RightCapital vs MoneyGuide: 7 Differences for Financial Advisors

The decision on which financial planning software to use with your practice can be a tough one. Two leaders in the industry are RightCapital and MoneyGuide. Let’s take a look at the differences between them. If you’re looking for a MoneyGuide alternative or comparing financial planning software for RIAs, the sections below break down the practical workflow differences that affect client meetings and plan delivery.

(Evaluating eMoney as well? Read this RightCapital vs. eMoney rundown.)

Advisor satisfaction ratings

RightCapital vs. MoneyGuide Market Share and Satisfaction from 2025 Kitces Report

The Kitces Report released in March of 2025, “How Financial Planners Actually Do Financial Planning,” shows that RightCapital's overall user satisfaction score grew to 8.7 out of 10, from 8.6 in 2021. MoneyGuide’s rating fell from 8.0 out of 10 in 2022 to 7.9 out of 10, the lowest satisfaction rating of “the big three” financial planning software companies.

The report notes:

RightCapital’s average advisor satisfaction score has surged from 8.0 in 2018 to 8.7 in 2024, tying with Income Lab as the highest-rated program. Conversely, MoneyGuide – after a slight bump in satisfaction between 2020 and 2022 – saw a decline in 2024 (and at a rating of just 7.9, is ranked well below its competitors, signaling a continued decline in market share is likely in the years to come).

The March 2026 T3/Inside Information Advisor Software Survey also revealed that RightCapital (with an average 8.4/10 user rating) was the highest rated software of "the big three", for the fifth consecutive year. In the most recent survey, MoneyGuide’s rating dropped to 7.62/10. (MoneyGuide is sometimes referred to as MoneyGuidePro):

Financial Planning Software	2026 Market Share	2026 AverageUser Rating
eMoney	35.62%	8.14
Envestnet MoneyGuidePro	24.23%	7.62
RightCapital	21.37%	8.40

As of January 2026, G2 ratings for RightCapital were 4.6 out of 5 compared to G2 ratings for MoneyGuide of 4.0 out of 5. G2 reviewers gave RightCapital higher marks for “Meets Requirements,” “Ease of Use,” “Quality of Support,” and “Product Direction,” similar to the feedback seen in the Kitces advisor survey.

Pricing and cost structure

The cost of RightCapital’s three tiers are laid out on the RightCapital 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.

MoneyGuide Plan	MoneyGuide Retail Price	MoneyGuide Plan Details	Comparable RightCapital Plan	RightCapital Retail Price
MoneyGuide	$2000 + $400 for Account Aggregation = $2400	Goal-Based Planning	Basic	$1800
Wealth Studios	$2500 + $400 for Account Aggregation = $2900	MoneyGuide + Cashflow & Estate Planning	Premium	$2520
Platform	$3000	Wealth Studios (Account Aggregation included) + Prospecting	Platinum	$3060

Product updates and innovation pace

Feedback on product updates, MoneyGuide compared to RightCapital

A review on G2 titled “MoneyGuidePro 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) in that time.”

MoneyGuide is part of Envestnet, which was acquired by private equity firm Bain Capital in 2024. RightCapital is owned by the company’s original founders and remains independent. In the social media post above, Michael Kitces notes this difference is how “RightCapital is listening to advisors.”

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.”

Scott Frey: MoneyGuidePro, I think was a little bit monolithic, in that it had been around for a long time, it was deep into its engineering cycle, and when we went to MoneyGuidePro with problems, we got a "we've got bigger fish to fry" message.

RightCapital, and especially in its infancy, took feedback as well as a technology company has, in my experience, as well as a service provider has. And we got to have a lot of input.

I remember, probably a dozen times writing into the RightCapital team asking for features and then finding out that they were going to show up and then having them show up. That kind of collaboration and ability to take input has built a lot of trust for me. There's an attitude and cultural element that that reflects that made me a lot more willing to partner with them again when I created my own firm.

Functionality (planning approach, tax, data inputs)

Kitces graphic on ratings of areas of interest between RightCapital and other financial planning software

Planning approach

There are some major differences between RightCapital and MoneyGuide, the main one being that with MoneyGuide, advisors must use the goal-based planning approach. 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 MoneyGuide does. People’s lives are 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’ 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.

MoneyGuide, on the other hand, has minimal consideration of pre-retirement income and expenses. MoneyGuide assumes that clients are not spending more than they make in a given year.

Tax considerations

RightCapital notes all income sources and how each is taxed. To fund any deficits, RightCapital also considers drawing down and selling assets, which produce unique tax scenarios.

RightCapital offers an interactive Roth conversion tool that makes it easy to visualize the impact of conversions on items such as tax brackets, IRMAA surcharges, and increases to taxable Social Security. While MoneyGuide has Roth conversions, it lacks the interactivity and visual outputs. RightCapital also includes future tax projections including sample tax forms such as the 1040.

Additional tax-planning capabilities within RightCapital include Tax Strategies, which solves for the top asset location, withdrawal, and Roth conversion strategies based on the client plan. Another tax-focused tool, Tax Analyzer, allows for deeper tax return analysis and client-friendly visuals that break down their tax picture in an easy-to-understand way. With Tax Analyzer, you can upload a client’s tax return and/or view the future projected tax returns based off of the client’s current plan or your proposals.

Data visualization tools

RightCapital offers data visualizations that are much clearer than the alternative solutions. For example, RightCapital received a lot of press and advisor approval about the personalized one-page plan summary, Snapshot. MoneyGuide also offers a “digital page summary” called “My Snapshot."

Comparison of RightCapital's one-page plan vs. MoneyGuidePro's one-page view in Michael Kitces tweet from April 2022

According to the advisor replies to the above post from Michael Kitces, it seems RightCapital is more 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, which advisors were excited to see:

Cash Flow Maps— intuitive visuals that help illustrate your clients' cash inflows and outflows in a simple diagram

In the August 2025 Kitces Report, “The Technology That Independent Financial Advisors Actually Use And Like,” RightCapital also outranked MoneyGuide in the categories of Visuals (RightCapital at 8.5 vs. MoneyGuide at 7.2) and Reporting Output (RightCapital at 7.8 vs. MoneyGuide at 6.6).

Additional differences

RightCapital also has the following features that are not available within MoneyGuide:

User experience (advisor + client 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.”

Scott Frey: My impression of MoneyGuidePro, coming into the industry...my first impression was that it was a relic of the nineties. It looked 10 years old, 10 years ago. And the UI was unintuitive to say the least. I thought that it, it functioned fine, but it was not a place I loved living in day-to-day as a person using the software.

That's a relatively minor complaint compared though to its impact on client relationships. The biggest problem with MoneyGuidePro was that you had to explain it and those meetings in the planning process where you get to actually have impact and make a key decision that changes the course of someone's financial path are very few. And actually that time is incredibly small and valuable. And it was readily apparent from the beginning that we were spending a lot of that most valuable time explaining how programs worked and answering questions. And sometimes in the worst case scenario, we were having to argue for the episteme of the program. We were having to explain that the program was indeed reliable. That was in large part because of UI that looked unintuitive or, when we would play with it in front of the client, was hard to understand.

And, that sometimes failed us at critical moments at the culmination of planning. I think those failures are sometimes hard to register because the information was not incorrect that was being displayed. But, if it's not convincing and it doesn't lead to behavioral outcomes, it doesn't really matter. And there's a lot more than correctness to planning software.

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, Jonathan discussed the differences he found between RightCapital and MoneyGuide:

Jonathan Kiehl: We were using MoneyGuide Pro and I decided to go with RightCapital. I spent a lot of time analyzing that just in regards to the fact that I was really looking for more client engagement.

The experience that I had with MoneyGuide Pro was that it was really kind of an advisor tool and we would trot it out during the client meetings and it would be this great, impressive plan that we would show clients and if they wanted any more information, we'd print out a 60 page report for them and send them on their way. That really didn't sit well with me.

I wanted something that was a little bit more client facing or client first. Because I wanted the financial planning software to be a tool that I was using and not the actual financial planning.

In looking at RightCapital, the two things that really stood out to me were the cohesiveness of the platform and some of the visuals. That's what pointed me more toward RightCapital than MoneyGuide Pro.

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.”

Client support and onboarding

Social media posts about how much financial advisors love the support team at RightCapital’s financial planning software

In the March 2025 Kitces Report, RightCapital rated highest for Customer Support with 9.1 out of 10 compared to MoneyGuide’s 7.8 out of 10. As of January 2026, according to the user surveys collected on G2, the overall quality of support is rated as 9.5 out of 10 for RightCapital vs 7.5 out of 10 for MoneyGuide. All support inquiries to RightCapital are answered by a live product specialist.

Onboarding experience

Several advisor success stories mention how simple the learning process was when starting to use RightCapital:

“It was extremely easy,” Brooke Martinez commented, when asked about switching to RightCapital.
The Optima Capital Management team stated that within a week of using the software, it was clear, “RightCapital is so much smoother to work with.”
Michael Johnson, of Alchemi Wealth, mentioned in February 2025’s RightInsights event: “RightCapital was probably the easiest integration that we've had to date. We have done probably 15 different data migrations over the last four years. It can be really complex at times, but it truly was a click of a button with RightCapital.”

Some MoneyGuide reviewers on G2 comment on the difficulty of getting started. This otherwise positive 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 the sales team and test drive RightCapital during a 14-day free trial.

If you're a MoneyGuide user looking to move over, learn about our cutting-edge OCR solution to automate financial plan transitions from the MoneyGuide platform to RightCapital here.