Empower (formerly Personal Capital) tracks net worth and investments, not daily spending. Cash Compass handles the cash-flow side that Empower never really did.
Apple-native · No bank logins · iCloud sync
Empower rebranded from Personal Capital in 2023, but the product is the same: a net-worth dashboard with investment fee analysis, not a true budget tracker. Their spending view is a thin overlay on top of bank-synced transactions. Cash Compass is the opposite — category caps, voice logging, receipt scans, and monthly trend charts focused on what comes in and goes out daily.
Empower's free Personal Dashboard is genuinely good for net-worth tracking. Their paid Wealth Management service is gated by a $100,000 investable asset minimum and charges around 0.89% annually on the first million. Cash Compass Premium is $29.99 a year flat, with no asset minimum and no advisory fee. The free tier covers daily spending tracking permanently.
Empower's free tier exists partly to feed leads to their wealth-management advisors, and users routinely report phone-call follow-ups after signing up. Cash Compass has no sales team. You install the app, log your spending, and that's the whole product. The trade-off is real: Empower gives you a net-worth view if you can tolerate the outreach. Cash Compass keeps tracking small and focused.
Voice, photo of a receipt, or 3-tap manual entry — every method takes under 5 seconds.
Cash Compass picks the category automatically. Override once and it learns your pattern.
Weekly chart shows where money went. Adjust caps before the month is over, not after.
Empower acquired Personal Capital in 2020 and completed the rename to Empower Personal Dashboard in 2023, retiring the Personal Capital brand. The product itself didn't change much: it's still a free dashboard that aggregates bank, brokerage, and retirement accounts to show net worth, asset allocation, and fee impact, plus a paid Wealth Management service for clients above the $100,000 investable asset threshold. The rebrand was mostly about consolidating under Empower Retirement, which is one of the largest US retirement plan providers. If you used Personal Capital for net-worth tracking, the Empower app is the direct successor. The lead-generation flow into their advisors is also unchanged, so expect outreach after signup.
Only loosely. Empower is built around bank-aggregator pulls of account balances and transactions; it doesn't really have a clean transactions CSV export the way Mint or Monarch did. What you can do is open Empower's transactions view, scroll your last 60 to 90 days, and identify the categories you actually used. Then recreate those 8 to 12 categories as caps in Cash Compass in a few minutes. Most Empower users were tracking net worth in Empower and spending somewhere else anyway, so the transition is usually a fresh start in Cash Compass for spending while keeping Empower (or a brokerage app) for the investment side.
Empower's privacy policy permits Empower Personal Wealth advisors to contact you using the contact information you provide and the aggregated financial picture you've authorized. That's the deal: free dashboard in exchange for being a potential wealth-management lead. Cash Compass has no advisor channel, no sales follow-up, no marketing list tied to your spending. Your data lives in your private iCloud container, encrypted by Apple, not on our servers. If you want a net-worth tool and you're comfortable with the lead-gen relationship, Empower is fine. If you specifically want to keep your finances out of any sales pipeline, Cash Compass is the smaller surface.
No, and that's the honest split. Empower's headline feature is the net-worth dashboard with brokerage, 401(k), real-estate estimates, and asset-allocation charts. Cash Compass is a spending and budget app focused on monthly cash-flow: category caps, income vs expenses, recent transactions by voice or receipt. If you want net worth on one screen, keep Empower (or pair Empower with Cash Compass: Empower for net worth, Cash Compass for daily spending, no overlap). Many users find that split works better than trying to do both in one app — the budget app stays uncluttered and the wealth dashboard isn't asking you to categorize coffee purchases.
Built native for iPhone, iPad, and Mac with iCloud sync. Works offline.
No bank logins, no Plaid, no data sales. All data lives in your iCloud.
Manual entry, charts, category tracking — all free, forever. Premium is optional.
Install Cash Compass for the cash-flow side. Keep Empower for net worth if you like it. Two focused tools, not one fuzzy app.
Download Cash Compass on the App Store