An Empower (Personal Capital) alternative: read the sign-up rule
Empower's dashboard links US institutions in US dollars, and signing up needs a US phone number. That decides the question for most people looking for an alternative, before anybody compares a single feature.
Personal Capital is now Empower. Type personalcapital.com into a browser and you land on empower.com, and the product people still call Personal Capital is the Empower Personal Dashboard.
It is a good dashboard, especially for investments, and plenty of people have used it for a decade. If you are looking for an alternative, it is usually for one of four reasons. The first one settles it outright.
Reason 1: you cannot sign upLink to this section
Empower's own support article, Can I link an international account in Empower Personal Dashboard?, says it plainly:
Although you can access the Empower Personal Dashboard application from any location, we currently only support U.S based financial institutions (currency in USD) for accounts you can link to your dashboard.
And, at the end of the same article:
Please note: For security reasons, you will need a valid U.S. phone number to sign up for Empower Personal Dashboard.
That is a harder line than most apps draw. Other products let you in and then quietly fail to find your bank. Empower stops you at the door unless you have a US phone number, and links nothing that is not a US institution holding US dollars.
If you are outside the United States, the comparison ends there, and what you need is a tool built for money that does not sit in one country.
Reason 2: the dashboard is the front door to a wealth businessLink to this section
This is not a criticism, it is the deal, and Empower states it openly.
The wealth management page lists three tiers with minimums of $100,000, $250,000 and $1 million, charges "an annual advisory fee as a percentage of your total assets under management (AUM) using a tiered fee structure", and has a section headed "What we'll cover on your first call".
So the tools are the introduction, and the business is managing your money. If you want that relationship, the tools being excellent and costing you nothing is a good bargain.
If you do not, you are looking for a product whose business model is the product. Ours is: the tracker is free forever with nothing capped, and the paid tier is the AI layer, at $36 a year at the floor, $72 if you take the suggested amount, or $8 a month. Nobody calls you.
Reason 3: you want a budgeting app, not a portfolio dashboardLink to this section
Empower leans towards investments. Its tool list is net worth, retirement planner, portfolio analysis, savings planner, fee analyzer, and budgeting alongside them. That order is the right one for its audience, and the wrong one if what you actually want is to know where the money went last month.
In Hundo the spending is the main event: budgets are monthly or weekly limits per category, each in its own currency, and every report is built from the entries you make. Net worth then covers accounts, investments, property, vehicles, crypto and precious metals, minus debts, and including money other people owe you.
One detail worth naming, because it shows the difference in emphasis: Empower tracks cryptocurrency as a manual account you keep up to date yourself. Hundo prices crypto from CoinGecko and metals from metals.dev, automatically, because for a lot of people outside the US those are a real part of the balance sheet rather than a curiosity.
Reason 4: your money is in more than one currencyLink to this section
Empower's dashboard is a US dollar dashboard, by the rule quoted above.
Every account, asset and budget in Hundo keeps its own currency, in 166 of them. Each transaction stores the exchange rate for its own date, so last year's numbers stay converted at last year's rate, and the net worth page can tell you how much of a month's change was the market and how much was the exchange rate.
You can test the arithmetic before you sign up for anything: add up a net worth across several currencies, or see how much of an investment's return was the exchange rate.
How entries get in without a bank connectionLink to this section
There is no bank connection in Hundo at all, so nothing appears by itself. That is the trade, and it is only worth making if putting an entry in is fast.
- Type the amount, and pick from suggestions ranked out of your own history, which fill the merchant, category, budget and account in one tap.
- Import a CSV, TSV or Excel statement, with column mapping and duplicate detection.
- Photograph a receipt, forward an email receipt to your own address, dictate a note, or tell the assistant in a sentence.
The first two are free and uncapped. The rest are part of Pro.
What you would be giving upLink to this section
- Connected accounts. Empower's feeds fill the dashboard in for you. We have nothing that matches that, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
- Portfolio analysis and the fee analyzer. Empower reads your holdings from the source and tells you what your funds are costing you. Hundo values holdings, but it does not analyse a portfolio.
- A retirement projection. Empower's retirement planner is the reason many people opened it in the first place.
- Advice. If you want a human adviser attached to the software, that is exactly what Empower sells.
What you would be gettingLink to this section
- A tracker that is free forever, with nothing capped: unlimited accounts, transactions, budgets and assets.
- Every currency, each account, asset and budget in its own, with each transaction keeping the rate for its own date.
- No bank credentials anywhere, because there is no bank connection to hold them. Empower is straightforward about why an aggregator needs them: "Your credentials enable us to extract the data". If you would rather not hand them over, that decides the shape of the tool you can use.
- Your own AI, pointed at your own ledger. Hundo publishes an MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT or another assistant can read your accounts and draft changes you confirm. How it works.
The short versionLink to this section
In the United States, with US accounts, wanting investment tools and open to an adviser? Empower is strong and free to you, and this page is not trying to talk you out of it.
Anywhere else, or unwilling to hand a third party your banking logins, or holding more than one currency? You were never eligible for the comparison, and a tracker that asks for no bank login is the category you are actually shopping in.