Key takeaways
- There is no single best tool. There is a best tool for how you want to work, and four questions decide it: does it need an account, is it a projection engine or a dashboard, who pays for it, and can you get your data back out?
- Projection engines answer "what happens if"; aggregation dashboards answer "where do I stand today". Buying the second when you needed the first is the most common mistake.
- Anything free that requires linking your bank accounts is usually funded by something else — advertising, lead generation, or an advisory sales team. That is not sinister, but it should be priced into your choice.
- Spreadsheets are still a legitimate answer, and stop being one the moment you need RMDs, IRMAA, provisional-income taxation of Social Security and Monte Carlo in the same model.
- Planomy is a local-first projection engine: the full planner is free with no account, your plan is stored on your device, and paid Plus is only about syncing, bank sync and more assistant messages.
Four questions that actually decide it
Feature checklists are useless here, because every product in this category claims every feature. These four questions separate them, and you can answer all four from any vendor's own website in about ten minutes.
1. Does it require an account, and does it require your bank logins?
This is the biggest fork in the road and it is rarely presented as one. Some tools cannot function at all until you have created an account and connected financial institutions, because aggregation is the product. Others work from numbers you type in. Neither is wrong, but they imply very different relationships with your data — and very different answers to "what happens to my plan if this company is acquired or shuts down?"
2. Is it a projection engine or a dashboard?
A dashboard tells you where you stand today: net worth, allocation, fees, spending by category. A projection engine tells you what happens over the next 30 years if you retire at 61, convert $40,000 a year to Roth until 73, and the market drops 30% in your second year. Some products do both, most lean hard one way, and the marketing copy for both sounds identical.
3. Who pays for it?
There are only a handful of business models here: a subscription you pay; free tools funded by a wealth-management or brokerage business that hopes to manage your money; free tools funded by advertising or referral fees; and free-and-genuinely-free tools with a narrow paid upgrade. You are allowed to pick any of them. You are not allowed to pretend the model has no effect on the product.
4. Can you get your data out?
Ask before you start, not after you have spent six hours entering a plan. A full export you can download and restore is the difference between a tool and a hostage situation.
The five kinds of tool
Nearly everything in this category is one of five shapes. The table below compares the shapes rather than ranking individual products, because the shape is what determines whether a tool will suit you.
| Category | Best at | Account required | Typically funded by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription cloud planners e.g. Boldin, ProjectionLab |
Deep, detailed long-horizon modelling with a lot of dials | Yes — the plan lives in your account | A subscription you pay |
| Aggregation dashboards e.g. Empower Personal Dashboard, Monarch Money |
Seeing everything you own in one place, automatically | Yes — plus linked institutions | A subscription, or a wealth-management business behind the free tools |
| Brokerage and 401(k) planners | Convenience when your money is already there | Yes — an account with that institution | The institution holding your assets |
| Spreadsheets and templates | Total control and complete transparency | No | Your own time |
| Local-first planners e.g. Planomy |
Full projections without handing over an account or bank logins | No — optional, and only for syncing and sharing | An optional paid tier; the planner itself is free |
Category 1: subscription cloud planners
This is the serious end of the market — products built specifically to model a US retirement in detail, with tax-aware withdrawals, Roth conversion planning, Monte Carlo and scenario comparison. Boldin (which was called NewRetirement until it rebranded) and ProjectionLab are the two names that come up most often, and both are genuinely good at what they do.
What you are buying is depth and polish, and what you are accepting is a subscription and a cloud account: your plan lives on their servers, and access to it is tied to a paid relationship. For a lot of people that is an entirely reasonable trade — an ongoing fee for a tool you will use for twenty years is not expensive relative to the decisions it informs.
We have written longer, page-length comparisons for both: Planomy vs Boldin and Planomy vs ProjectionLab.
Category 2: aggregation dashboards
Empower Personal Dashboard (formerly Personal Capital) and Monarch Money sit here. Their core trick is connecting to your financial institutions and assembling a live picture of net worth, allocation, fees and spending. That is a real and valuable thing, and it is something Planomy deliberately does not try to be.
The thing to understand is what the free ones cost you in other currency. Empower's tools are free to use and the company is a wealth manager — the tools are, among other things, how it meets potential advisory clients, so households with larger balances should expect to hear from an advisor. Again: not sinister, and plenty of people are happy to have that conversation. Just know it is part of the deal before you link seven accounts.
Longer version: Planomy vs Empower Personal Dashboard.
Category 3: your brokerage's own planner
If your money is at a large brokerage or your 401(k) provider has a planning tool, use it — it is free, it already knows your balances, and for a simple situation it may be all you need. The limits are structural rather than a criticism: it models the accounts it can see, the assumptions are the institution's rather than yours, and it has no particular reason to model the assets it doesn't custody.
Category 4: a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is the most transparent planning tool there is, costs nothing, needs no account, and can model anything you are willing to build. It is a completely legitimate answer for a straightforward plan, and it is how a lot of very good planners started.
It stops being the right answer at a specific and identifiable point: when the questions you are asking need progressive federal brackets, the provisional-income formula that taxes Social Security, the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table, IRMAA's two-year lookback and a thousand Monte Carlo paths to interact with each other. Building that correctly is a project; maintaining it as the numbers change every year is a hobby. We wrote the honest version of that trade-off in retirement planning spreadsheet vs software.
Category 5: local-first planners — where Planomy sits
The newest shape in the category: a full planning engine that runs in your browser, stores your plan on your device, and needs no account to work. Planomy is one of these. The complete planner is free forever with no sign-up, no email and no bank login, and your plan is saved on the device you are using.
The fair objection to this category is that "runs in your browser for free" sounds like it must be a simplified calculator wearing a planner's clothes. The way to settle that is not to read a feature list but to check the four things above against it, so here is Planomy answered against its own criteria.
Does it require an account or bank logins? No, to both.
The complete planner opens with no account, no email and no card, and saves to the device you are on. An account is optional and buys only things an account is genuinely required for: a free one syncs a single plan, enables plan sharing and check-in reminders, and gives 5 AI assistant messages a week. Plus — $6 a month or $60 a year — syncs unlimited plans, adds Plaid bank sync and tops the assistant credits up to 50 a month. No planning capability sits behind that wall, which is the specific thing to verify on any tool claiming a free tier. Detail on the pricing page.
Projection engine or dashboard? Engine.
Cash, taxable, traditional, Roth and HSA are tracked as five separate ledgers rather than one blended balance, because every interesting retirement question — drawdown order, conversion timing, RMD exposure — depends on which ledger a dollar leaves from. Four named drawdown orders can be compared side by side, with FIFO / LIFO / HIFO / lowest-tax-first lot selection on taxable sales. Roth conversions can be set as an amount or as fill-to-the-top-of-a-bracket.
On the tax side: federal brackets from a dated, versioned dataset shipped as data rather than as constants in the code; state income tax across all 50 states and DC at three declared levels of fidelity (28 states plus DC with full bracket tables, nine with no income tax, 13 at a flat rate); RMDs on the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table with SECURE 2.0 start ages; Social Security taxation via provisional income; and Medicare Part B and Part D with IRMAA on the two-year MAGI lookback. Risk is handled twice over — a seeded Monte Carlo of up to 5,000 trials, and a backtest against every rolling window of real annual US market returns and CPI-U inflation from 1928 to 2024.
Who pays for it? You do not, for the planning.
Worth restating because of question 3 above: there are no ads, no data sale and no adviser funnel behind the free tier. The revenue model is the Plus subscription and one-time AI message packs. That is a model you can check rather than take on trust — if a free planner will not tell you plainly how it is funded, that is the answer to question 3.
Can you get your data out? Yes, and it is the whole file.
A plan downloads as a complete file you can restore into the app later or on another machine — the same mechanism that makes account-free use viable. Statement data can go in as CSV or OFX/QFX. Nothing is a walled export of summary numbers.
When category 5 is the wrong category for you
A category guide that only says nice things about the category its author sits in is an advert. So: here is when to pick a different one of the five above, phrased as category choices rather than as complaints about any product.
- Pick a dashboard (category 2) if the question is "where do I stand today". Local-first planners have no live market-price or holdings feed — that is inherent to the shape, not a missing feature. You maintain the numbers. If seeing an accurate current net worth without doing anything is the job, category 5 is structurally the wrong answer and always will be.
- Pick a subscription cloud planner (category 1) if you want a human attached. Some of them sell coaching or advice alongside the software, and that is a real product difference rather than a pricing one. Local-first planners sell no advice. If you want someone accountable for the answer, buy that, or hire a fee-only CFP separately — a projection is an input to that conversation, not a substitute for it.
- Pick category 1 or 2 if you will not click "download a copy". The defining risk of local-first is the defining risk of local storage: clear your browser data with no export and no account, and the plan is gone. There are two mitigations — a free account that syncs one plan, and an export button — but both require you to act. A cloud account requires nothing.
- Keep the spreadsheet (category 4) if the modelling is genuinely idiosyncratic. Every packaged planner, including this one, models the situations it was built for. A complex equity-compensation schedule, a property portfolio with per-unit financing, or a business sale with an earn-out may simply not have a home in any of the products in categories 1–3 or 5.
- None of these if you are planning outside the US. Almost every tool discussed on this page — Planomy included — models US federal brackets, state income tax, Social Security, Medicare, IRMAA and RMDs. In another tax system none of that machinery applies, and a US planner will give you a confident, wrong answer rather than an error message.
- A budgeting app if day-to-day money is the whole job. Planners in every one of these five categories are long-horizon tools. Envelope budgeting, receipt splitting and bill reminders are a different product category entirely.
A twenty-minute way to decide
- Write down the one question you actually want answered. "Can I retire at 61?" and "am I paying too much in fund fees?" are answered by different categories of tool.
- Decide, before you look at any product, whether you are willing to create an account and link financial institutions. That single answer eliminates about half the market.
- Try the free path of two tools from the surviving category with the same inputs. Divergent answers are informative — dig into which assumption differs rather than trusting the friendlier number.
- Check the export. If you cannot download your plan, do not build your plan there.
If step two came out as "no account, no bank logins", you can do step three right now — the Planomy planner opens straight into a plan with nothing to sign up for. If you would rather start with a single number, the FIRE number calculator and the retirement drawdown calculator take about a minute each.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best retirement planning software?
There is no single best one, and any list that claims otherwise is usually ranked by affiliate payout. The useful question is which category fits you: a subscription cloud planner for maximum depth, an aggregation dashboard to see everything you own, your brokerage's own tool for convenience, a spreadsheet for total control, or a local-first planner if you would rather not create an account at all.
Is free retirement planning software any good?
Some of it is excellent. The thing to check is how it is funded, because that shapes the product: free tools attached to a wealth manager exist partly to introduce you to advisors, free tools funded by referrals steer toward products that pay them, and free tools with a narrow paid upgrade have to keep the free version genuinely useful. Ask who pays before you ask what it costs.
Do I need to link my bank accounts to plan for retirement?
No. Linking accounts saves typing and keeps balances current, which is genuinely useful for tracking. But a projection is driven by balances, contributions, spending and assumptions — all of which you can type in once and update a few times a year. If you would rather not link anything, that rules out aggregation dashboards and rules in spreadsheets and local-first planners.
What is the difference between a retirement dashboard and a retirement planner?
A dashboard describes today: net worth, allocation, fees, spending. A planner projects the future: what your balances, taxes and income look like year by year under a set of assumptions, and what breaks the plan. Buying a dashboard when you needed a projection engine is the most common mistake in this category, because both are marketed with the same language.
Can I use more than one retirement planning tool?
Yes, and it is a good idea when a decision is large. Run the same inputs through two tools and compare. Where they disagree, find the assumption that differs — usually a return assumption, an inflation figure or how the tool handles taxes — rather than assuming the more optimistic answer is the correct one.
Try the category before you buy into it
Planomy's full planner — projections, taxes, Social Security, RMDs, Monte Carlo and scenarios — opens with no account, no email and no bank login, and saves your plan on your device. It is the cheapest way to find out whether a projection engine is what you were missing.