If you’re choosing between Rocket Money and Empower (formerly Personal Capital), you’re already asking the right question — both are free at the entry level, both replaced Mint for a lot of people, and they’re not interchangeable products. The right pick depends on whether you need to fix your cash flow (Rocket Money) or understand your wealth (Empower).
Here’s the short version before we go deep:
- Choose Rocket Money if you want to track and cancel forgotten subscriptions, negotiate bills, monitor a free credit score, and stop the leaks in your monthly cash flow. Try Rocket Money free →
- Choose Empower if you want deep portfolio analysis, retirement planning, and a single dashboard for your investments and net worth. Try Empower free →
Rocket Money: 10M+ members · Owned by Rocket Companies (NYSE: RKT) · Bank connections via Plaid (read-only)
The good news: most people can answer this in about 30 seconds once they know what each app actually does. The bad news: most online comparisons get it wrong by treating them as competitors when they’re really complements.
What each app is actually designed to do
The fundamental split between these two isn’t features — it’s the financial problem they’re built to solve.
Rocket Money is built around the idea that most people leak money without realizing it. Forgotten subscriptions, bills that crept up, spending categories you’d be embarrassed to total. Rocket Money surfaces all of that automatically, helps you cancel what you don’t want, negotiates eligible bills on your behalf, and gives you a free FICO score. Its design center is cash flow — money in, money out, and stopping the leaks.
Empower (the brand formerly known as Personal Capital, before it was acquired by Empower Retirement) is built around the idea that most people have no idea what their portfolio is actually doing. Asset allocation, fee drag, retirement readiness, net worth across every account. Empower’s free tools — investment tracking, portfolio analysis, retirement planner, fee analyzer — are some of the strongest in the category. Its design center is wealth — what you own, how it’s allocated, and whether you’re on track for retirement.
Both apps are free at the entry level. They solve different problems for the same person.
Side-by-side feature comparison
| Feature | Rocket Money | Empower |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free tier; Premium $7–$14/month | Free tools (wealth management is a separate paid advisory service) |
| Free tier | Yes — genuinely useful | Yes — entire personal dashboard is free |
| Subscription detection | Automatic; in-app cancellation on Premium where the merchant supports it, Concierge handles the rest | None |
| Bill negotiation | Yes — available on free and Premium (30% success fee) | None |
| Credit score | Yes (FICO Score 2 from Experian, refreshed up to 4×/month) | None |
| Budgeting | Reactive (tracks what you spent against limits) | Cash-flow style budgeting + monthly trends |
| Investment tracking | Balance-level (no holdings analysis) | Holdings-level (asset allocation, performance vs benchmarks) |
| Portfolio analysis | None | Yes — fee analyzer, allocation check, sector breakdown |
| Retirement planner | None | Yes — scenario testing, Monte Carlo simulation |
| Net worth dashboard | Yes (Premium only) | Yes (free) |
| Account linking | Plaid (banks, cards, brokerages, loans) | Bank, credit card, brokerage, retirement, real estate |
| Account security | MFA + 256-bit AES at rest + Plaid read-only | MFA + multi-layer encryption |
| Joint/household use | Two-person account sharing on Premium | Multiple accounts per household supported |
| Mobile apps | iOS + Android (strong) | iOS + Android (strong) |
| Web app | Exists, feels secondary | Full-featured, design-led |
| Monetization | Premium subscriptions + 30% success fee on bill negotiation | Wealth management upsell ($100k+ minimum, separate paid service) |
Pricing: both have meaningful free tiers, with very different upgrade paths
Rocket Money has a genuine free tier that includes account aggregation, subscription detection, basic budgeting, the FICO Score 2, MFA, and bill negotiation. Premium ($7–$14/month, you pick your price within the slider, billed monthly) adds the Subscription Cancellation Assistant, full credit reports, net worth dashboard, balance alerts, Financial Goals automated savings, account sharing, and other features documented in our Free vs Premium comparison.
Empower’s entire personal dashboard is free. There is no Premium tier. Empower makes money by upselling free-dashboard users into its wealth management advisory service, which is a separate paid offering with a 0.89% annual fee on the first $1 million invested, scaling down to 0.49% above $10 million. The minimum to enroll in Personal Strategy is $100,000 in investable assets, scaling up through Wealth Management ($250k+) and Private Client ($1M+). Most free-dashboard users never engage with the advisory product — but you should expect at least one phone call from an Empower advisor after you link a substantial brokerage account. That’s the trade for the free tools.
For people who want comprehensive money tracking without paying anything, both deliver. The key question is what you want to track — Rocket Money for monthly cash flow and subscriptions, Empower for portfolio and net worth.
Subscription management: Rocket Money wins, it’s not close
This is one of Rocket Money’s two signature features and Empower has nothing comparable.
Within 48 hours of linking your accounts, Rocket Money flags every recurring charge it can detect. On Premium, you can cancel many subscriptions in-app where the merchant supports it; for merchants that require phone calls or written notices, Rocket Money’s Concierge team handles the cancellation on your behalf. Coverage varies by merchant.
In my own audit, Rocket Money found $720/year in subscriptions I had forgotten about. It cancelled four of them inside the app, handled my gym cancellation (which required written notice) via Concierge, and had everything wrapped up in under 48 hours.
Empower has no subscription detection or cancellation feature. You’d see recurring charges as line items in its transaction view, but you’d identify and cancel them yourself.
If you haven’t audited your subscriptions in the last year, Rocket Money will almost certainly find money you’re losing — that alone often justifies the cost of Premium. For a deeper dive on the cancellation feature specifically, see our How to cancel subscriptions on Rocket Money guide.
Bill negotiation: Rocket Money wins (Empower doesn’t have it)
Rocket Money’s bill-negotiation service is on both Free and Premium. Submit eligible bills (Cable/Satellite TV, Internet/Phone, Home Security, Satellite Radio), Rocket Money’s team negotiates with the provider, and Rocket Money charges a 30% success-based fee on the first year’s savings only when they actually lower your bill. No savings, no charge.
A $20/month reduction on your internet bill saves you $240 over the year. After Rocket Money’s 30% fee ($72), you net $168 in year one and the full $240 each year after — even one successful negotiation can pay for several months of Premium on its own. For the full mechanics, see our Bill Negotiation Review.
Empower doesn’t offer bill negotiation. No competitive feature, and they don’t appear to be building one — Empower’s product roadmap is focused on wealth management, not consumer cash-flow optimization.
Investment tracking: Empower wins decisively
This is where Empower is the better tool, and it’s not close.
Rocket Money shows brokerage balances and rolls them into your net-worth dashboard, but it doesn’t give you holdings-level analysis. You can see your Robinhood account is worth $X; you can’t see what’s in it from inside Rocket Money.
Empower does proper investment tracking. Holdings-level views, asset allocation analysis, performance against benchmarks, fee analyzer (which shows how much your funds are costing you in expense ratios over decades), sector and geographic breakdowns. If you’re an active investor or you want a single dashboard that handles your full portfolio across every brokerage and retirement account, Empower has the better tool. The retirement planner is also genuinely good — Monte Carlo simulation, scenario testing, and stress-testing your savings strategy.
This is the most underrated dividing line between these two apps. For passive index investors who only check balances quarterly, Rocket Money is fine. For anyone who actively manages their portfolio composition, runs retirement scenarios, or wants to understand what they’re really paying in fund fees, Empower is the right pick.
Retirement planning: Empower wins (Rocket Money doesn’t have it)
Empower’s Retirement Planner is the strongest free tool in the category. You input your savings rate, expected income, retirement age, and spending goals, and it runs Monte Carlo simulations to tell you the probability of hitting your retirement target. You can stress-test scenarios — what happens if you retire two years earlier, increase savings by $200/month, or take a sabbatical mid-career.
Rocket Money has no equivalent. Its planning surface is short-term cash flow and budgets, not multi-decade retirement modeling.
If you’re more than five years from retirement and you want to know whether you’re actually on track, Empower’s planner is worth signing up for the free dashboard alone.
Joint finances and couples
Both apps support shared use, with different models.
Rocket Money Premium supports two-person account sharing: each member gets their own login, and you collaborate on the same budgets, transactions, subscriptions, and goals shared in the app. It’s structured for two people (Primary + Secondary), with some asymmetries — the Secondary user doesn’t get the credit-score feature, and there’s no per-account hiding between partners. (Per Rocket Money Help Center: Account Sharing.)
Empower allows multiple users per household — you can link your spouse’s accounts and view a joint financial picture across everyone’s assets. There’s no per-user upcharge. The household model is simpler than Rocket Money’s Primary/Secondary structure but lacks RM’s per-feature gating, which some couples actually prefer.
If shared visibility is the priority, both work. If you specifically want one shared budget allocation that both partners contribute to actively, neither app handles that as cleanly as YNAB does — see our Rocket Money vs YNAB comparison if joint budgeting is your main use case.
Security: comparable, with different specifics
Both apps take security seriously and are comparable to other consumer finance apps in the category.
Rocket Money: read-only bank connections via Plaid (your bank credentials are never stored by Rocket Money), 256-bit AES encryption at rest, MFA via text, automated phone call, or authenticator app, and corporate backing from Rocket Companies (NYSE: RKT), which files 10-Ks and runs proper third-party audits.
Empower: multi-layer encryption, MFA via authenticator apps and text codes, and corporate backing from Empower Retirement — one of the largest retirement plan providers in the US (which acquired Personal Capital and rebranded the consumer dashboard to Empower).
Neither is materially less secure than the other. Both have institutional corporate backing, which matters more than people realize for a tool holding aggregated views of your full financial picture.
Empower’s monetization tradeoff: the wealth-management call
Worth saying clearly because it surprises new users: Empower’s free tools are free because they’re a lead-gen funnel for the paid advisory service. When you link a brokerage account with substantial assets, you should expect at least one phone call from an Empower advisor offering to review your portfolio. The minimum to engage their advisory service is $100,000 in investable assets (Personal Strategy tier).
This isn’t a scam or a bait-and-switch — it’s the explicit business model. The dashboard is genuinely good, the tools are genuinely free, and the advisor calls are easy to decline. But if you’re allergic to upsell calls, this is the cost of using Empower’s free product.
Rocket Money’s monetization is more upfront: Premium subscription + bill-negotiation success fees. There are no advisor calls — the upsell happens entirely inside the app.
Different tradeoffs, both honest. Worth knowing which trade you prefer before signing up.
Who Rocket Money is right for
- People with forgotten subscriptions — if you haven’t audited your recurring charges in the last year, Rocket Money will almost certainly find money you’re losing.
- Anyone with negotiable bills — if you’re paying market rate or above on internet, phone, cable, or home security, the bill-negotiation feature alone often pays for Premium for the year.
- Former Mint users who want the familiar dashboard experience back, with better subscription management.
- People who want a free credit score alongside their spending tracking — Rocket Money has FICO Score 2 (Experian), Empower doesn’t.
- Cash-flow-focused users who care more about monthly inflows and outflows than long-term wealth modeling.
If you want the full feature-by-feature breakdown, see our Rocket Money review.
Who Empower is right for
- Active investors who want holdings-level portfolio tracking and performance analysis across every brokerage and retirement account.
- People who care about retirement planning — Empower’s Retirement Planner and Monte Carlo simulator are the best free tools in the category.
- Anyone with significant fund holdings who wants to know what they’re really paying in expense ratios — the fee analyzer is genuinely eye-opening for most users.
- High-net-worth users who want a free dashboard now and may consider professional advisory services later (Empower’s wealth-management product starts at $100k).
- Wealth-focused users who care more about asset allocation, retirement readiness, and net worth than monthly cash flow.
Can you use both?
Yes — and unlike most “use both” recommendations, this one actually makes sense. Rocket Money and Empower overlap minimally:
- Rocket Money handles subscriptions, bill negotiation, credit score, and monthly cash flow
- Empower handles investments, retirement planning, fee analysis, and net worth
Run Rocket Money on the cash-flow side and Empower on the wealth side. Both are free at the entry level, so the only cost is the time to set them both up — about 15 minutes total. Most users I know who run both end up using Rocket Money’s mobile app daily for the spending and subscription view, and Empower’s web dashboard weekly or monthly for the portfolio and retirement check-in.
The only meaningful overlap is the net-worth dashboard — Empower’s is free, Rocket Money’s is Premium-only. If you’re paying for Rocket Money Premium, you’re paying for a feature you can get free from Empower; if you’re not, no overlap to worry about.
The decision, simplified
Pick Rocket Money if you answer yes to any of these:
- “I haven’t audited my subscriptions in the last year.”
- “I’m paying market rate or above on internet, phone, cable, or home security.”
- “I want a free credit score alongside my spending tracking.”
- “I’m coming from Mint and want something similar.”
- “Most of my financial life is cash flow, not investments.”
Pick Empower if you answer yes to any of these:
- “I want holdings-level portfolio tracking, not just account balances.”
- “I care about retirement planning and want to stress-test my savings strategy.”
- “I want to know how much I’m really paying in fund fees.”
- “I have substantial investments spread across multiple brokerages and retirement accounts.”
- “Most of my financial life is wealth and investments, not monthly cash flow.”
Pick both if you answer yes to questions in both lists. They cost nothing to use together and they cover complementary problems.
For the other major paid alternatives, see our Rocket Money vs YNAB comparison and Rocket Money vs Monarch Money comparison.
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