Planomy vs ProjectionLab

What they have in common

It is worth starting here, because the shared ground is large. Both run in a browser. Both are projection engines: you describe a household, a set of accounts, contributions, a retirement date and some assumptions, and you get a year-by-year path rather than a single headline figure. Both let you model life events and compare scenarios instead of committing to one future. Both attract the kind of person who wants to know why the answer moved.

If you have been looking at aggregation dashboards and finding them unsatisfying, both of these are the correct kind of tool — see the category guide for why that distinction matters so much.

The comparison

You will notice several "check their site" cells. That is deliberate. ProjectionLab is a good product being actively developed, and a competitor's page confidently describing its feature set is exactly the sort of thing that goes stale and turns into a misrepresentation. The axes we are confident about are stated plainly; the rest we would rather you verify at the source.

What Planomy's engine models

• 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.

All of that is in the free, no-account tier. What Plus adds is unlimited synced plans, bank sync where available, and a larger AI assistant allowance — see the pricing page.

Pick ProjectionLab if…

• You enjoy a highly interactive, visual modelling experience and are happy to pay for the polish.
• You are planning an early retirement in the FIRE mould and want a tool with a community of people doing the same thing.
• A subscription for a tool you will open weekly is an easy decision for you.
• You have looked at their site and their storage and export model suits you — genuinely, go and read it.

Pick Planomy if…

• You want the complete planning engine at no cost, with no account and no email address.
• You want your plan to sit on your device rather than in a subscription you have to maintain.
• You want the US tax machinery — brackets from a dated dataset, provisional-income taxation of Social Security, IRMAA's two-year lookback, RMDs on the IRS tables — modelled explicitly rather than approximated.
• You want to track what you actually spent against the plan, not just project forward.

Who Planomy is not for

A comparison page that concludes "and so you should obviously choose us" is not a comparison. Here is where Planomy is the wrong answer.

• 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.

How to actually test them

Pick one decision you genuinely face — retire at 60 versus 63, convert to Roth before RMDs or not, claim Social Security at 62 versus 70 — and run it through both with identical inputs. Then compare the year-by-year tax line, not just the ending balance. A planner's opinion about taxes is where most of the divergence between two credible tools comes from. Our Roth conversion ladder and Social Security claiming guides give you a scenario worth testing with.