Quick — what’s your investment account balance? And what are your top five equity positions as a percentage of total portfolio value?
If you can’t answer these questions from memory, you’re not alone, especially if you’re a hands-off investor who relies on a robo-advisor or human financial advisor to manage your money.
But there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to keep close tabs on your investments. An investment tracking app can help — but not all are created equal. Some are clearly superior to the rest.
The Best Investment Tracking Apps
These are the best investment tracking apps available right now. Each does at least one thing really well, from providing sophisticated financial insights without an expensive advisor to replicating the experience of spreadsheet tracking without all the work.
Our top overall pick has the best array of features and capabilities for both DIY and hands-off investors, and its free version is impressively comprehensive.
1. Personal Capital
Personal Capital earns the top spot on this list thanks to a constellation of features that make it appropriate for all sorts of investors — from seasoned day traders to committed index investors. And there’s no fee to use its investment tracking capabilities.
Personal Capital’s position is further strengthened by its comprehensiveness. It’s built to give you a single-screen view of your entire net worth: your bank account balances, investment positions, loan balances, cash value life insurance positions, real estate equity and mortgages, even car equity and auto loans.
You can sync virtually any U.S.-based investment account to your Personal Capital account. Once that’s done, you’ll have a real-time view of your account balances, positions, and asset allocations. You can also take advantage of some super-useful tools that pull from your synced accounts:
- A retirement simulator (pictured below) that shows how much you’re on track to retire with and your chances of reaching your financial goals in retirement
- An asset allocation chart that shows how your portfolio breaks down by asset type, sector, and other factors
- A fee analyzer that shows how much you’re really paying to manage your portfolio
Personal Capital has some additional features worth noting too:
- Hands-on wealth management services for users with at least $100,000 to invest — this is how Personal Capital makes money
- Savings and retirement planning tools
- Financial calculators for loan payments, compound interest, and more
- Bespoke services for high-net-worth individuals and families, starting at $1 million under management
2. Quicken Premier
Quicken Premier is another piece of high-octane budgeting software that lets you track your investments in real time.
Unlike YNAB (You Need A Budget), Quicken Premier is not free — you’ll pay about $6 per month to use it — but its investment tracking interface is much more sophisticated.
One standout capability is its robust tax management tools. These include personalized insights to maximize tax savings and automatically generated tax reports that help active traders corral dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of cost basis figures come tax time.
Quicken Premier has some additional features included in the monthly price:
- Chart visualization for actual and target portfolio allocations (pictured) to show you how far off-balance your portfolio might be
- Single-view bill dashboard
- Internal bill payment tool
- Option to link private investments, such as equity or stock options in privately held companies
- More than a dozen portfolio analysis and research tools, including buy/sell optimizer, buy/hold comparison, investment watchlists, and more
3. Fidelity Full View
Fidelity Full View is a free add-on to your Fidelity investment account. It displays real-time balance data from your Fidelity accounts and linked outside investment accounts, showing a holistic view of your portfolio performance over time. You can link taxable accounts, retirement accounts, even cryptocurrency accounts.
Fidelity Full View also offers a comprehensive accounting of your net worth through an advisor-grade platform called eMoney (pictured below). Once you’ve gotten comfortable with the interface, you can use eMoney to gain the same sorts of money management insights your human financial advisor might give you — without the hefty advisory fee.
Fidelity Full View is free with Fidelity’s robo-advisor service, which costs anywhere from $3 per month to 0.50% of assets under management annually, depending on your balance and other factors. Additional features worth noting include:
- A rolling ledger of transactions in linked accounts
- Real-time cash flow tracking
- DIY financial planning tools to assist long-range investment decisions
- Custom expense categorization
- Customizable budget planning
4. SigFig
SigFig is a robo-advisor with unusually robust investment-tracking capabilities for both internal and external balances. The secret is SigFig’s reliance on a team of human experts — unlike most robo-advisors, where humans are either totally absent from the customer experience or only available to higher-net-worth investors.
That’s enough to earn SigFig the title of best portfolio tracker for hands-off investors. Additional features worth noting include:
- Get your first $10,000 managed free, then pay 0.25% of assets under management annually
- Unlimited access to investment advisors, regardless of balance
- No trading commissions
- In-place account management — no need to move your funds from other brokerages if you have a preexisting relationship
- Complimentary fee and risk analysis
5. Morningstar Portfolio Manager
Morningstar Portfolio Manager is available to anyone with a free Morningstar account — which in turn is a must-have for anyone who buys and sells individual stocks.
The interface is shockingly straightforward (pictured below), and that’s the point. You can see all your positions at a glance, with gain, loss, balance, and share information for each. Upgrade to Morningstar Premium to get even more insights, including proprietary Morningstar ratings for stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and in-house market research reports.
Additional features:
- Customized news and analysis feed for each name in your portfolio
- At-a-glance fundamentals for each name, including forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio, price/book ratio, and dividend yield
- Custom cost basis settings for tax optimization
- Delayed quotes for benchmark indexes
Methodology: How We Select the Best Investment Tracking Apps
We use seven important factors to assess investment trackers and build our list of the best on the market. Each touches on some aspect of the overall user experience, whether it’s the out-of-pocket cost or the range of value-added capabilities available to paying customers.
Pricing and Fees
Sure, you get what you pay for, but no one likes to pay more than they should. That’s why we’re quite price-sensitive in our evaluation of investment tracking apps. Many of the products on this list are totally free or have free versions, and others are favorably priced in comparison to similar competitors.
External Account Syncing
Of all the capabilities of modern investment tracking apps, one of the most convenient — and most important — is the ability to sync external investment accounts with your app account. That way, you don’t have to log into your investment account and manually export the latest values — or, worse, manually update your investment tracking spreadsheets.
We strongly prefer investment tracking apps with external syncing capabilities. Those that don’t have them need to do well on multiple other fronts to have a chance here.
Portfolio Analysis Capabilities
Being able to see your investment account balances and positions in real time is great, but the best investment tracking apps offer much more. We prefer apps with a broad range of portfolio analysis capabilities, on par with what you’d get from a full-service brokerage account.
Net Worth Tracking Beyond Your Investment Portfolio
Even if your investments represent the majority of your net worth, they’re not the full picture. You also have cash in checking and savings accounts and perhaps other cash accounts, insurance policies, and real estate too.
That’s why we prefer investment tracking apps that also track other assets. You deserve a single-dashboard view of your entire net worth.
Ease of Use
Is it so much to ask your investment tracking app to be user-friendly? At least, in comparison to a traditional spreadsheet that you have to update periodically?
We don’t think so, which is why we give preference to apps that don’t throw up roadblocks for users.
Financial Insights and Advice
The best investment tracking apps go beyond reporting and analysis to offer actionable financial insights and advice — with or without the supervision of a human financial advisor. We built this list accordingly, with many apps on it designed to help you become a better investor rather than merely keep tabs on your accounts.
Investment Automation
The first job of an investment tracking app is to track investments, not manage them. So it’s not a dealbreaker that many investment tracking apps don’t have this capability.
But we still prefer more comprehensive investment tracking apps that double as robo-advisors or conduits to human financial advisors. You’ll find several of these on this list.
FAQS
If you’ve never used an investment tracking app before, you’ll face a bit of a learning curve your first time around.
It’s natural to have questions about this type of software, so let’s take a look at some of the most common that come up for first-time users and those considering taking the plunge.
What’s the Difference Between a Portfolio Management App vs. an Investment Tracking App?
It depends how you define “portfolio management.”
The name implies actual management of investments — stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, bonds, and so on. After all, human portfolio managers actually manage real money held in investment accounts.
But many platforms that call themselves “portfolio management apps” are basically investment tracking apps. That’s why many of the apps on our list here can also be found on other lists of top portfolio management apps.
How Much Do Investment Tracking Apps Cost?
Some investment tracking apps cost nothing at all. For example, Personal Capital’s investment and net worth tracking capabilities are free to all users — it’s only when you opt into a financial advisor relationship that you start paying fees for use.
Other investment tracking apps charge fees right out of the gate. More comprehensive apps generally cost more — often hundreds of dollars per year — than basic investment trackers.
Can Investment Tracking Apps Track Net Worth?
Many investment tracking apps can and do track net worth. They sync with just about any external financial account, from your local bank or credit union to the multinational investment house you invest with. They can also pull data from real estate websites like Zillow and Redfin, which is useful if you own a home or rental property.
Do You Need an App to Track Your Investments?
Not necessarily. Most brokerage accounts have sophisticated dashboards that show your positions at a glance, including gains and losses to date. Most also have basic research and analysis tools, along with watchlists and even paper trading capabilities.
Investment tracking apps make sense if you want something your brokerage can’t provide. That might mean more sophisticated technical analysis tools, a wider array of news and research, or more comprehensive net worth tracking.
How to Choose the Best Investment Tracking App
Not sure which investment tracking app is right for you?
Pull back and make a list of each platform you’re considering. Then narrow it down using the factors we built this list around:
- Pricing and fees
- Ability to sync with external financial accounts
- Portfolio analysis capabilities
- Net worth tracking beyond your investment portfolio
- Ease of use
- Financial advice and insights
- Investment management capabilities
You might consider other factors as well. What’s important is that you find an investment tracking platform that ticks as many boxes as possible and meets your core investing needs and objectives.
