Empower vs Monarch vs Copilot vs Kubera: The Best Net Worth Tracker After Mint

When Mint shut down, it left a specific hole: one free screen that pulled every account into a single balance. The four apps that inherited its users each fixed a different part of that screen, and they do not overlap as much as the marketing suggests. The right pick depends on whether you care most about paying nothing, budgeting like an accountant, or tracking assets a normal aggregator cannot see.

Here is the short version before the detail.

The free line in the sand

The first fork is money. Empower Personal Dashboard is the only one of the four that costs nothing to use. It is an all-in-one net worth and investment dashboard, and it stays free because it is funded by an optional advisory upsell. That means the product is genuinely usable at zero dollars, and the trade is that a licensed advisor may call you if your linked balances cross a threshold. If you can ignore the phone, the dashboard itself is a real tool, strongest at investment analysis: allocation, fees hiding in your funds, and retirement projections.

The other three charge a subscription. Monarch Money, Copilot Money, and Kubera all sit behind a paywall, which changes the question. You are no longer asking "is this free," you are asking "is this worth paying for over Empower." The answer is yes only if you need something Empower does not do well, and each paid app is built around a different one of those gaps.

Budgeting depth: where the paid apps earn it

Empower was never really a budgeting app. It shows spending, but it does not give you the envelope-style, category-by-category control that Mint power users lived in. That is the exact space the two budgeting-first apps target.

Monarch Money is built explicitly as a full Mint replacement, which is the clearest positioning of the group. If your reason for leaving Mint was the budgeting workflow itself (rules, recurring bills, shared household accounts, goals), Monarch is trying to rebuild that end to end rather than bolt it onto an investment screen.

Copilot Money attacks the same problem from a different angle. It is a premium, Apple-first budgeting app whose selling point is best-in-class AI categorization. The pitch is that the single most tedious part of budgeting, fixing miscategorized transactions, mostly disappears because the engine gets it right. That matters more than it sounds: a budget you have to hand-correct every week is a budget you abandon. The catch is the Apple-first part. If you are on Android or live in a browser, Copilot is the weakest fit here.

Crypto and the assets aggregators cannot see

The last fork is what counts as an "account." Traditional aggregators are built for banks, cards, and brokerages. They handle crypto unevenly and treat a house or a stake in a private company as, at best, a manual line item you update by hand.

Kubera exists for exactly that problem. It is a premium net worth tracker for crypto, real estate, and alternative assets, and that focus is the whole point. If a meaningful share of your net worth sits in wallets, property, private equity, collectibles, or anything a bank feed will never show, Kubera is the only one of the four designed around it rather than apologizing for it. The trade is the mirror image of Copilot: Kubera is light on granular budgeting. It is a balance-sheet tool, not a spending coach.

Monarch and Copilot both support crypto and let you add manual accounts, so a modest crypto position or a single rental will show up. The difference is depth. For a few holdings, either is fine. For a genuinely alternative-heavy balance sheet, they become the manual-entry chore that Kubera automates.

Bottom line

Pick by your biggest constraint, not by feature lists.

If you want the closest thing to free Mint and you mostly care about investments and net worth, use Empower Personal Dashboard and tolerate the occasional advisory pitch. If your loss was the budgeting workflow and you want a true Mint successor, pay for Monarch Money. If you are all-in on Apple and hate cleaning up transactions, Copilot Money's categorization is the reason to switch. If crypto, real estate, or private assets make up a real slice of your worth, none of the others will keep up with Kubera. Most people are best served by Empower plus one paid app that covers their specific weak spot, rather than by trying to make a single tracker do everything.

FAQ

Is Empower actually free, or is there a hidden fee?
The dashboard is free to use. It is funded by an optional advisory upsell, so an advisor may reach out based on your linked assets, but you are never required to buy anything to keep using the tracker.

Which one is the closest replacement for Mint?
Monarch Money is positioned as a full Mint replacement, so it is the closest match if you are rebuilding the same budgeting-plus-net-worth setup you had before.

What is the best option for tracking crypto and real estate together?
Kubera. It is purpose-built for crypto, real estate, and alternative assets, whereas the others treat those as manual add-ons.

Does Copilot work on Android or Windows?
Copilot is an Apple-first app, so its experience is strongest on iPhone and Mac. If you are primarily on Android or the web, Monarch is the safer budgeting choice.

Can I use more than one of these at once?
Yes, and many people do. A common setup is Empower for the free investment view plus one paid app (Monarch, Copilot, or Kubera) chosen for the job Empower handles poorly.