Which Retirement Planner Is Best for You?
If you’re comparing Boldin and Empower (formerly Personal Capital), there are some surface-level similarities: account aggregation, retirement projections, no cost to get started. But the tools are built for different purposes.
Empower tracks your net worth and how your portfolio is performing. Boldin gives you a complete financial plan, addressing every lever, so that you’re on track to the life you want.
Retirement planning is a sequence of connected decisions: when to retire, which accounts to draw from, how to handle taxes, when to claim Social Security. Those decisions affect each other in ways that take real modeling to see.
| If you want… | Better choice |
| Portfolio tracking and fee analysis | Empower |
| Retirement income planning | Boldin |
| Roth conversion modeling | Boldin |
| Budgeting and spending tracking | Empower |
| Flat-fee CFP® advice | Boldin |
| Ongoing portfolio management | Empower |
| Monte Carlo retirement modeling | Boldin |
| Social Security optimization | Boldin |
Both tools appear regularly in roundups of the best retirement calculators. Here’s how Boldin and Empower compare on planning depth, investment tracking, Roth strategy, pricing, and advisor access.
The Difference Between Boldin and Empower: Planning Depth
The Boldin Planner delivers a lot of what a human financial planner does: it takes your full retirement picture and shows you how your decisions play out over time. Empower’s Retirement Planner is primarily a portfolio tracker for monitoring investments rather than retirement income planning software.
Empower’s retirement projections show you whether you’re on track in broad terms. Boldin lets you model the specifics: when to claim Social Security, how Roth conversions affect your tax bracket over time, what a different withdrawal sequence does to your portfolio’s longevity.
If you want a clear view of what you own, what it’s worth, and how it’s performing, Empower handles that well. If you want the kind of holistic retirement plan a financial planner would charge $4,000 to build, the Boldin Planner is where to start.
What Boldin Does Better: Retirement Planning, Tax Strategy, and Scenario Modeling
Retirement income, withdrawal, and drawdown strategy
Boldin pulls income, taxes, Social Security timing, healthcare, real estate, debt, pensions, and annuities into one plan. You can model Medicare costs and estimates, project Roth conversion windows, map out a withdrawal and drawdown strategy, and run everything across different return assumptions to see how it holds up.
Social Security strategy
Social Security alone has enough variables to justify a dedicated tool. Boldin lets you compare claiming ages, model spousal coordination strategies, and see the long-term dollar impact of waiting versus claiming early, all within the context of your full plan.
Tax strategy and Roth conversion windows
Tax strategy in retirement is where the modeling earns its keep. Boldin projects your marginal rates across future years, which lets you identify low-bracket windows (often between retirement and RMD age) where conversions make sense. The opportunities show up in context, with the tax cost attached. The full Roth comparison is covered below.
Boldin AI: What-if scenarios and worst-case modeling, in plain language
Boldin AI lets you ask questions in plain language and get instant answers drawn from your accounts, income, assumptions, and projections. Ask what happens if you retire two years early, whether a Roth conversion makes sense at your income level, or how your plan holds up if markets underperform for the first decade of retirement. Empower has nothing like it.
The worst-case question matters as much as the optimistic one. Boldin AI makes it easy to run both, follow up on either, and go directly to the part of the Planner where the relevant inputs live.
It’s available on all plans. Basic users get up to 5 questions a day; PlannerPlus users get up to 200 per conversation with no limit on conversations. Boldin is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, and uses 256-bit encryption across all data.
What Empower Does Better: Investment Tracking, Fee Analysis, and Budgeting
Investment tracking and fee analysis
Empower’s investment tracking tools go beyond what Boldin offers. Its Retirement Fee Analyzer combs through your holdings and flags hidden fund costs, something Boldin has no equivalent for. You also get an investment checkup that compares your asset allocation against your stated risk tolerance and performance tracking going back years.
Spending tracking and budgeting
Empower connects credit card accounts and breaks down spending by category. For people who want one dashboard to monitor their portfolio and their budget, that’s genuinely useful. And all of it costs nothing. The wealth management service is optional, available if you have $100,000 or more and want human portfolio management.
If your primary goal is understanding what you own and what it’s costing you, Empower handles that well.
What Empower Doesn’t Include
Empower’s strength is monitoring. Where it falls short is planning — specifically the retirement-phase decisions that depend on how income, taxes, and withdrawals interact over time. Key capabilities absent from Empower’s Retirement Planner:
- Integrated Roth conversion modeling: Empower’s standalone Roth Conversion Analyzer is disconnected from your linked accounts and retirement projections
- Retirement withdrawal planning: no built-in tool for modeling which accounts to draw from and in what order to manage taxes and longevity risk
- Tax-aware retirement income modeling: Empower doesn’t project marginal rates across future years or identify low-bracket conversion windows
- Medicare and IRMAA planning: healthcare cost modeling isn’t integrated into Empower’s retirement projections
- Monte Carlo simulation: Empower’s retirement planner doesn’t run probability-of-success scenarios across thousands of market outcomes
- AI-driven what-if planning: no equivalent to Boldin AI’s ability to answer scenario questions tied to your actual plan data
The Roth and tax gaps in particular are worth understanding before you decide which tool fits your situation.
Roth Conversion Modeling: Boldin vs. Empower
Empower’s Retirement Planner doesn’t function as integrated Roth conversion software. It offers a Roth Conversion Analyzer calculator as a separate tool that doesn’t connect with your accounts and projections. There’s no way to test conversion amounts against your tax brackets, identify low-bracket windows, or see year-by-year tax impact within the context of your full plan.
Boldin’s Roth Conversion Explorer, available on PlannerPlus, lets you test four strategies side by side:
- Maximize estate value
- Minimize lifetime taxes
- Convert up to your income tax threshold
- Convert up to your IRMAA threshold
For each one, you see the year-by-year tax cost and how it reshapes your withdrawal plan over time.
The window where Roth conversions do the most work is often those early retirement years before Social Security kicks in and before RMDs start. Getting the timing and the amount right matters, and it shifts based on your specific income picture. That depends on seeing the tax cost in context, which is what Boldin provides.
Boldin vs. Empower Pricing: Free Plan, PlannerPlus, and Advisor Access
Empower’s planning and tracking tools are free. Boldin has a free Basic plan that covers the core: income, assets, Social Security, and a long-range projection. PlannerPlus, at $144 a year, adds Monte Carlo simulations, up to 10 scenarios, and side-by-side comparison for deeper modeling work.
| Boldin | Empower | |
| Free plan | Core planning: income, assets, Social Security, long-range projection | Full portfolio tracking, fee analysis, budgeting |
| Paid plan | PlannerPlus: $144/year — complete retirement plan with tax strategy, Social Security and Medicare modeling, unlimited Boldin AI, Monte Carlo, what-if scenarios (up to 10, compare side by side) | No paid planning tier |
| Advisor model | Flat-fee CFP® engagement; no assets under management | Wealth management with active portfolio management |
| Advisor cost | $2,800 for a two-session comprehensive plan checkup | Tiered AUM fee starting at 0.89% ($100K minimum); rate steps down on each additional bracket, reaching 0.49% on dollars above $10M |
Advisor access is priced differently. Empower’s wealth management involves active portfolio management rather than planning advice. Fees start at 0.89% and step down across brackets: 0.79% on the first $3M for private clients, declining further through $5M and $10M thresholds, with the lowest marginal rate of 0.49% applying only to dollars above $10M. The blended rate you end up paying depends on your total assets across all tiers.
Boldin Advisors charges a flat $2,800 for a comprehensive retirement plan checkup with a CFP® professional, with no assets under management. That runs across two sessions: an initial meeting to go through your plan and goals, then a follow-up to deliver your written report. The scope covers withdrawal sequencing, Roth conversion guidance, portfolio analysis, cash flow planning, and stress testing, with a fiduciary throughout the process.
The two models serve different needs. If you want someone managing your money on an ongoing basis, Empower’s service makes sense to look at. If you want to sit down with a CFP® professional, build a plan, and own the execution yourself, the flat-fee structure is worth understanding.
Boldin vs. Empower: Which Is Right for You?
| Choose Empower if… | Choose Boldin if… |
| You want to track your portfolio and net worth in one dashboard | You’re figuring out when you can afford to retire |
| Catching hidden fund fees is a priority | You need to sequence withdrawals across multiple account types |
| You want budgeting and spending tracking built in | You want to model how Social Security timing affects your income |
| You’d prefer optional wealth management with human oversight | You’re evaluating a Roth conversion window in your specific tax situation |
| You want to stress-test your plan across different market scenarios |
Empower handles monitoring well. The Boldin Planner is built for the decisions that monitoring can’t answer.
If your question is “How are my investments doing?” Empower is the right tool. If your question is whether you can retire, when to claim Social Security, and how to sequence withdrawals without a surprise tax bill, that’s what Boldin is built to solve.
What Independent Reviewers Say About Boldin
The same distinction shows up consistently in third-party coverage.
Rob Berger has tested most of the major retirement planning tools available, and names Boldin as his personal choice for planning. “Boldin is what I use to plan our retirement,” he writes at robberger.com, pointing to its depth across Social Security claiming, Roth conversion windows, Medicare costs, and pensions. In his separate Empower review, he rates it highly for tracking net worth, surfacing hidden investment fees, and pulling your full financial picture into one place.
At The White Coat Investor, contributor Eric Rosenberg draws the same line: “Modeling scenarios and changing assumptions are its strengths,” he writes of Boldin, while positioning Empower as the better fit for portfolio tracking and investment analysis.
SmartAsset’s Boldin review describes the platform as well-suited to people approaching retirement who want to stress-test their decisions before making major life changes. Their Empower review finds its strongest use case among investors with $200,000 or more who want portfolio management paired with human advisor access.
Frequently Asked Questions
For retirement planning specifically, Boldin goes much deeper than Empower. It connects Roth conversions, tax sequencing, Social Security timing, and healthcare costs inside one integrated plan, so you can see how those decisions interact. Empower has a retirement planner, but most people use it for investment monitoring. If planning is the goal, Boldin is where to focus.
Empower and Personal Capital are the same platform. Empower acquired Personal Capital in August 2020 and folded it into the Empower brand in February 2023. The free tools (net worth tracking, portfolio analysis, and the retirement planner) carried over under the new name. If you’ve been searching for Personal Capital vs. Boldin comparisons, both names refer to the same product.
Boldin offers a free Basic plan that covers core planning features. PlannerPlus, which adds Monte Carlo simulations, multiple scenarios, and side-by-side comparisons, is $144 per year.
Roth conversion planning involves moving money from a traditional IRA or 401(k) into a Roth account during years when your income and your tax rate are lower than it will be later. The goal is to pay taxes now at a favorable rate rather than in the future, when RMDs or other income sources push you into higher brackets. Done well, it can reduce lifetime taxes and shrink future required minimum distributions.
Boldin AI is built into the Boldin Planner and draws on your actual plan data to answer financial and retirement questions in plain language. You can explore scenarios, ask follow-ups, and get links directly to the relevant part of your plan. Basic users get up to 5 questions per day; PlannerPlus users get up to 200 per conversation, with no limit on conversations.
Boldin builds its default assumptions from long-term economic data: an 8.08% rate of return on a moderate portfolio and 2.54% inflation. You can adjust both and switch between optimistic, average, and pessimistic scenarios at any point. PlannerPlus adds Monte Carlo simulation, which runs your plan across thousands of market scenarios and returns a probability-of-success score.
Empower includes basic Roth conversion modeling. Boldin’s Roth Conversion Explorer (a PlannerPlus feature) goes considerably further, letting you maximize estate value, minimize lifetime taxes, convert up to your income tax threshold, and convert up to your IRMAA threshold. You can also use it to see the year-by-year tax impact of each against your full income and withdrawal plan.
Boldin lets you link accounts and track balances, but investment tracking isn’t its focus. It uses your account data as inputs for retirement modeling, projecting how your portfolio holds up across different withdrawal strategies, return assumptions, and tax scenarios. For deep portfolio analysis, fee breakdowns, and performance tracking, Empower is the stronger tool.
Boldin’s free Basic plan covers income, assets, Social Security, and a long-range projection. PlannerPlus, at $144 a year, adds Monte Carlo simulation, up to 10 scenarios with side-by-side comparison, and expanded Boldin AI access. Anyone working through real retirement decisions (when to claim, how to sequence withdrawals, whether a Roth conversion makes sense) will find real value in the modeling depth in PlannerPlus. A traditional financial planner would charge several thousand dollars to build the same plan.
