Planomy vs Empower Personal Dashboard

They are not the same kind of product

The single most useful thing to understand before comparing these is that they sit in different categories. A dashboard describes the present: what you own, how it is allocated, what you are paying in fees, where the money went last month. A projection engine describes futures: what your balances, taxes and income look like each year for thirty years under a set of assumptions, and which assumption breaks the plan.

Empower's dashboard does include retirement planning features fed by your linked accounts, and they are genuinely useful for a quick read. But the thing it is best at is aggregation, and the thing Planomy is best at is projection. Choosing between them on a feature checklist misses this entirely.

The comparison

On "free" tools from a wealth manager

This deserves saying carefully, because it is easy to make it sound like an accusation and it isn't one. Empower's tools are free and well built. Empower is also a large wealth-management business, and the tools serve the business by putting the firm in front of people with assets to manage. Users with meaningful balances have long reported being contacted by an advisor.

That is a completely normal way to fund software, and if you want an advisor conversation it is arguably a feature. The only mistake is not knowing it is part of the arrangement before you link seven accounts. Price it in, decide, and move on.

The three questions a dashboard structurally cannot answer

This is not a knock on aggregation. An aggregator's job is to tell you what is true right now, and Empower's does that well. But a retirement decision is a question about a future that depends on the order you do things in, and that requires a different kind of machinery. Three worked examples of the gap:

"Should I convert to Roth this year, and how much?"

A correct answer has to price the conversion against next year's marginal bracket, against the extra tax on Social Security the conversion drags into the taxable base, and against the IRMAA surcharge it triggers on Medicare Part B and Part D two years later — that two-year MAGI lookback is why a conversion at 63 shows up as a bill at 65. In Planomy you can set a conversion as a flat amount or as fill-to-the-top-of-a-bracket and watch all three effects land on the year-by-year table. A balance aggregator has no year-by-year table to land them on.

"Which account do I spend first?"

Planomy keeps five separate ledgers — cash, taxable, traditional, Roth and HSA — because the tax on a dollar depends entirely on which one it came out of. It compares four named drawdown orders side by side, and for taxable sales it applies real lot selection: FIFO, LIFO, HIFO, or lowest-tax-first. A dashboard that shows a single blended net-worth line has, by construction, thrown away the distinction the question turns on.

"What if the first five years are bad?"

Sequence-of-returns risk is invisible in an average. Planomy runs a seeded Monte Carlo of up to 5,000 trials, and separately backtests your plan against every rolling window of real annual US market returns and CPI-U inflation from 1928 to 2024 — so you can see the actual 1966 and 2000 retirees, not a bell curve. Current balances, however accurate, say nothing about this.

Underneath all three sits the tax engine: federal brackets from a dated, versioned dataset rather than constants in the code, state income tax for all 50 states and DC, and RMDs on the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table with SECURE 2.0 start ages.

Use both, honestly

There is no rule against it, and the combination covers each one's weakness. Keep an aggregation dashboard for the live picture of balances and fees; keep a planner for decisions like when to claim Social Security, whether to convert to Roth before RMDs start, and which accounts to spend first. Update the planner's balances from the dashboard a few times a year and you have most of the benefit of both with none of the confusion.

Who Planomy is not for — the dashboard version

If what you actually wanted was the dashboard, take the dashboard. These are the reasons a dashboard user should not switch, and they all come back to the same trade: a planner asks you to type, and gives you a future in return.

• The appeal of Empower is that it updates itself. This is the honest dealbreaker, so it goes first. Planomy has no live market-price or holdings feed at all — there is no version of it where your share prices refresh overnight. Balances are what you type, or what an optional Plaid bank connection imports on the Plus tier, and even that imports transactions rather than marking a portfolio to market. If seeing today's number without doing anything is the point, we do not do the point.
• You will not maintain it. Follows from the above and is worth saying plainly. A planner you update twice a year is useful; a planner you updated once in 2026 and never touched again is worse than the dashboard, because it looks authoritative while being stale. Be honest about which of those you will be.
• You want an investment view — allocation drift, fund overlap, fee analysis on live holdings. Empower's free tools are genuinely built for this and Planomy is not. Planomy models the effect of fees on a projection; it does not X-ray your actual fund lineup.
• You want someone to call. Empower is a wealth manager and the dashboard is, openly, the top of that funnel — which is a fine trade if advice is what you are after. Planomy sells no advice, has no advisers, and will never ring you. That cuts both ways and you should pick the side you want.
• You are planning outside the US. Federal brackets, Social Security, Medicare, IRMAA and RMDs are all US-specific and none of it transfers.

Where to start

If you already know roughly what you own, you can have a real projection in about ten minutes with no account: open the planner. If you want a single number first, the net worth calculator and the investment fee impact calculator cover two of the things people open a dashboard for in the first place.