6 best apps like Empower

Out of all the budgeting apps on the market, YNAB, or You Need A Budget, is one of the more popular alternatives to Empower. But YNAB's focus is on budgeting, whereas Empower simply includes various budgeting tools and calculators, as well as other features.

With YNAB, the philosophy is that every dollar needs a job. The app assigns tasks for your entire income, which can include paying off debt, building up your emergency fund, paying bills, and discretionary spending. If you're trying to become debt free as fast as possible, this style of budgeting could be for you.

The downside of YNAB versus Empower is that YNAB costs $14.99 per month or $99 if you pay annually. But YNAB claims its users save $600 on average within their first two months of using its software, which could justify the monthly price if you really need help with your budgeting.

Empower has an excellent wealth management service where you can work with a financial advisor to create a custom investing plan. However, you need to invest $100,000 or more to become a client, and annual management fees start at 0.89% for the first million you invest.

In comparison, robo-advisors like Betterment are significantly more affordable and beginner-friendly. There's no minimum investment requirement with Betterment, and fees start at just 0.25% per year.

The starter plan is fully automated, but there's a range of portfolios you can invest with after answering a questionnaire about your risk tolerance. And you benefit from features like automatic rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting as well.

Another popular feature of Empower is its cash account. This cash management account lets you earn 3.35%, even as a non-Empower Advisory Client.

This is a very competitive interest rate. But true investors can take it one step further by opening an Aspiration Spend & Save account instead. This account starts ay 3.00% APY, but if you upgrade to Aspiration Plus for $7.99 per month, you earn 5.00% instead.

You only earn these high interest rates on your first $10,000. But you can use Aspiration as a home for you emergency fund or idle cash as an alternative to Empower. Plus, there's a cash-back program that pays you for shopping at certain environmentally-friendly merchants.

As mentioned, Empower offers a wealth management service where you work with a financial advisor to create a custom investing plan. But it's not the only company that offers online, one-on-one access to a financial advisor.

With Facet, you get to work with CFPs who can help you with areas of personal finance like retirement planning, asset management, tax planning, and estate planning. Facet advisors are also fiduciaries, so they have a legal duty to put your needs and interests ahead of their own. And your Facet advisor can work directly with your brokerage accounts to help manage your investments and build a portfolio that suits you goals and risk tolerance.

In terms of fees, Facet charges a flat annual fee between $2,000 and $8,000 depending on your needs. This is very different from Empower, which charges fees based on total assets under management. Depending on your portfolio size and needs, this means Facet can be more cost effective than Empower.

If you're a fan of spreadsheet budgeting, Tiller Money is hands-down the best Empower alternative. This automated software pulls your financial data from 10,000+ institutions, organizing all of your income, expenses, and liabilities into a spreadsheet for you. Plus, you can view a simple breakdown of expenses by category, your monthly and yearly budgets, and overall net worth.

Tiller Money isn't flashy, but it helps you organize your financial information and crunch some numbers. And like Empower, it also has a retirement planning feature that you can use to forecast your future earnings as you plan for retirement.

It costs $79 per year to use Tiller's paid plan. But there's a 30-day free trial you can take advantage of to test out its software.

One popular reason people use Empower is its free net worth tracker. However, while Empower lets you add cryptocurrencies as a manual asset to track, it's definitely not crypto-focused.

In contrast, Kubera is the best portfolio and net worth tracker for digital assets. It focuses on all things crypto and DeFi, letting you add popular coins and NFTs to your portfolio to track. But stocks and more traditional assets aren't left on the sideline; Kubera still works with 20,000 banks and brokers.

The downside of Kubera versus Empower is that Kubera costs $150 per year. But if you're a serious crypto and NFT investor with a large portfolio, it's the best tracker out there.