12 Best Wealthfront Alternatives in 2026 (Fees Compared)

The best Wealthfront alternative depends on which part of Wealthfront you are replacing. If you want the same hands-off, automated portfolio at a similar price, Betterment is the closest like-for-like swap. If cost is the whole point, Fidelity Go charges nothing below $25,000 and Vanguard Digital Advisor runs about 0.15% a year, both cheaper than Wealthfront’s 0.25%. If you want a human on the phone, Betterment Premium and Empower do that and Wealthfront does not. And if you came here from an older list: Wealthsimple has not served U.S. clients since 2021, and Personal Capital is now Empower. This guide is information, not financial advice.

Disclosure: The Impact Investor earns affiliate commissions from some of the companies covered on this site, at no extra cost to you. That never changes which platform we recommend, and no company paid to be included here or reviewed this article before publication.

What are the best Wealthfront alternatives in 2026?

Eleven platforms are worth comparing against Wealthfront, and only three of them undercut it on price. Wealthfront charges 0.25% a year with a $500 minimum on its Automated Investing account, so any alternative has to beat that number, beat the minimum, or give you something Wealthfront withholds, which in practice means access to a human advisor. Everything in the table below was checked against each provider’s own pricing page or fee schedule in August 2026.

Platform	Annual cost	Minimum	Human advisor	Best for
Wealthfront (the benchmark)	0.25%	$500	No	Tax-loss harvesting and direct indexing
Betterment	0.25%, or $5/month below $24,000 without $200/month recurring deposits	$0	Yes, on Premium (0.65%)	The closest like-for-like swap
Fidelity Go	$0 under $25,000; 0.35% at $25,000 and above	$0 to open, $10 to invest	Coaching included at $25,000+	Small balances
Vanguard Digital Advisor	About 0.15% net	$100	No (Personal Advisor is separate)	The lowest ongoing fee
Schwab Intelligent Portfolios	$0 advisory fee	$5,000	No (Premium tier is separate)	Headline price, with a catch
Robinhood Strategies	0.25%, capped at $250/year for Gold members	$50	No	Larger balances if you already pay for Gold
M1	$3/month platform fee, waived at $10,000 in assets	$100	No	Choosing your own holdings
Acorns	$3, $6 or $12 a month by tier	$5	No	Round-ups and first accounts
SoFi Automated Investing	0.25%	$1	Yes, complimentary CFP access	Banking and investing in one app
Axos Managed Portfolios	0.24% above $500; $1/month below	$500	No	Banking customers already at Axos
E*TRADE Core Portfolios	0.30%	$500	No	Investors already inside Morgan Stanley
Empower (formerly Personal Capital)	0.49% to 0.89% by balance	$100,000	Yes, dedicated advisors at $250,000+	Six-figure portfolios wanting real advice

Which Wealthfront alternative is actually cheapest?

Vanguard Digital Advisor is cheapest as a percentage, and Fidelity Go is cheapest in dollars until you cross $25,000. Percentage fees and flat monthly fees cross over at a specific balance, and that crossover is the single most useful number on this page. The arithmetic below is ours, using each platform’s published rate applied to a plain taxable balance.

Platform	Cost on $5,000	Cost on $25,000	Cost on $100,000
Fidelity Go	$0	$87.50	$350
Vanguard Digital Advisor	$7.50	$37.50	$150
Schwab Intelligent Portfolios	Not available below $5,000	$0 in fees, plus cash drag	$0 in fees, plus cash drag
Wealthfront	$12.50	$62.50	$250
Betterment	$60 (flat $5/month)	$62.50	$250
Robinhood Strategies (Gold)	$12.50 + $50 Gold	$62.50 + $50 Gold	$250 capped, + $50 Gold
Acorns Bronze	$36	$36	$36
M1	$36, or $0 at $10,000+	$0	$0

Two things fall out of that table. A flat monthly fee costs far more on a small balance than on a large one: Acorns Bronze at $36 a year is 0.72% of $5,000 but 0.036% of $100,000, and M1’s $3 monthly fee disappears entirely once you hold $10,000. And Betterment only matches Wealthfront’s price once you clear $24,000 or set up $200 a month in recurring deposits. Below that it bills $5 a month, which is more than Wealthfront would charge on the same balance.

Is Betterment better than Wealthfront?

Betterment is better if you want the option of talking to a person, and Wealthfront is better if you want the deepest tax machinery. They charge the same 0.25% headline fee and both do automatic rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting, so the decision comes down to two differences. Betterment sells a Premium tier at 0.65% that includes unlimited access to certified financial planners, with a $100,000 balance requirement. Wealthfront has no human-advice tier at any price.

The second difference runs the other way. Wealthfront’s S&P 500 Direct account holds the individual stocks in the index rather than a fund, harvests losses at the stock level, and charges 0.09% a year. Wealthfront cut its minimum from $20,000 to $5,000 on June 10, 2025, which puts stock-level harvesting within reach of an ordinary balance for the first time. Betterment has nothing equivalent. Our full Betterment review and our Betterment alternatives guide go through the account types in detail.

Is Schwab Intelligent Portfolios really free?

Schwab charges no advisory fee, but it requires every portfolio to hold cash, and that cash is the price. Schwab Intelligent Portfolios has a $5,000 minimum and a mandatory cash allocation that has run roughly 6% to 10% of the portfolio. That cash sits in the Schwab Bank sweep, which paid about 0.45% APY as of May 2026, well under what a high-yield account was paying at the same time.

On a $50,000 portfolio, an 8% cash allocation parks $4,000 outside the market. Whether that costs you more than Wealthfront’s $125 annual fee depends on what the market does, which is the honest answer rather than a tidy one. The structural point is simpler: a fee you can see is easier to plan around than a drag you cannot.

Is Vanguard or Fidelity a cheaper Wealthfront alternative?

Both are cheaper than Wealthfront, at opposite ends of the balance range. Vanguard Digital Advisor costs about 0.15% a year net, takes a $100 minimum, and waives the advisory fee for the first 90 days. That is the lowest ongoing percentage fee among the major robo-advisors, and it is a little under two-thirds of what Wealthfront charges. It buys you Vanguard index funds and nothing else, which is the trade.

Fidelity Go charges nothing at all below $25,000, then 0.35% above it, so it is the cheapest option for a starter balance and the most expensive of the big three once you cross the line. There is no account minimum to open, and $10 gets your money invested. At $25,000 the fee kicks in but so does unlimited coaching with a Fidelity advisor, which Wealthfront does not offer at any balance. If you are picking between fund families on values grounds rather than price, our guides to Vanguard ESG funds and Fidelity ESG funds compare the actual holdings.

Is Robinhood Strategies a real robo-advisor?

Yes, and it is the newest genuine competitor on this list. Robinhood launched Robinhood Strategies in March 2025, a managed portfolio service separate from its commission-free trading app. It charges 0.25% a year, matching Wealthfront, takes a $50 minimum, and rebalances and harvests losses the way the older robo-advisors do. Holding individual stocks alongside ETFs requires $500.

The interesting part is the fee cap. For Robinhood Gold members, who pay $5 a month or $50 a year, the management fee is capped at $250 a year. Past $100,000 invested, the marginal management fee is therefore zero, which no other platform here matches. Below roughly $20,000 the Gold subscription costs more than it saves, so the cap only pays off for larger balances.

What are the best alternatives to the Wealthfront Cash Account?

The Wealthfront Cash Account’s real selling point is not its rate, it is that deposits are swept across up to 32 partner banks for up to $8 million in FDIC insurance, or $16 million on a joint account, against the standard $250,000 per bank. Wealthfront quoted 3.30% APY as of January 30, 2026, and from March 2, 2026 added 0.25% for clients directing at least $1,000 a month in deposits into a Cash Account alongside a funded investing account.

Deposit rates move whenever the Federal Reserve moves, and every article quoting one is out of date the week it publishes, so check the provider’s own rate page before you switch rather than trusting a number printed here or anywhere else. What is worth comparing is the structure. Betterment Cash Reserve and SoFi both sweep to partner-bank networks with multi-million-dollar coverage; a plain high-yield savings account at a single bank stops at $250,000. If banking is the real reason you are leaving, our roundups of banks like Chime and the best banks for low-income earners cover fee-free checking rather than robo-advisors.

What about Acorns, SoFi, M1, Axos and E*TRADE?

Five platforms in the table above deserve a sentence of their own, because the table cannot show who each one is designed for.

Acorns is the round-up app: it rounds card purchases up to the nearest dollar and invests the difference, which is how most of its users start. The flat subscription of $3, $6 or $12 a month is the thing to watch, since on a few hundred dollars it is an enormous percentage and on $100,000 it is almost nothing. Its sustainable portfolio is the reason it appears on this site at all.

SoFi is the one-login option. Automated investing costs 0.25% with a $1 minimum, and the account comes with complimentary access to a certified financial planner, which is unusual at that price. What SoFi is really selling is everything else on the same app: checking and savings, loans, a credit card, insurance.

M1 allows you to build the portfolio yourself. You define a “pie” of stocks and ETFs with target weights and M1 automates the buying, the fractional shares and the rebalancing, so you get automation without giving up the selection. A $3 monthly platform fee applies below $10,000 in assets.

Axos Managed Portfolios charges 0.24% on balances above $500 and $1 a month below, so it is priced just under Wealthfront and is mostly worth it if you already bank with Axos. Note that the earlier version of this page claimed Axos charges no management fee. It does.

E*TRADE Core Portfolios, now part of Morgan Stanley, is the most expensive plain robo here at 0.30% with a $500 minimum. It makes sense if your other accounts already sit at E*TRADE and you want the automated portfolio in the same place, and very little sense otherwise. Our guide to E*TRADE automatic investing covers the setup.

What do these platforms actually invest in?

Nearly all of them build the same thing: a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds and ETFs spread across U.S. stocks, international stocks, bonds and sometimes real estate, with the allocation set by a short risk questionnaire and held on target by automatic rebalancing. That is what automated investing means in practice, and it is why the fee matters so much. When two platforms hold broadly similar index funds in broadly similar proportions, the cost of the wrapper is one of the few differences you control.

Two exceptions are worth knowing. Fidelity Go builds portfolios from Fidelity Flex mutual funds, which carry no expense ratio of their own, so the headline advisory fee is closer to your all-in cost than it is elsewhere. M1 is not a robo-advisor at all in the usual sense: you assemble your own “pie” of stocks and ETFs and M1 automates the buying and rebalancing, so the diversification decisions stay with you. If you want your portfolio screened on values rather than cost, our guides to socially responsible mutual funds and ESG ETFs cover what those funds actually hold.

Which account types can you move over?

Every platform on this page supports a taxable brokerage account and the main IRA types, so the question is only whether it supports the specific account you hold. Check that before you open anything, because a platform can be the cheapest on the page and still be unable to take your account.

Three differences stand out. Wealthfront runs its own 529 college savings plan, sponsored by the State of Nevada, whose contribution ceiling rose to $575,000 per beneficiary on January 30, 2026, and most robo-advisors have no 529 at all, so college savings is a genuine reason to stay. Fidelity offers a managed HSA through Fidelity Go on the same terms as its taxable accounts, free below $25,000 and 0.35% above, which no other platform here matches. And Acorns puts custodial accounts for children behind its $12-a-month Gold tier rather than offering them on the entry plan.

Which Wealthfront alternatives give you a human advisor?

Four of the platforms here will put you in front of a person, at four different prices. SoFi is the cheapest route, bundling complimentary access to a certified financial planner with a 0.25% automated account and a $1 minimum. Fidelity Go includes coaching sessions once you hold $25,000, inside its 0.35% fee. Betterment Premium charges 0.65% for unlimited planner access with a $100,000 balance. Empower, the wealth-management arm formerly called Personal Capital, charges 0.49% to 0.89% for its advisory services depending on balance, takes a $100,000 minimum, and assigns two dedicated advisors at $250,000 and above.

Wealthfront offers none of this. It has never sold human advice, and that is the single clearest reason to leave it rather than a fee argument. Our review of Empower’s sustainable portfolios covers what the advisory service actually invests in.

Which alternative offers the widest range of products?

SoFi covers the most ground, and Wealthfront covers more than most people realize. Before switching it helps to write down which Wealthfront products you actually use, because the platform provides more than one thing: automated investing, S&P 500 Direct and Nasdaq-100 Direct portfolios, an automated bond portfolio, the cash account, the Nevada-sponsored 529, and a portfolio line of credit that lets clients with at least $25,000 in a taxable automated account borrow roughly 30% of the portfolio value without selling anything. Replacing four of those with one platform is a different exercise from replacing a single ETF portfolio.

SoFi is the widest single answer, since it sells investing, checking and savings, personal and home loans, a credit card and insurance under one login. Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard are full brokerages, so self-directed trading, mutual funds, retirement accounts and higher advice tiers all sit alongside the robo product. M1 pairs investing with margin borrowing, priced at 5.65% as of February 2, 2026, though its Owner’s Rewards credit card closed in May 2025 and has not been replaced. Acorns and Robinhood Strategies are the narrowest, which is not a criticism if a single automated portfolio is all you were using.

Which alternatives have the best planning tools?

Fee tables answer the wrong question for a lot of people. If you are leaving Wealthfront because you cannot see whether you are on track, the feature to compare is the planning layer sitting on top of the portfolio, not the advisory fee underneath it. Wealthfront’s own answer is Path, a projection engine that links your accounts, models retirement, a house or college, and tells you what the current savings rate produces. It is the strongest free planning tool of any platform on this page, and it is a reason people stay.

Three alternatives take a different approach to the same job. Betterment builds a goal-based structure around everything you save for, each with its own target date, target amount and allocation, so a house deposit and a retirement pot are not held at the same risk level. Empower’s dashboard is free to use whether or not you pay for the advisory service, and its retirement planner and fee analyzer are the reason most people opened a Personal Capital account in the first place. Fidelity and Vanguard both bundle deep retirement calculators and long-term projection tools into their ordinary brokerage experience at no extra cost.

The pattern is worth noticing before you switch. Automation of the investments themselves has become a commodity, sold at four different price points for what is broadly the same set of index funds, and the planning tools and account types on top are where the platforms now differ. Compare those first and the fee decision usually makes itself.

What happened to Wealthsimple, Personal Capital, SigFig and Altruist?

Four names that appear on most older Wealthfront-alternative lists, including the earlier version of this one, are no longer options for a U.S. investor. We corrected them rather than quietly deleting them, because if you have read them elsewhere you deserve to know why they are gone.

Name	What happened	What to use instead
Wealthsimple	Sold its entire U.S. advisory book to Betterment in 2021 and closed remaining U.S. accounts that June. It is a Canada-only service and has been for five years.	Betterment, which absorbed those clients
Personal Capital	Acquired by Empower and rebranded. The free dashboard is Empower Personal Dashboard; the paid service is Empower Personal Strategy.	Empower, at 0.49% to 0.89% with a $100,000 minimum
SigFig	Rebranded as Tandems in September 2025 and pivoted to selling software to banks and advisors. The retail robo keeps the SigFig name but is now a side business.	Betterment or Fidelity Go for a comparable retail account
Altruist	A custodian for registered investment advisors, used by more than 6,000 advisors as of May 2026. It deliberately runs no direct-to-consumer business, so you cannot open an account yourself.	Any platform on this page, or hire an advisor who custodies at Altruist

Is Wealthfront publicly traded?

Yes. Wealthfront Corporation listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker WLTH on December 12, 2025, and carried a market capitalization of roughly $1.42 billion as of August 3, 2026. It is the only company on this page whose robo-advisory business is the whole listed entity, which makes it the cleanest public proxy for the sector.

The listing followed a failed sale. UBS agreed to buy Wealthfront for $1.4 billion in early 2022 and the two sides mutually terminated the deal that September. Wealthfront’s S-1 reported $88.2 billion in platform assets and more than 1.3 million funded clients as of July 31, 2025. Several other platforms here sit inside listed parents, including Robinhood, SoFi, Charles Schwab and Morgan Stanley, which owns E*TRADE.

What is the Wealthfront controversy?

The SEC censured Wealthfront in December 2018 over false statements about its tax-loss harvesting service. Wealthfront had told clients it monitored every account for transactions that could trigger a wash sale, which cancels the tax benefit of a harvested loss. It did not. Over more than three years, wash sales occurred in at least 31% of accounts enrolled in the strategy.

The same order found Wealthfront had re-tweeted prohibited client testimonials and paid bloggers for referrals without the required disclosures. Wealthfront settled without admitting or denying the findings, agreed to a cease-and-desist, and paid a $250,000 penalty. It was one of the first enforcement actions the SEC brought against a robo-advisor, and it is nearly eight years old. We mention it because it comes up constantly in searches, not because it says much about the service in 2026.

Why would someone switch away from Wealthfront?

Four reasons come up repeatedly, and only one of them is the fee. You want a human advisor, which Wealthfront does not sell at any price. You have a small balance, where Fidelity Go at $0 or Vanguard Digital Advisor at 0.15% simply costs less. You want to choose your own holdings, which is M1’s entire proposition. Or you want banking and investing under one login, which SoFi does and Wealthfront does not.

One mistake is worth avoiding before you move anything. Transferring a taxable account by selling everything and moving cash realizes capital gains and can hand you a tax bill larger than several years of the fee you were trying to escape. Ask the receiving platform for an in-kind ACATS transfer instead, and if the holdings cannot move in kind, ask what will be sold before you sign. Moving an IRA carries no such problem.

How we chose these Wealthfront alternatives

We started from the platforms a Wealthfront customer could realistically move to today, which meant testing every candidate against four questions: is it still operating, is it open to retail customers in the United States, has it been renamed or acquired since the last update, and have its fees or minimums changed. Four names failed that test and moved into the corrections table above rather than staying in the list.

Every fee, minimum and threshold was then read off the provider’s own pricing page, fee schedule or help center in August 2026. Deposit rates were excluded from the comparison table on purpose: they change with the federal funds rate, providers often render them client-side so they cannot be quoted reliably, and a number that is wrong within a month is worse than no number. Cost-per-balance figures are our own arithmetic from the published rates. We hold no position in any company named here, none of them reviewed this article, and nothing in it is financial advice.

Frequently asked questions

Related reading

• Wealthfront’s socially responsible portfolio, reviewed
• M1 Finance review and the Acorns Sustainable Portfolio
• Apps for automatic investing in ETFs
• Best impact investing apps
• E*TRADE alternatives and our Axos Invest review

Last updated August 2026. This guide was rebuilt from the ground up. Four platforms were removed from the recommendation list because a U.S. reader can no longer open an account with them: Wealthsimple, which left the U.S. in 2021; Personal Capital, now Empower; SigFig, which became Tandems in September 2025; and Altruist, which serves advisors rather than consumers. Several figures in the previous version were wrong and have been corrected: M1’s credit card was closed in May 2025 and its margin rate is 5.65% as of February 2026 rather than the 2% to 3.5% quoted; Axos and SoFi both charge advisory fees, 0.24% and 0.25%, where the page said they charged none; Fidelity Go and Vanguard Digital Advisor have $0 and $100 minimums, not the “high account minimums” claimed; and Wealthfront’s cash coverage is up to $8 million, not $1 million. Nothing here is financial advice, and none of it accounts for your own tax position. Fees, minimums and rates change without notice, so confirm any figure with the provider before you move money.