Personal Capital vs Mint Review 2022: Which App Is Best?

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If you’ve been searching for the best personal finance app to take control of your money, you may be wondering, is Personal Capital better than Mint? The answer:  it depends. Today, I will cover everything you need to know about Personal Capital vs Mint, so you can choose the best financial tool for your needs. 

About Personal Capital

Personal Capital is a suite of financial tools to help you track your spending, investments, and more. The service was founded in 2009, and today, Personal Capital has over 2.8 million users and $16 billion in assets under management. 

Its claim to fame is its financial dashboard, which can help you understand all aspects of your finances. While it is well-rounded in its service offering, it is most robust in the area of investment tracking, which I’ll cover in more detail shortly. 

About Mint

Mint was founded in 2006 and has since become one of the world’s most popular budgeting solutions. 

While Mint started as a budgeting solution, over time, it has expanded its offering to include credit score monitoring, bill pay services, and more.

Even though Mint is most commonly known as a budgeting solution, it does offer investment tracking, thus creating a suite of comparable tools to Personal Capital.

So, let’s get started comparing Personal Capital vs Mint!

Budgeting

Both Personal Capital and Mint offer budgeting tools to help you track your spending.

Personal Capital takes a more simplistic approach to budgeting. When you link your accounts to Personal Capital, it can automatically track and categorize spending. However, this is about as far as things go. Personal Capital will show you month over month spending trends, but it doesn’t provide much in the way of budgeting for each category of spending.

Mint, on the other hand, offers one of the most popular budgeting apps around. Not only does Mint track your spending, but you can also set up category-by-category budgets to determine if you’re on track. 

Another area where Mint gets the nod is in goal setting. With Mint, you can set up goals for things like buying a home, an emergency fund, and more. These goal-setting mechanisms can help you adapt your budget to your financial priorities. While Personal Capital does offer some goal setting features, they are not nearly as flexible or robust as Mint’s. 

Where both of these apps excel is in tracking each transaction. Not only can this help you understand where your money is going, but it also makes it easier to verify that all transactions through your accounts are authentic.  

However, because Mint offers more flexible budgeting tools, it is the winner in this category. 

Winner:  Mint

Investment Analysis

Next in this Personal Capital vs Mint comparison, let’s talk investment analysis. Personal Capital and Mint each offer tools to help you track your investments. 

Personal Capital shines when it comes to investment tracking. The highly robust dashboard makes it easy to see the performance of your holdings and portfolio. Additionally, you can track performance by account and get a visual take on your portfolio allocation by asset class and sector. 

Mint offers some tools to track investment performance, portfolio allocation, and comparisons to various indices, but frankly, the investment tools are lackluster compared to Personal Capital. It is difficult to do simple things like tracking returns of various accounts, individual assets, etc.

When it comes to tracking your investments, Personal Capital is the most robust tool around.

Winner:  Personal Capital

Synchronization

Both Personal Capital and Mint allow you to connect thousands of financial institutions to track your bank accounts, loans, investments, and more.

Having used both Personal Capital and Mint, both synchronization systems have proven reliable for me, though I have certain accounts that both systems struggle to keep in sync. 

However, since both apps support most institutions, there is no clear winner in this category.

Winner:  Tie

Bill Tracking

When it comes to bill tracking, both Personal Capital and Mint offer solutions to help you keep tabs on your bills so that you never miss a payment. Both of these platforms work reasonably well, helping you understand when your payments are due and tracking which payments have been made.

Candidly, I don’t use bill tracking services such as these because I have automated my finances, so all of my bills are paid automatically.

However, since both support bill pay service, there is no clear winner in this category. 

Winner:  Tie

Other Standout Features

Comparing Personal Capital vs Mint, each app has features that help it stand out from the crowd.

Personal Capital stands out with some of its investment planning features. For example, its Retirement Planner feature allows you to determine the likelihood that you’ll be able to meet your retirement goals based on assumptions around savings rate, spending in retirement, and social security. It runs thousands of simulations to show you the likelihood of success. 

Another standout feature offered by Personal Capital is its Retirement Fee Analyzer. When it comes to reaching your financial goals, one of the biggest enemies you’ll face is investment fees. Imagine for a moment that your investments return 8% per year, and your investment fees total 1% per year. This means you will lose 12.5% of your investment growth to fees; over time, that adds up. 

Personal Capital’s Fee Analyzer allows you to see the fees you are paying at a glance and understand just how much they’ll cost you over a lifetime of investing. This tool alone could save you thousands. 

With Mint, one standout feature is credit monitoring. If you want to have all of your financial information in one place, this can be beneficial. However, when it comes to credit monitoring, I prefer Credit Karma.

Additionally, Mint excels in its trend monitoring, making it easy to see how your financial picture changes over time. For example, it is easy to track spending by category. However, these features aren’t necessarily unique to Mint. 

Overall, Personal Capital gets the win here for its unique investment analysis features.

Winner:  Personal Capital

Pricing

Now that you have a high-level understanding of both of these services, you may be wondering how much they cost.

Personal Capital and Mint use different approaches to monetization. 

Personal Capital is a free service, offering full access to all financial tools and trackers. However, Personal Capital also offers a paid advisory service. With this service, you gain access to Personal Capital’s financial advisory team, which can help you select the right investments and portfolio allocation based on your specific needs. For the first $1mm of managed money, the fee is 0.89% of your assets under management.

Is Personal Capital worth the fee? In my opinion, no. I believe anyone can learn how to start investing on their own if they’re willing to put in the effort. However, if you insist on hiring someone to help you manage your money, Personal Capital is a reasonably-priced option. For most users, though, I suggest using Personal Capital as a free service. 

Mint has a different approach. While their platform is also entirely free, Mint makes its money by marketing services. For example, Mint recommends credit cards, bank accounts, and more. If you sign up for one of the services Mint recommends, they make a small commission. Unfortunately, this makes it feel like there are many ads as part of the Mint experience. 

While both services are free, Personal Capital is less “in your face” about its advisory service relative to Mint’s countless advertisements for various services. For this reason, we prefer its pricing model. 

Winner:  Personal Capital

Mobile Apps

Both Mint and Personal Capital offer robust, well-designed mobile apps.

However, when it comes to Mint, the web app offers far more functionality than the mobile app. Personal Capital, by comparison, offers nearly all of the online functionality right in its app.

For this reason, we think Personal Capital leads in this area.

Winner:  Personal Capital

Security

Is Personal Capital safe? Is Mint safe? These are essential questions you’ll want to answer before connecting with either of these apps.

Luckily, both of these services have stringent security policies.

Both services offer two-factor authentication, military-grade encryption, and more. You can learn more about Personal Capital’s security policy and Mint’s security policy if you want to learn more. 

While it’s not always easy to tell how robust a service’s security policies are, you can rest assured that your data is safe given the vast user base of both of these services.  

Winner:  Tie

Customer Service

Let’s compare Personal Capital vs Mint support. Personal Capital makes it easy to get help when you need it. Personal Capital has a repository of frequently asked questions, and if you’re an advisory client, you can even reach out to Personal Capital by phone. While I have never needed to request support from Personal Capital, it is easy to reach out to them if I do.

The best way to reach Mint is using their built-in chat feature, and you should be able to reach someone during most hours (5 A.M. to 9 P.M. PT as of the time of this writing). However, Mint does not have a telephone number, so it’s a bit harder to find help when you need it. 

Winner:  Personal Capital

Who is Personal Capital Best For?

Personal Capital is best for people trying to gain a holistic understanding of their financial picture. 

While Personal Capital offers a wide array of tools from budgeting to saving, its bread and butter is helping you track your investments. It does this better than any other service I have tried, and the best part is that it’s free!

Additionally, I also like being able to track my net worth in Personal Capital. The highly visual dashboard makes it easy to spot trends and make sure I am headed in the right direction.

Who is Mint Best For?

Candidly, Personal Capital wins out in many categories, but the area where it falls short is budgeting. If you are comparing these two services on budgeting alone, Mint wins by a landslide.

That said, is there a better app than Mint for budgeting? In my opinion, yes, there are much better solutions for budgeting. Two of my favorite solutions are YNAB and Tiller Money. You can learn more about these budgeting solutions by checking out the below articles.

• YNAB vs. Mint:  Budgeting App Showdown
• 5 You Need a Budget Alternatives
• Tiller Money Review:  Is Spreadsheet Budgeting Right for You?

Personal Capital vs Mint:  Which is Best?

Wrapping up this Personal Capital vs. Mint review, I have to give the nod to Personal Capital. It is perhaps the most full-featured personal finance app to help you gain a better understanding of your finances. 

While Personal Capital falls short on budgeting, I suggest using a dedicated budgeting app like YNAB for this purpose anyway. 

By pairing Personal Capital with a dedicated budgeting app, you get the best of both worlds and will be well on your way to a better financial life. 

However, finding the right personal finance app depends on your decision. So, get started with Personal Capital or Mint today!