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.

The FIRE-specific machinery, since that is the shared audience

People comparing these two products are usually not asking "can it do a retirement projection". They are asking whether it handles the specific manoeuvres an early retiree cares about. So rather than a generic capability list, here is what Planomy does on exactly those points — all of it in the free, no-account tier.

Bridging the years before 59½

The whole early-retirement problem is funding a gap with money that is mostly in accounts you are penalised for touching. Planomy keeps cash, taxable, traditional, Roth and HSA as five separate ledgers and lets you compare four named drawdown orders against each other, so the bridge is something you can see and test rather than assume. On taxable sales it applies real lot selection — FIFO, LIFO, HIFO or lowest-tax-first — which is the difference between a plausible bridge and an accurate one.

The Roth conversion ladder

Conversions can be set as a flat amount or as fill-to-the-top-of-a-bracket, and the projection carries the consequences forward: the effect on provisional income and therefore on how much of your Social Security becomes taxable, and the IRMAA surcharge on Medicare Part B and Part D that lands two years after the conversion year. If you are laddering in your early 60s, that lookback is the thing that catches people out. See the Roth conversion ladder guide for the strategy itself.

Sequence-of-returns risk, two ways

A 40-year retirement is far more exposed to a bad first decade than a 25-year one, so this matters more here than in a conventional plan. Planomy runs a seeded Monte Carlo of up to 5,000 trials, and separately backtests against every rolling window of real annual US market returns and CPI-U inflation from 1928 to 2024. The backtest is the more useful of the two for FIRE, because it puts you in the shoes of the actual 1966 and 2000 retirees rather than sampling from a distribution that has never had a decade like theirs.

Underneath all of it

Federal brackets from a dated, versioned dataset rather than constants in the code; state income tax for all 50 states and DC; RMDs on the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table with SECURE 2.0 start ages; scenarios, life events and goals; and plan-versus-actual tracking of what you really spent. Plus adds unlimited synced plans, bank sync and a larger AI assistant allowance — never a planning feature. 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, in this particular comparison

A comparison page that concludes "and so you should obviously choose us" is not a comparison. These are the reasons someone weighing these two should pick the other one.

• You want to model something genuinely unusual. This is the honest gap between a mature paid modelling tool and a new one. Planomy's building blocks are accounts, income streams, expenses, life events, goals and scenarios; if your situation needs something those do not express — an intricate equity compensation schedule, a property portfolio with per-unit financing, a business sale with an earn-out — you will hit the edge of what it models, and a tool with more modelling primitives is worth paying for.
• Non-US or dual-country planning. Planomy's tax engine is US-only: federal brackets, state income tax, Social Security, Medicare, IRMAA and RMDs. There is no partial credit here — if you are planning a retirement in another tax system, none of the machinery above applies to you.
• You want live balances rather than typed ones. There is no market-price or holdings feed. You maintain the numbers, or you connect a bank on Plus and it imports transactions. Neither marks a portfolio to market.
• Your state tax is the crux and you are in one of the 13 flat-rate states. 28 states plus DC have full bracket tables; nine have no income tax; the remaining 13 use a single flat rate. The app labels which it is using, but if that line decides your retirement, verify it independently.
• You want a person, or a community. Planomy sells no advice and has no advisers. It is also new, which means no forum full of people who have already solved your modelling problem. That is a real cost of picking the newer product and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

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.