What to use instead of Portfolio Visualizer

The product

Portfolio Visualizer is five calculators behind one login: an allocation backtester with fund history going back to 1972, Monte Carlo simulation, an optimiser with an efficient frontier and Black-Litterman, Fama-French factor regression, and tactical allocation models. Almost nobody uses all five, and which one you use decides whether anything below is of any interest.

Our card on Portfolio Visualizer carries the pricing and coverage, verified against the vendor's own pricing page on 13 September 2026. The shape of it: free with no login, Basic at 30 dollars a month and Pro at 55 — both billed annually only. There is no month-to-month option, which is the whole of the problem for a tool a lot of people open twice a year and then not again until something changes.

Three things worth correcting before going further, because all three come up every time this is discussed:

• It did not become paid in 2024. Archived copies of the pricing page go back to April 2020. What happened in 2024 is that SRL Global acquired the site and rebuilt it, which is when a lot of people noticed limits that had been there for years.
• The ten-year cap is not on everything. It applies to the ticker backtest — the module most people arrive for, which is why it is the one they hit. The asset-class allocation backtest is not capped that way: a free session still returns the full series from January 1972. If your question is what a 60/40 would have done, the free tier answers it in full and nothing below is of any use to you.
• What free actually withholds is saving and export. The vendor's own footnote grants 50 stored models to Basic and 150 to Pro, and none below; portfolios cap at 15 assets and the current month-to-date is excluded.

So the honest question is not "what replaces Portfolio Visualizer". It is "which of the five was I using, and does it have a free permanent home". For three of them it does, and for one of them the answer is that you were never being charged for it in the first place.

What to use instead

The allocation backtest. Portfolio Charts is the closest thing and it is free — any asset mix, inflation-adjusted, back to 1970, and charted in twelve home countries' own currencies, which is a thing Portfolio Visualizer does not do at all. The trade is resolution: Portfolio Visualizer computes from month-end balances and Portfolio Charts works on annual data, so a question about a particular quarter was already unanswerable and is now more so.

The withdrawal plan. FI Calc replays twelve withdrawal strategies against every US cycle since 1871, free and with no account; cFIREsim is the older tool doing the same job, and running both is a reasonable sanity check rather than a duplicate. Neither is a second copy of the other's answer, and where they disagree it is usually the assumptions rather than the arithmetic.

The whole-life plan. If what you actually wanted from the Monte Carlo was a life rather than an allocation, ProjectionLab models it as milestones and cash flows and Boldin models the US tax, Social Security and Medicare side year by year — both things Portfolio Visualizer has never done. Both have free tiers and both sell an annual plan. FIREproof does the withdrawal and Monte Carlo work with the tax code attached — US, Canada, the UK and Spain — and is the one tool on this page you can rent for a single month, at 10 dollars, which is the specific thing the subject does not offer.

Doing it yourself. bt is the one that matches the job exactly: an MIT Python library for backtesting allocation and rebalancing rules, composed from algos over a frame of prices, with no cap on assets, history or saved models because there is nothing to save it to but your own disk. VectorBT if the point is sweeping hundreds of parameter combinations rather than testing one policy — see backtesting frameworks for the rest.

The factor regression. Testfolio does it free — Fama-French three and five factor, Carhart, q-factor and AQR, up to six at a time, with t-statistics and adjusted R-squared reported. This is the module every comparison of Portfolio Visualizer still calls irreplaceable, including, until recently, this page.

The optimiser. Nothing. That is the subject of the next section and it is the reason this page does not tell everybody to cancel.

What you give up

The optimiser. Efficient frontier, Black-Litterman, rolling optimisation. Nothing in this catalogue does it, and no combination of things in this catalogue adds up to it — testfolio, which answers most of the rest of this page, marks Black-Litterman "not currently offered" in its own comparison. If the optimiser is why you opened Portfolio Visualizer, the annual plan is the cheap answer and everything above is a distraction.

Custom factors, and factor work at fund level. Testfolio's free tier caps factor regression at six factors and sells custom ones on its paid plans. If your work is fund-level factor attribution rather than portfolio-level, check the specific screen you use before deciding this page applies to you.

One consistent set of numbers across all five. This is the loss people underestimate. Portfolio Visualizer's modules share one data set, one inflation series and one set of return definitions. Split the work across Portfolio Charts at annual resolution since 1970, FI Calc on cycles since 1871, and a Python library fed from whatever provider you have, and you have three start dates, three definitions of a real return and three rounding conventions. Two of them disagreeing about a 60/40 portfolio's worst decade is normal and is not a bug in either.

A licence to use the output in work you are paid for. Basic is licensed for personal and educational use and only Pro covers commercial use, so a consultant or an adviser was never on the free tier to begin with. Check that question on any substitute before putting its output in front of somebody who is paying you: of the five above, bt is the only one that answers it in a licence file you can read.

Fund history to 1972 with backfills. Extending a fund back past its inception using its asset class is a feature, not a rounding error, and the free tools mostly do not offer it. What you feed bt is whatever your data provider actually has.

Migration notes

Name the module before shopping. Open the tool and look at which of the five you last used. Almost everyone answers "the backtester", which is the one with several free substitutes — and the people who answer "the optimiser" have just saved themselves an afternoon.

Compare start dates before comparing results. Portfolio Charts is annual since 1970, FI Calc and cFIREsim run cycles since 1871, Portfolio Visualizer backtests to 1972 with asset-class backfills, and a Python backtest starts wherever your data does. A number that looks wrong against the one you remember is usually a different window, not a different calculation. Rerun the old analysis on the new tool's window before concluding anything.

Export the saved models first, if you have any. Saving is a paid feature, so the stored models are exactly what lapses when the subscription does. The export formats on the card are CSV, Excel and PDF; take them before the renewal date rather than after.

"Free" is not one thing here. FI Calc, cFIREsim and Portfolio Charts are free with no account and no upsell. ProjectionLab and Boldin run free tiers that lead to annual plans of 129 and 144 dollars. bt is MIT and yours permanently, and costs an afternoon of learning a dataframe instead — which for a once-or-twice-a-year question is a worse trade than it looks.