Buyer’s Guides
Comparisons of the tools people actually use to build portfolios and plan retirement. We build one of the tools in these guides, so treat our own entry with appropriate suspicion — but the competitor entries are written to be accurate, including the places where a rival does something better than we do.
Best Free Portfolio Optimization Software
Five optimizers compared — Portfolio Lab, Portfolio Visualizer, Testfol.io, Portfolio Charts, and Efficient Frontier — on optimization methods, data sources, asset coverage, and what each one costs once you hit its limits.
Best Free Monte Carlo Retirement Calculator
Portfolio Lab, cFIREsim, FICalc, FireCalc, and Fidelity compared on simulation quality, whether they use historical or forward-looking returns, and how each handles fat tails and sequence risk.