Velira vs Empower
Empower's personal dashboard (formerly Personal Capital) is a well-known free tool for aggregating accounts, tracking net worth and investments, and analyzing portfolio fees and allocation. It also offers a separate, optional paid wealth-management service where human advisors manage assets for a fee.
Velira is not an advisory service and does not manage money. It is a read-only decision-support app for people whose money is complicated — investments alongside business equity, illiquid stakes, earnouts, and private notes. It unifies everything into one honest net-worth number and tells you the move your plan calls for each day, grounded in survival math, with an auditable rule trace. You decide and place every order yourself; Velira never executes.
The core distinction: Empower's free dashboard is a tracking surface that can lead into managed advisory. Velira is a daily decision engine that keeps you in control and never takes custody of your assets.
| Capability | Velira | Empower |
|---|---|---|
| Core job | Daily decision-support grounded in survival math — what to do with a complex balance sheet, with the reasoning shown. | A free financial dashboard for account aggregation, net-worth and investment tracking. |
| Business model | A subscription decision-support platform; Velira never manages assets or takes custody. The software is a financial information and education tool — it does not provide personalized investment advice — and the higher tiers add licensed human professionals (CFP, CPA, Estate Planner) who advise you directly. | Free dashboard, with an optional separate paid wealth-management / advisory service. |
| Who acts on your money | You do. Velira is read-only by architecture and never executes a trade. | Self-directed in the free dashboard; the optional advisory service has human advisors manage assets. |
| Investment analysis | Reasons over your real positions against your plan and survival floor, not just allocation and fee snapshots. | Portfolio tracking with fee analysis, allocation views, and retirement projections. |
| Complex & illiquid assets | First-class: business equity, private stakes, earnouts, and private notes are modeled directly. | Net-worth tracking centered on connected bank and investment accounts; manual entries can be added. |
| Confirmed vs. contingent money | Two-ledger discipline: a confirmed 'honest floor' kept strictly separate from a contingent 'potential total'. | Presents net worth and projections as combined figures. |
| Retirement / survival projection | A survival / funded-ratio engine with a 'Why' view exposing the inputs and rules behind each output. | Includes a retirement planner and Monte Carlo–style projection in the dashboard. |
| AI guidance | Ask Velira, an AI coach reasoning over your full balance sheet inside read-only, rule-traced guardrails. | Human financial advisors are available through the optional paid advisory service. |
| Onboarding | Optional white-glove onboarding to configure complex assets and the plan correctly from the start. | Self-serve dashboard setup; advisory clients are onboarded by an advisor. |
Who Velira is for
Velira is for people with complex, affluent balance sheets who want a daily, defensible answer to 'what should I do?' — without handing their assets to a manager. If you value staying in control, seeing the rule trace behind every recommendation, and keeping confirmed money strictly separate from contingent upside, Velira is built for you.
It suits founders, operators, and anyone with concentrated positions, earnouts, private notes, or illiquid stakes who wants survival-grounded decision-support rather than either a bare tracking dashboard or full discretionary management.
Where Empower may fit better
If you simply want a free, polished dashboard to aggregate accounts and watch your net worth, investments, and fees in one place, Empower's no-cost dashboard is a capable option.
And if what you actually want is for licensed human advisors to manage your portfolio for you — full discretionary wealth management — that is a service Empower offers and Velira deliberately does not. Velira keeps you as the decision-maker by design. If you'd rather delegate the decisions and execution entirely, a managed advisory relationship (such as Empower's) is the right category to look at.
See Velira on your own numbers
Velira is read-only by architecture and never executes a trade — it tells you the move your plan calls for, and you place it. It is decision-support, not financial advice.