Empower's personal dashboard is free to use, and it is aimed at the whole picture: investments, retirement plans, cash, credit and debt in one place. Its own site says over 20 million people use it, and it carries a net worth tracker, retirement scenarios and budgeting tools. If your question is how your wealth is doing, it is built to answer it.
What each one starts from
Empower starts from your accounts. Its site tells you to connect all of them, from 401(k)s and IRAs to checking, mortgages and credit cards, and says the more you connect, the better the tools and insights get. The dashboard works because it can see the lot.
myClerkBook starts from what you record. You photograph a receipt, or upload an invoice or a statement file you exported yourself, and the entry comes back filled in for you to confirm. Nothing in the product connects to an account, so there is no link to revoke and no copy of your balances sitting with someone else.
| Dimension | myClerkBook | Empower |
|---|---|---|
| Account connectionmyClerkBook | None, permanently. No aggregator in the stack | You connect your accounts, and the tools improve as you connect more |
| Net worthEmpower | No | A net worth tracker across everything you connect |
| Investments and retirementEmpower | No. We keep books, not portfolios | Portfolio analysis, retirement scenarios, and access to advisors |
| Price of the dashboardEmpower | A paid plan, after a seven day Premium trial | Free |
| Reading documentsmyClerkBook | Receipts, invoices and statement files, with a confidence score on every field | Not listed on its site |
| Clients, projects and currenciesmyClerkBook | Separate books, 166 currencies, every amount kept as you entered it | Not listed on its site |
| Getting startedDifferent by design | Name a book and record an entry | An email and a phone number, then your accounts |
Where Empower is better
There is a cost on our side too. A feed fills itself in, and a book only knows what you record. If you do not photograph the receipt or type the entry, we cannot see it.
Who each one is for
- Choose Empower if you want your investments, retirement accounts and debts in one picture, and you are comfortable connecting them to get it.
- Choose myClerkBook if you earn from several clients or in several currencies, want a separate book for each, or do not want any account connected at all.
- Use both if you like. One watches your wealth and the other keeps your client work straight, and neither needs the other.
- 0
- Bank connections
- 166
- Currencies
- 1,000
- Parsing credits a month
- 5
- Separate books
No login, no aggregator, no read access. Architectural, not a setting.
Stored exactly as entered, converted daily on Premium.
One per entry read from a receipt, invoice or statement, on Premium. 50 a month on Basic.
Each with its own categories, base currency and insights, on Premium.
One last thing, and it applies to every comparison on this blog. myClerkBook is not trying to be the product with the most features on the page. It is trying to be the one that never asks you for something it should not need. If automatic bank import is the thing you want most, buy the product that does it well and ignore everything above. That is a real preference and it deserves a real answer rather than a sales rebuttal.