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.

What Planomy models that a dashboard generally does not

• Year-by-year projections with separate ledgers for cash, taxable, traditional, Roth and HSA balances, over a horizon of up to 100 years.
• Federal tax from a dated, versioned dataset — 2026 ordinary and long-term capital-gains brackets, FICA and Medicare — rather than hard-coded numbers.
• State tax for all 50 states and DC: 29 with full progressive brackets, the rest at a flat effective rate, labelled as such.
• RMDs on the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table with SECURE 2.0 start ages.
• A Social Security claiming explorer across the full 62-to-70 range, with a benefit estimate built from your earnings history.
• Medicare Part B and Part D premiums with IRMAA surcharges keyed off the two-year MAGI lookback.
• Monte Carlo across 1,000 to 10,000 trials, plus a historical backtest over every rolling window of real US returns and CPI-U inflation from 1928 to 2024.
• Four named drawdown strategies side by side, FIFO / LIFO / HIFO / lowest-tax-first lot selection on taxable sales, and Roth conversions by amount or fill-to-bracket.
• Scenarios, life events and goals, plus plan-versus-actual cash-flow tracking with optional bank sync.

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

If what you actually wanted was the dashboard, take the dashboard. Here is where Planomy is not the right tool.

• You want balances and prices to update themselves. Planomy has no live market-price or holdings feed. Balances are what you enter, or what an optional bank connection imports. That is a deliberate local-first trade-off, and if you want a portfolio that refreshes on its own it is the wrong tool.
• You want a person to look at your plan. Planomy does not sell advice and has no advisors attached to it. If what you actually want is a fee-only CFP to review your situation, hire one — a projection is an input to that conversation, not a replacement for it.
• You are planning outside the US. The tax engine models US federal brackets, Social Security, Medicare and IRMAA, and RMDs. None of that transfers.
• You need exact state tax in every state. 29 states plus DC carry full progressive brackets; the rest are modelled at a flat effective rate. The app tells you which kind your state is using rather than hiding it, but if you live in a flat-rate-approximated state and the state bill is the crux of your decision, treat that line as an estimate.
• Day-to-day budgeting is the whole job. Planomy compares your actual spending against your plan, but it is a long-horizon planner first. If you want envelope budgeting, receipt splitting and bill reminders, a dedicated budgeting app will serve you better.

And one specific to this comparison: if the appeal of Empower is that it updates itself, understand that Planomy only does that on the Plus tier with bank sync, and that otherwise you are maintaining balances by hand a few times a year.

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.