Two personal finance heavyweights… Personal Capital vs. Quicken. One has been around for decades and might even be older than you, and the other is a new favorite in the personal finance world, offering free investment tracking and retirement planning tools.
To help you decide which money tracking software is best, I’m putting these two head-to-head to look at which features will help make a difference in your financial life.
What is Personal Capital?
Personal Capital was founded in 2009 and currently has over 2 million active users tracking their investments, cash flow, and planning for retirement. It is a money management platform with robust tools, but Personal Capital also offers paid wealth management service – there are now over 19,000 users with over $9 billion in assets under management. For the sake of this comparison, I’m going to be discussing the free version of Personal Capital.
Personal Capital aggregates the most important parts of your financial life – bank account info, investments, and spending – in one place. They have a heavy focus on net worth tracking and retirement planning, which helps many users reduce their fees.
How much does Personal Capital cost?
Personal Capital is 100% free to use unless you have over $100,000 in invested assets and want to use its advisory services.
Sign up Personal Capital using my exclusive link and we’ll both get $20.
What is Quicken?
Quicken is the OG money management software, and it has made some recent updates that help users with multiple facets of their financial life, including:
- Budgeting
- Investment tracking
- Bill-tracking
- Debt pay off
- Net worth tracking
How much does Quicken cost?
Quicken is a paid software that has three different levels of service:
- Starter $34.99/year
- Deluxe $44.99/year (on sale from $49.99)
- Premier $67.49/year (on sale from $74.99)
If you are up for paying for two years of service at a time, there are discounts on Deluxe and Premier.
As I tell you about Personal Capital vs. Quicken, I’ll be referring to the Starter level of Quicken unless otherwise specified.
If you’re curious how Quicken’s cost compares to other apps, one of the most popular options – YNAB or You Need A Budget – costs $84.99/year. It’s a great zero-based budgeting app, but it lacks the investment tracking and retirement planning tools offered by Quicken.
You can learn more about YNAB at YNAB Review 2021: The Most Effective Budgeting App Around?
Personal Capital’s features
Like I said, Personal Capital offers incredibly comprehensive tools for tracking your investments and helping you prepare for retirement – this is what my wife and I really love about it.
But here’s a complete rundown of Personal Capital’s features:
Your Personal Capital dashboard
After you log in to your Personal Capital account, your dashboard is where you get a broad overview of everything that comes with Personal Capital. You’ll see:
- Net worth
- Investable cash
- Cash flow
- Budgeting
- Portfolio balance
- Retirement savings
Net worth tracking
Your net worth is calculated by adding all of your assets together and then subtracting your liabilities. With Personal Capital, you can see where your net worth is today, but you can also see where you were at 30 days ago, 90 days ago, etc.
Because your net worth determines your overall financial strength, Personal Capital gives you in-depth options for looking at it, like breaking it down by asset/liability class. This shows you which areas you should address as you work to grow your net worth.
Personal Capital Review 2021: Free Investment and Net Worth Tracking
Cash Flow Analyzer
This Personal Capital feature displays how much money is moving in and out of your accounts. You can look at it by spending category, see graphs, and see transactions from your linked accounts.
Read more at Personal Capital vs. YNAB: Which Money Tool Should You Use First?
Retirement Planner
This is where Personal Capital really shines and it starts by asking you for your projected retirement savings, current retirement savings, your age, and planned age of retirement.
After taking those things and the current state of your finances into consideration, Personal Capital tells you if you’re on track for retirement. You can even plan around with different scenarios (like having kids, buying a house, etc.) to see how that changes the projections.
If you’re not on track, Personal Capital’s Retirement Planner will make some suggestions for you.
Portfolio performance
After you link all of your investment accounts – even micro-investing apps – Personal Capital puts everything on the same page to check on your portfolio performance. To help you optimize your investments, Personal Capital will recommend a better asset allocation.
Retirement Fee Analyzer
This is a super cool function that can literally help you save thousands of dollars as you plan for retirement. It works by looking at the fees you’re paying for:
- ETFs
- Mutual funds
- 401(k) fees
- Management fees
Then, the retirement fee analyzer shows you how those fees affect your overall cost of your investments. While fractions of a percentage may seem insignificant, it can really add up over several decades of investing.
The analyzer also lets you adjust contributions, employer matches, earnings, additional fees, etc. to see how different scenarios and small changes add up.
Learn more about saving on fees and optimizing your 401(k) at Blooom Review 2021: An Affordable Robo-Advisor for Your 401(k).
Wealth management service
Once you have $100,000 in investment assets, you can pay Personal Capital for wealth management services. It’s a mix of Robo-advisory services and human support.
The levels of service include:
- Investment Service for up to $200k in investment assets. This includes access to a financial advisory team, tax-efficient ETF portfolio, Smart Weighing™, 401(k) advice, cash flow, and spending insights, 24/7 access including weekends and after hours, and support priority services.
- Wealth Management for up to $1M in investment assets. Including everything with the investment service and two dedicated financial advisors, customizable stocks and ETFs, full financial and retirement plan, college savings and 529 planning, tax-loss harvesting, and financial decisions support.
- Private Client services for over $1M in investment assets. Including everything above and priority access to CFP®, advisors, investment committee, and support; investment portfolio mix of ETFs, individual stocks and individual bonds; family tiered billing; private banking services; estate, tax, and legacy portfolio construction; donor advisory funds; private equity and hedge fund review; deferred compensation strategy; estate attorney and CPA collaboration; and access to private equity investments.
The cost of Personal Capital’s wealth management services ranges from 0.49%-0.89% of assets under management. This service is entirely optional, even if you do meet the qualifying amount of invested assets.
Quicken’s features
Quicken has a lot to offer users, and because it’s a paid service, you expect that level of functionality. My team got a complete walkthrough of Quicken’s software from it’s VP Management and Design, Jeff Parker.
Budgeting
Quicken has preset and customizable budgeting categories, and you can set limits, get notifications when you overspend, and edit as needed.
You can break each category down into subcategories so you can look at the micro and macro level of your total budget, and Quicken also has some simple to read charts and graphs.
You can read more about budgeting with Quicken at Quicken vs. Mint: Which Budgeting Tool is Better in 2021?
Bill pay
If you pay for Quicken Premier, you can pay using Quicken to set up bill pay for up to 10 different accounts. All Quicken plans now let you download PDF copies of your bills through the bill center dashboard.
Investment tracking
With Quicken Deluxe and Premier, you get robust investment tracking tools, including:
- The ability to track your investments and retirement accounts
- Access to Morningstar’s Portfolio X-ray tool to evaluate your investments
- Compare buy-and-hold options, improving your portfolio analysis
- Compare your returns to market averages
- See your cost basis and create tax reports
Debt Reduction Plan
While this is currently only available with the PC version of Quicken, it’s a great feature if you need help paying off your debt.
Here’s what you get with Quicken’s Debt Reduction Plan:
- See all of your debts in one place.
- It builds a graph that shows how long it will take you to eliminate your debt.
- You can play around with different scenarios where you increase or decrease the amount you pay each month, and it projects how those changes affect your payoff
- See what it would look like to make a lump payment on your debt.
- It helps you develop a plan for paying off your debt. It leans more towards the debt avalanche method – paying off loans with the highest interest rate first.
Your credit score
Quicken show you your updated quarterly credit score from Equifax.
Options for small business owners
Quicken offers the Home and Business & Rental Property Manager that has tools for small business owners that can help them invoice customers and stay up-to-date with payments. It’s currently only available for PC users and costs $89.99/year and includes everything that comes with Premier.
Personal Capital vs. Quicken 2021
Now that you’ve gotten a rundown of each, let’s look at how all of these features stack up to see whether Quicken vs. Personal Capital is a better money tool for you.
Features |  Personal Capital |  Quicken |
|---|---|---|
Overall Rating | ✓ Our Top Pick 9.5 M$M Rating | 9 M$M Rating |
Net worth tracking | ||
Cash Flow Analyzer | ||
Retirement Planner | ||
Portfolio performance | ||
Retirement Fee Analyzer | ||
Wealth management service | ||
Budgeting | ||
Bill pay | ||
Investment tracking | ||
Debt Reduction Plan | ||
Your credit score | ||
Options for small business owners | ||
Sign Up |
Which is better for budgeting?
Personal Capital’s budgeting tools are run through its Cash Flow Analyzer, letting you see how much money is coming in and out and where it’s all going. It’s essentially cash flow budgeting – as long as you’re in the black you’re good.
Cash flow budgeting is flexible and can be incredibly effective for some people. However, for anyone who needs stricter guidelines, Quicken offers much more comprehensive budgeting tools, including:
- Ability to create unlimited spending categories
- Setting a budget for different categories (one-month budgets are available at all budgets, but yearly budgets are only available with Deluxe and Premier)
- Include or exclude whichever expenses you want
- Get an in-depth analysis of each area
Budgeting winner: Quicken
Which is better for investment tracking?
Both Personal Capital and Quicken offer extensive investment tracking tools, but Quicken only offers them in Deluxe and Premier. If you are willing to pony up at least $44.99/year for Quicken, you do get a few more tools, including:
- Setting up stock watch lists
- See market comparisons for buy/sell decisions
Honestly, most investors are still going to get a lot out of Personal Capital’s robust and free tools, and it is 100% ahead of any other free financial tool in terms of investment tracking. For me, that makes Personal Capital the clear winner in this category
Investment tracking winner: Personal Capital
Which is better for retirement planning?
In the Personal Capital vs. Quicken debate, this is another hard one because it, again, has to do with cost. And in reality, either one of these tools is going to help you make informed decisions now so that you stay on the right path for retirement.
Personal Capital is free and still gives you your projected portfolio balance at different ages, offers recommendations for saving on fees and making contributions, let’s you play with what-if scenarios, and more. That’s a lot for a free tool!
On the other hand, paying for Quicken lets you dive a little deeper into those what-if scenarios with its Lifetime Planner. You can make the cost of living adjustments, future loans, college costs, etc. and then see how each change may affect retirement.
Retirement planning winner: Tie
Which is better on price?
Free doesn’t always mean better… that’s for darn sure. But in this case, Personal Capital’s free service gives you stellar tools that can help you build a better financial life. I’ve been using it for several years, and I’ve been very happy with how it lets me interact with my investments and track my retirement planning progress.
I’d say that if you do want powerful budgeting tools, paying for Quicken could be worth the cost.
Winner for price: Personal Capital
The final word – Quicken vs. Personal Capital
I’ve done reviews and comparisons on A LOT of personal finance tools and one thing I’ve noticed is that when you find something you like, you stick with it. That’s why I’ve been using Personal Capital for so long.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that none of the personal finance apps I’ve looked at give you the budgeting and powerful investment tracking and retirement planning tools that Personal Capital and Quicken have to offer.
Sure, you can get a little of that with Mint, but Mint is full of ads and doesn’t always sync transactions as quickly as I’d like. Those are all non-issues with Personal Capital and Quicken.
No matter which app you use, you’re going to get tools that will help you create a better financial present and future.
About Millennial Money Man
Bobby Hoyt is a former band director who paid off $40,000 of student loan debt in 18 months on his teaching salary and then left his job to run Millennial Money Man full-time. He helps other Millennials earn more through side hustles, save more through budgeting tools and apps, and pay off debt. He is a personal finance expert who has been seen on Forbes, Reuters, MarketWatch, CNBC, International Business Times, Business Insider, US News, Yahoo Finance, and many other personal finance and entrepreneurship media outlets.
