Vaulted vs Monarch Money — Privacy Comparison 2026

Published March 19, 2026

Monarch Money is the finance app most people switched to after Mint shut down. It's polished, well-designed, and handles budgeting and net worth in one place. It's also $14.99/month and requires you to connect your bank accounts through Plaid. If those two things don't bother you, Monarch is a solid product.

But if you're specifically trying to track your net worth— not your daily coffee spend — you might be paying for a lot of features you don't need, while handing over more access than necessary.

What Monarch Money does well

To be fair: Monarch is genuinely good. It syncs your bank accounts automatically, categorizes transactions, tracks budgets, shows net worth trends, and has a clean collaborative mode for couples. If you want a single app to manage your entire financial life with minimal manual work, Monarch is worth considering.

The automatic sync is the killer feature. Your balances update without you doing anything. For people who want real-time visibility into their finances, that's valuable.

Where the trade-offs hit

Monarch's auto-sync model requires persistent access to your bank accounts via Plaid. That means:

• Plaid has a token allowing ongoing access to your financial accounts
• Your transaction history, account balances, and spending patterns flow through Plaid's servers
• Monarch's servers store your financial data to power the dashboard
• You're paying $14.99/month for this access indefinitely

For net worth tracking specifically, you only need a balance update once a month. You don't need daily transaction feeds. The privacy cost of persistent bank access is real; the benefit for net worth tracking is marginal.

Vaulted vs Monarch Money — feature comparison

Who should use which

Use Monarch if:you want to track your full financial life — budgets, spending categories, subscriptions — in one place and the subscription cost and privacy trade-off are acceptable. It's genuinely good software for that use case.

Use Vaulted if:you care specifically about net worth tracking and don't want to hand over bank credentials or pay a monthly fee. Spend 2-3 minutes per month updating your balances and you get trend charts, asset breakdowns, and a clean net worth history — with no one else having access to your financial data.

How Vaulted works

Vaulted is a Progressive Web App that runs entirely in your browser. Add your assets and liabilities, take a monthly snapshot, and watch your net worth trend over time. Your data is stored in IndexedDB — no server, no account, no subscription.

It installs on your phone or desktop and works offline. Export your data as JSON for backups. Import it on another device. That's the whole product.

Try it

Try Vaulted free at vaultedworth.com — no sign-up, no credit card, no bank login. Or read the source code on GitHub.