Personal Capital — now Empower — gives you a free dashboard in exchange for linking your broker credentials and putting you on a financial advisor's call list. Foliolytic gives you deeper portfolio analytics in exchange for nothing. Here is the honest comparison.
Try Foliolytic Free →Switch if you are tired of the advisor outreach calls, you want client-side data privacy, and your primary use case is portfolio analytics (not net-worth aggregation across bank, mortgage, and credit accounts). Keep Empower if you specifically want a unified net-worth dashboard pulling from every account you own. Many users do both: Empower for net-worth visibility, Foliolytic for actual portfolio analytics.
Free · No signup · No advisor calls · 70+ metrics · Client-side onlyPersonal Capital launched in 2009 and was rebranded to Empower Personal Wealth in 2023 after Empower Retirement acquired it. The free dashboard tools — net-worth aggregation, portfolio overview, retirement planner — are excellent and remain genuinely free. The price you pay is that you must link your broker credentials, link your bank credentials, link your credit-card credentials, and accept that any account above roughly $100,000 will receive proactive outreach from an Empower-licensed financial advisor pitching wealth management services. Empower's actual revenue model is its managed-account fee (roughly 0.49% to 0.89% of AUM per their advisory disclosures; verify at empower.com).
Foliolytic does not aggregate bank accounts, does not have an advisor team, does not store credentials, and does not link to your broker. You upload a CSV; the analytics happen in your browser; the file is never sent anywhere. The trade-off is that Foliolytic only sees what you give it — it doesn't see the rest of your financial life. That is the same trade-off privacy always involves.
The table below reflects the public state of both tools as of April 2026. Empower's pricing structure for advised accounts changes occasionally; verify against their current disclosures.
Foliolytic was built with one explicit philosophy: your portfolio data is yours, the analytics should be free, and you should never receive a phone call about wealth management.
Empower's free dashboard is genuinely best-in-class for one specific workflow that Foliolytic does not attempt to replicate.
This deserves its own section because it is the most consequential difference between the two tools.
Empower's free dashboard requires you to link credentials for every account you want visible. Those credentials (or the OAuth tokens that replace them) are stored on Empower's servers because the dashboard works by pulling fresh data daily. That is a reasonable architecture for the product, but it has three concrete consequences:
Foliolytic's architecture is the opposite. You upload a CSV. The CSV is parsed by JavaScript running locally in your browser. The metrics are computed locally. Nothing is sent anywhere. There is no "user record" in any database because there is no database. If Foliolytic is ever breached (or coerced by a subpoena, or sold to a private-equity buyer with different ethics), there is no user data to leak. That is the privacy guarantee.
The trade-off is real: Foliolytic only sees the file you give it. It cannot show you your net worth across all accounts. It cannot deliver fresh data daily without you re-uploading. If unified net-worth visibility matters more to you than client-side privacy, Empower is the better tool.
$0 / month, $0 / year, no signup, no credit card. No paid tier exists. Funded by a self-imposed budget. No sales pipeline.
The dashboard is genuinely free. Empower's revenue is its Wealth Management service — a fiduciary advised account with the following published structure (verify the current rate at empower.com/wealth-management):
For context, a $500K portfolio at the 0.89% rate is $4,450 per year.
Empower / Personal Capital does not provide a clean transaction-history CSV export. The cleanest migration path is to bypass Empower and go straight to your underlying brokerage.
Log into the brokerage that holds your investments (Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, etc.) and export the full transaction history as CSV. Foliolytic's format detector recognizes 30+ broker formats.
Drag the CSV onto the Foliolytic homepage. The parser reconciles tickers, dividends, splits, and fees automatically. Analysis happens in your browser.
If you decide to stop using Empower, unlink each broker connection in your Empower account settings, then delete the account. Empower will retain logged data per their retention policy, but linked-account access stops immediately on unlink.
Foliolytic is the right tool for you if any of these describe your situation:
Foliolytic is the wrong tool for you if any of these are core to your need:
Drop a brokerage CSV onto Foliolytic. No signup, no credentials, no advisor follow-up. Just analytics.
Analyze My Portfolio Free →Personal Capital was rebranded to Empower Personal Wealth in 2023. The free dashboard tools (net worth tracker, portfolio overview, retirement planner) remain free as of April 2026. Empower's revenue model is its paid wealth management service, which charges roughly 0.49% to 0.89% of assets under management — verify the current rate at empower.com. To use the free dashboard, you must create an Empower account and link your brokerage credentials.
Two distinct concerns. First, the free dashboard requires you to link broker credentials so Empower can pull your full holdings and balances. That data is stored on Empower's servers. Second, Empower's revenue model is its wealth management business — accounts above ~$100,000 typically receive proactive outreach from a licensed advisor. If you do not want either, a client-side tool like Foliolytic is structurally different.
No. Foliolytic does not collect contact information, does not have a sales team, and does not offer wealth management. Foliolytic is a free analytics tool maintained by an independent developer with no AUM business attached. There is no upsell.
Partially. Foliolytic shows your portfolio value over time and breaks it down by holding, sector, and asset class. It does not aggregate your bank accounts, mortgages, credit cards, or other non-investment accounts the way Empower does. If you want a full personal-finance net-worth dashboard, Empower remains the strongest free option. If you want pure portfolio analytics with deeper risk-adjusted return metrics, Foliolytic is the better choice.
Yes. Personal Capital / Empower's free dashboard shows annualized return, asset allocation, and a basic risk score, but does not compute the Sharpe ratio, Sortino ratio, max drawdown, alpha, beta, or the broader set of risk-adjusted return metrics. Foliolytic computes 70+ metrics including all of the above.
Empower / Personal Capital does not provide a clean transaction-history CSV export. The simplest migration is to log into your underlying brokerage and download the CSV directly. Foliolytic auto-detects 30+ broker formats and ingests the file in seconds.
Foliolytic processes your CSV entirely client-side in your browser. No transaction data is uploaded to any server. There is no account creation, no credential storage, no broker linking. The privacy model is structurally simpler than Empower's: Foliolytic literally cannot leak data it never sees.