.
Rikdom goes deeperMonarch surfaces spending insights. Rikdom adds tax-loss harvesting detection, rebalancing alerts, and natural language queries across your entire financial picture.
Rikdom goes deeperWhere Rikdom pulls ahead
Monarch shows you your money. Rikdom tells you what to do with it. These have no equivalent in Monarch:
Rikdom checks your brokerage holdings for harvestable losses, tracks wash sale windows, and estimates the tax savings.
10,000-path simulations that model sequence-of-returns risk, variable spending, and asset allocation changes. Not a simple growth line — a probability distribution of your future.
Ask your financial data questions in plain English. "What's my effective savings rate excluding mortgage principal?" "How much did I spend on dining out this quarter vs last?"
Compare your savings rate, allocation, and spending to income-matched peers. Privacy-first: N≥50 thresholding, differential privacy, no individual data exposed.
Feature by feature
| Capability | Monarch | Rikdom |
|---|---|---|
| Budgeting & Tracking | ||
| Budget tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Zero-based envelope budgeting | Flexible | ✓ |
| Bank sync (Plaid) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Transaction categorization | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cash flow tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Wealth Tracking | ||
| Net worth dashboard | ✓ | ✓ |
| Brokerage sync (holdings + cost basis) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Real asset auto-valuation | Manual | ✓ |
| Liquidity score | — | ✓ |
| Intelligence | ||
| Retirement projection | Plus only | ✓ |
| Scenario modelling (new job, house, kids) | Plus only | ✓ |
| Monte Carlo projections (10K paths) | — | ✓ |
| Tax-loss harvesting detection | — | ✓ |
| Smart rebalancing alerts | — | ✓ |
| AI-powered insights | — | ✓ |
| Community benchmarks | — | ✓ |
| Retirement Planning | ||
| Roth conversion analysis | — | ✓ |
| Social Security optimization | — | ✓ |
| Withdrawal strategy modeling | — | ✓ |
| Monthly report (PDF) | — | ✓ |
| Pricing | ||
| Monthly cost | $14.99 Core | $14 |
| Annual cost | $99.99 Core | $140 |
| Cost to include retirement projection | $199.99/yr Plus | $140 |
With Community Benchmarks, Rikdom answers the question Monarch can't: how do you compare? Anonymous, differentially private comparisons across savings rate, debt ratio, and six other metrics — grouped by income cohort, with a minimum of 50 contributors before data appears.
Your history comes with you. Export your Monarch transactions to CSV and the import wizard recreates your accounts, categories, and transaction history inside Rikdom. It suggests a Rikdom category for each Monarch category — you confirm or override before anything is written. Monarch's export doesn't include budget amounts, so you'll set those fresh; everything else moves.
Contributions vs. market
A balance that rose $40,000 is two different stories. Put in $30,000 of it yourself and the market had a quiet year. Put in $4,000 and the market did the work, which is not a thing to count on twice. Payroll is what makes this hard to see: money that goes from your paycheck into a 401(k) never touches your bank feed, so the obvious arithmetic — ending balance, less starting balance, less what you spent — files it under market growth. Rikdom pulls it back out and names it, with the employer match on its own line, because money your employer added isn't money you chose to save.
The math
Monarch Core is $14.99/mo for budgeting and net worth. Rikdom is $14. The gap opens when you want to know whether you're on track. Monarch keeps retirement projection and scenario modelling in Plus, a second subscription at $199.99 a year on top of Core. Rikdom has no second tier. Projections and tax-loss harvesting are in the plan you already bought.
Monarch pricing and tier details verified against monarch.com/pricing on 20 September 2026. Plans change; if you're reading this much later, check their pricing page before deciding.