Empower Personal Capital is a rare example of a company that offers fee-based advisory services while also providing a useful free service. Web- and app-based tools provide top-level financial snapshots and tracking, but not enough for specific activities such as budgeting and savings.

Personal Capital, part of Empower Retirement's suite of financial services, is not to be mistaken from the outset as anything more than a wealth management advisor. Indeed, looking at the company's website, it is difficult to distinguish the noise associated with its fee-based services from the value that the company's free services provide. Once inside, however, one can access tracking and investment tools that make budgeting and saving simple. However, as the Personal Capital review indicates, it lacks some things found in the best budgeting apps.

Personal Capital has free accounts for viewing one's net worth, setting a budget, and planning savings. The company makes money when you sign up for its wealth management advisory services. Fees are relatively high, starting at 0.89% for clients managing a minimum of $100,000 (maximum of $1 million). For this fee, you get access to Personal Capital's portfolio funds and a team of financial advisors (two dedicated advisors for portfolios over $200,000) to guide you through your financial journey.

At the heart of Personal Capital's free service is a dashboard view of your synchronized bank and investment accounts that helps you see the big picture of your financial situation and cash flow. The Savings Planner helps you start saving for retirement or an emergency fund, and the Investment Checkup analyzes your portfolio allocation and compares it to Personal Capital's recommendations.

The Fee Analyzer looks at hidden or high fees in linked investment accounts, and the Retirement Planner tells you what is possible. All roads lead to trying out bigger and better personal capital services. For example, after we created our retirement scenario, we were prompted to schedule a free 30-minute call with an advisor.

The inclusion of a basic hierarchy of monthly spending budgets helps flesh out the finance-focused perspective of this service, and the investment tools may complement or confirm what one's investment broker already offers.

Since this service is more focused on aggregation and less on action, it is not surprising that written assistance is thin. There is a pop-up help bot at the bottom of each screen, and you can also leave messages for the agent.

To get started with a free account, just enter your username and email. The free account gives you access to the Personal Capital Dashboard and all its tools.

Next, you answer a few questions about yourself (we skipped this one) that the service uses to enter your retirement and savings recommendations. The process is then simple: add an account, select a financial institution, connect to that institution, and authenticate your account information. We liked the fact that Personal Capital clearly indicates what information you will access from each institution.

Once the service is up and running, they can also add (through integration with Zillow) home values, portfolios, other assets such as cryptocurrency and car loans, and non-digital assets that can be tracked manually such as art, jewelry, and cash. Investment and planning guidance will, of course, depend on how well they are linked and shared.

I liked Personal Capital's clean, logical structure. On the right side of the page, a sliding side panel appears by default, showing net worth, assets, liabilities, and accounts all at once. The rest of the page is divided into various widget blocks that display snapshots of different aspects of your account and the market. Personal Capital is the only service that provides daily account updates upon login (which can also be sent via email).

Personal Capital's budgeting feature appears under the Banking tab and as a widget on the Dashboard page. While this tool is very limited, it is valuable if you want to break down your budget into simple terms. I want to spend X amount of money per month. No more than that. The only thing you can edit is your monthly budget. Everything else is automatically categorized and imported from transaction data. It displays your spending for the past 30 days and compares it to the previous month.

The Savings Planner is different from other services: at Personal Capital, the Savings Planner covers investing for retirement, saving for an emergency fund, and paying down debt. However, it does not help plan savings for vacations or other life events or aspirations.

The mobile app provides a visual snapshot but is not structured in such a way that there are many actionable items. It shows monthly budgets and spending by category, and you can edit your target spending for the month, but that's about it for budgeting. In other words, it functions the same as the web browser, just with slightly different visuals. You can also view cash flow, transactions, net worth, and portfolios.

Personal Capital has an attractive look and some useful tools for viewing assets, but it is not a substitute for DIY-oriented personal finance packages like Mint or Simplifi, or dedicated budgeting software like YNAB. Any of these three packages will do a better job of digging into where your money is going and how much you are spending per week. The only thing you can do with Personal Capital is to tally your budget for transaction expenses for the month. This is a far cry from YNAB's aggressive approach of allocating every available dollar to transactions and future transactions.

Adding accounts was smooth, with the clearest explanation I have seen of what they allow access to and what they allow in return. The dashboard also provides a functional and crisp view of finances and cash flow. Ultimately, however, I found Personal Capital to be focused on showing gorgeous graphs but lacking in practical functionality.