RightCapital vs. MoneyGuide
The decision on which financial planning software to use with your practice can be a tough one. Two of the leaders in the industry are RightCapital and MoneyGuide. Let’s take a look at the differences between them. (Evaluating eMoney? Read our RightCapital vs. eMoney rundown.)
RightCapital vs. MoneyGuide advisor satisfaction ratings
The Kitces Report from August 2023, “The Technology That Independent Financial Advisors Actually Use And Like” shows that RightCapital's overall user satisfaction score grew to 9.1 out of 10, from 8.6 in 2021. MoneyGuide’s rating fell from 8.2 out of 10 in 2021 to 7.7 out of 10, the lowest satisfaction rating of “the big three” software companies.
The report notes:
RightCapital continues to be on a rapid growth streak. The fact that the vendor still generates both the highest satisfaction and value ratings of these 3 suggests that it will continue to rise, likely surpassing MoneyGuide’s market share among independents in the coming year (especially when coupled with what is now a materially below-category average satisfaction rating for MoneyGuide).
It continues:
MoneyGuide, rating below average in overall satisfaction, was also the only leading third-party vendor to receive below average scores on every one of the 13 specific attributes surveyed. This signals remarkably broad-based dissatisfaction by MoneyGuide’s users with its overall product iteration in recent years, particularly in the areas of comprehensiveness, depth of analysis, and ongoing engagement, where it most lags its market-leading peers.
The January 2024 T3/Inside Information Advisor Software Survey also revealed that RightCapital (with an average 8.46/10 user rating) was the highest rated software, as it was in the 2022 and 2023 surveys:
When breaking down user ratings in different demographic categories within the T3 Report (ex. Years in Business, Business Model, and Size of Firm by Annual Revenues), RightCapital had a higher rating than MoneyGuidePro in 14/15 categories.
RightCapital vs. MoneyGuidePro cost
The cost of RightCapital’s three tiers are laid out on our pricing page. MoneyGuide publishes their pricing on their website as well. It’s worth noting that MoneyGuide is more of an “a la carte'' solution, where you pay extra for certain features, so it’s difficult to do an apples-to-apples pricing comparison.
RightCapital vs MoneyGuide product updates
A June 2023 review on G2 titled “MoneyGuide has not kept up with the times” notes “I have used MGP over the last decade and they have failed to develop any significant additions (phone app, HSA, budgeting,ext.) in that time.”
Another advisor, Scott Frey, raves about RightCapital’s ability to take feedback from advisors and make changes: “When we went to MoneyGuide with problems, we got a ‘we’ve got bigger fish to fry’ message. RightCapital…took feedback as well as a technology company has in my experience.”
MoneyGuide has been owned by Envestnet since 2019. RightCapital is owned by the company’s original founders and remains independent. In a September 2022 social media post, Michael Kitces notes this difference is how “RightCapital is listening to advisors”:
RightCapital vs. MoneyGuidePro functionality
Planning approach
There are some major differences between RightCapital and MoneyGuidePro, the main one being that with MoneyGuidePro, advisors must use the goal-based planning approach. According to this article by industry expert Michael Kitces, goal-based planning “puts the cart before the horse” and may result in hard conversations with the client about needing to create more realistic goals. A user on Reddit also notes, “MGP is great for pre-retirees and retirees. Beyond that, goal-based planning isn’t particularly useful for say, a 30-year-old.” With RightCapital, advisors have the flexibility to use goal-based planning, cash-flow planning, plus modified cash-flow planning.
Data sources used in financial planning
RightCapital considers more data sources than MoneyGuidePro does. For example, in MoneyGuidePro, there is minimal consideration of pre-retirement income and expenses. MoneyGuidePro assumes that clients are not spending more than they make in a given year.
In reality, people’s lives are much more complex. That’s why RightCapital includes budgeting, and debt and student loan management tools built within the software to envision a client’s entire financial picture, and accounts for clients’ spending habits such as when they are spending more than they make within a given year. These additional inputs and tools provide more control for the advisor to help clients with their specific financial situations.
Tax considerations
RightCapital notes all income sources and how each of them is taxed. To fund any deficits, RightCapital also considers drawing down and selling assets, which produce unique tax scenarios.
The biggest difference you’ll see between RightCapital and MoneyGuidePro when it comes to tax-planning is that RightCapital offers an interactive Roth conversion tool that makes it easy to visualize the impact of conversions on items such as IRMMA surcharges and increases to taxable Social Security. RightCapital also includes future tax projections including sample tax forms such as the 1040. While MoneyGuidePro has Roth conversions, it lacks the interactivity and visual outputs. A G2 user notes a dislike of MoneyGuidePro is the “Lack of ability to explore tax impact of certain strategies”.
Data visualization tools
RightCapital is unique in the financial planning software industry for including advanced data visualization tools to help advisors communicate with clients using simple visuals instead of 60-page reports. RightCapital has received a lot of press and advisor approval about the one-page plan, Snapshot. MoneyGuide also offers a “digital page summary” called “My Snapshot”, as noted in this WealthManagement.com article.
According to the advisor replies to the above post from Michael Kitces, it seems RightCapital is most preferred, with quotes such as “Design wise RC crushes”, “I can’t tell you how much RightCapital’s illustration of future wealth distribution warms my heart”, and “MGP and eMoney reports look like they should come with a fax cover sheet”.
Other exciting visualization features from RightCapital include Blueprint™—an engaging, intuitive, and interactive graphical layout of each clients’ net worth, goals, income, savings, and expenses—and Cash Flow Maps— intuitive visuals that help illustrate your clients' cash inflows and outflows in a simple diagram.
Additional differences
RightCapital also has the following features that are not available within MoneyGuidePro:
Debt & student loan management
Budgeting
Medicare planning & premium calculation
Advanced Social Security optimization such as government pension offset, windfall elimination provision, etc.
Annuity analysis
Insurance needs analysis
Document vault
Back office access
Consolidated client activity tracking
RightCapital vs. MoneyGuidePro user experience
Advisor Scott Frey said MoneyGuide “is a relic of the nineties”, stressing his disappointment in having to take time in client meetings to explain the software—and sometimes even having to vouch for its reliability. “The UI (user interface) was unintuitive to say the least.”
According to this review on G2, MoneyGuide’s “reporting is clunky and a lot of charts and graphs…don’t make sense to the client”. Another (otherwise great) review laments, “I wish it were a bit easier to plan on the fly with clients. I find navigating and updating results a bit tedious when clients are at the table.”
Advisor Jonathan Kiehl had used MoneyGuide with a previous firm before starting his own RIA and switching to RightCapital. It “didn’t really sit well with me” to send clients off on their way with a 60-page report, he said. During a Good Advisors Finish First panel held in 2023, Jonathan discussed the differences he found between RightCapital and MoneyGuide:
Diving more into the cohesiveness of RightCapital, Jonathan noted, “It looks the same whether I'm presenting a financial plan, or whether clients are logging into their client portal to see their net worth statement, or to do some work with the budgeting tool…When I was with MoneyGuide, a lot of the things were add-ons…it was a little disjointed.”
According to the Kitces Report, RightCapital’s visuals are an 8.8 out of 10, compared to MoneyGuide’s 7.5 out of 10. Here’s Jonathan again, walking through some of his favorite visuals within RightCapital:
RightCapital vs. MoneyGuidePro client support
Here is what MoneyGuidePro reported about their client support team on their website:
85% live call rate
4.8/5 average customer satisfaction score
In the aforementioned Kitces Report, RightCapital rated highest for Customer Support with 9.0 out of 10 compared to MoneyGuide’s 8.0 out of 10. At the time of this post, according to the user surveys collected on G2, the overall quality of support is rated as 7.5 out of 10 for MoneyGuide vs. 9.5 out of 10 for RightCapital.
Some stats we share about the RightCapital support team:
98% satisfaction rate
Median inbound answer time under 90 seconds
On RightCapital’s G2 page, one user mentioned, “The customer service is the best, quick responses, and if they don’t have a feature you ask for, they forward all requests to their developers.” One user noted they liked best about RightCapital, “The immediate help we can get from the support team when we are stuck on how to model something. It's especially helpful because we like to create and update financial plans interactively with our clients and the quick solutions keep everyone engaged.”
RightCapital vs. MoneyGuide onboarding experience
RightCapital advisors are usually comfortable working within our platform in less than a month. The onboarding specialists will make plenty of time for follow-up calls if you would like extra support as you get started. Support and training (including our webinars) are always free and our help center is intuitive and well-organized.
Some MoneyGuide reviewers on G2 comment on the difficulty of getting started. One user notes, “It's a little tricky to learn at first - there are so, so many layers”. Another says, "Sometimes it is a bit hard to navigate because it’s not intuitive if you don’t want to go step by step.” This otherwise good review notes, “There are so many different tools/scenarios it can be cumbersome at times”.
Choosing a financial planning software for your practice is a big decision. We encourage you to sign up for a personalized 1:1 20-minute demo with a member of our sales team and test drive RightCapital during a 14-day free trial.