Name: Keep the Diff
Author: Lee

Empower, which used to be called Personal Capital, is one of the best known free money apps. It shows all your accounts in one place, which is why it often appears in lists of Mint replacements. If you landed here, you probably want something that does less, or something that does not read your accounts at all.

What Empower does

According to its App Store listing, Empower lets you see all your accounts in one place, check your investment allocation, plan for retirement with scenario comparison, work on debt and an emergency fund, and set and track budgets. The app is free to download. The listing says advisory services are separate, and that they are provided for a fee based on the assets managed. The app is listed for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac.

That is a strong set of tools if your question is "how am I doing across everything I own?" Net worth, retirement projections and investment views are what Empower is built around.

Why people look for an alternative

You do not want your accounts connected

An app that shows all your accounts in one place needs access to them. The dashboard fills itself in from that access. If you would rather not share that access with another company, you want an app that works from numbers you type. Our list of budget apps that don't connect to your bank covers the options.

You want to save more, and measuring is only half of that

Net worth and retirement planning describe where you stand. They do not give you a moment of credit when you skip a purchase this afternoon. People who want that feeling often need a different kind of tool. Expense tracker vs savings tracker explains the split.

The dashboard is more than you need

A complete picture of your finances is a lot of screens. If you just want to know how much you kept this month, a single number is easier to look at.

What Keep the Diff does instead

Keep the Diff tracks one subtraction: planned spend minus actual spend equals the Diff. When you decide not to buy something, or to buy a cheaper version, you log what you were ready to spend and what you actually spent. The difference is money you kept, and it adds up by week, by month and toward a goal with a photo.

There is no bank connection and no account needed to log. Keep the Diff never sees a balance or a transaction. It has no streaks, so a missed week does not reset anything.

Checked October 2026. Confirm details on each maker's site.

	Empower	Keep the Diff
What it is for	Seeing and planning across all your accounts	Recording money you chose not to spend
Accounts	Linked, so the dashboard can show them	None connected
Retirement and investments	Yes: planning tools and advisory services	No
Budgets	Yes	No budget to set
Goals with a photo	Not listed in the App Store description	Yes. One on Free, more on Premium.
Cost	App is free to download. Advisory services carry a fee based on assets managed.	Logging is free. Premium adds sync, goals, widgets and more.

The honest comparison

Empower shows your whole financial picture. Keep the Diff shows one number. It cannot tell you your net worth, your investment mix or where your money went.
Empower can help plan retirement. Keep the Diff does not do planning of that kind.
Empower works from your accounts. Keep the Diff works from what you tell it, which means it takes a few seconds of your time for each decision.
Empower is built for tracking what you have. Keep the Diff is built for noticing what you did not spend.

Some people use both: a dashboard for the big picture, and a tiny log for the daily choices. They do not conflict.

If you want to stop linking accounts altogether

Moving off a connected app takes about an evening. Disconnect the accounts in the app you are leaving, then decide what you still want to measure. A spreadsheet handles net worth if you update it once a month. For daily saving, a simple log is enough. How to save money without a budget walks through the method.

Doing it in Keep the Diff

Open the app, tap to add a decision, and enter two numbers. Choose a goal and the total counts toward it. The free plan logs without limits. Premium adds sync across your devices, multiple goals with photos, widgets, the watch app and recurring Diffs, which suit a canceled subscription that saves the same amount every month.

Keep the Diff is on the App Store and Google Play, and there are downloads for Mac, Windows and Linux on the download section of the home page. You can also try it in your browser first. Premium pricing is on the Premium page.

An Empower alternative that never sees your accounts