Stock Portfolio Trackers

Two facts eliminate more of this listing than any preference you have, and both come before price: whether the tracker can import from your broker, and whether it computes a capital gain your revenue authority recognises. Automatic broker connections are broadest in the US and Canada, thinner in the UK and Australia, and in continental Europe usually limited to a handful of large neo-brokers. Check your own broker by name first. No plan tier fixes a missing connection.

• Tax reporting in a named country — Sharesight.
• Free, open source, your own server — Ghostfolio or Wealthfolio if you want it local-only.
• Dividend income and a forward calendar — Snowball Analytics, DivvyDiary or Stock Events.
• Everything you own, property and cash included — Kubera.
• A free mobile tracker for a handful of positions — Delta or getquin.

What actually decides the choice

Feature lists in this category are nearly identical, and nearly irrelevant. What separates these products is geography, arithmetic and where your credentials sit.

Broker import coverage. The single most expensive thing about a tracker is typing into it. Automatic connections are widest in the US and Canada, where a handful of aggregation APIs cover the large brokers; they are patchier in the UK and Australia, and in continental Europe they generally reach a short list of neo-brokers and stop. Everything outside that list is a CSV upload — where the format changes when the broker redesigns its statement — or hand entry. Check your own broker by name on the vendor's supported list before you check anything else. No plan tier fixes a missing connection.

The tax jurisdiction it was built for. A capital gains calculation is not a localisation setting; it is a different algorithm per country. The UK pools identical shares into a Section 104 holding and overrides it with same-day and 30-day matching rules. Australia discounts a gain by 50% once the parcel is a year old, and carries franking credits alongside. Canada wants adjusted cost base and disallows a superficial loss inside 30 days. Germany taxes an accumulating fund before you sell it, through the Vorabpauschale — for 2026 a basis rate of 3.2% applied to 70% of it, against a €1,000 tax-free allowance. A tracker computing one of these correctly is not one release away from the others, which is why the products that do tax seriously name five or six countries and offer everyone else a generic gains summary.

Which return number it reports. See below. This is the field most likely to make you believe something untrue about your own portfolio.

How the free tier is capped. In this category the cap is holdings, not days or features — often around ten positions, sometimes one portfolio. That is a real product for an index investor and useless to anyone with a long tail of individual names. Paid tiers cluster between $7 and $25 a month; the net-worth-first products sit well above that, annual-only, near $250 a year, because they price against the size of the balance sheet rather than the number of tickers.

Whether it holds your credentials. A cloud tracker with broker linking holds a connection to your accounts through a third-party aggregator. Open-source trackers — self-hosted on your own server, or local-first on your own machine — do not, and pay for it with manual imports and no automatic corporate actions. This is a genuine trade, not a purity argument.

What it does with corporate actions and currency. Splits, spin-offs, mergers, return-of-capital distributions and ETF reinvestments are where a cost basis quietly goes wrong, and where a cheap tracker is cheap. If you hold assets in more than one currency, ask separately whether the tracker reports currency gain as its own line — a portfolio up in dollars can be flat in euros, and one number hides that.

TWR, MWR, XIRR: three labels, sometimes three answers

Vendors are inconsistent here in a way that matters, because these are different quantities and they are all called "return".

Time-weighted return (TWR) removes the effect of your deposits and withdrawals. It measures the holdings, not your behaviour, and it is what fund managers are judged on. German-influenced products often call it TTWROR — "true time-weighted rate of return" — which is the same idea computed off a valuation at each cash flow.

Money-weighted return (MWR) weights the return by how much money was actually invested and when. It measures you, including whether you happened to buy in March 2020.

XIRR is not a third concept. It is the money-weighted return computed from dated cash flows; IRR assumes even periods, XIRR uses the actual dates. A tracker showing "IRR", "XIRR", "money-weighted" or "dollar-weighted" is showing the same family of number.

"Simple return" and "annualised return" are neither, and are defined per vendor. Some annualise by weighting each dollar of capital by how long it has been invested; others divide by elapsed years. Read the help page before you compare two products' headline percentages — the disagreement is usually definitional, not a bug.

The practical rule: if you are asking "is this strategy any good", you want time-weighted. If you are asking "what did I actually earn", you want money-weighted. A tracker that offers only one is not wrong; it has picked a question, and you should know which.

Four jobs hiding behind one interface

Tracking is the base job: consolidate several brokers into one position, price it daily, and show allocation and performance. Judge these on import coverage and on corporate-action handling.

Dividends is a different product wearing the same UI. The buyer wants a forward calendar, per-position yield on cost, projected annual income, payout growth and withholding tax — none of which a good general tracker necessarily has. This job also brings a research burden the others do not: the dividend database has to be right, including special dividends, cuts and non-US payment schedules.

Tax is the job with the highest cost to the vendor and the highest switching cost to you. It requires jurisdiction-specific gains logic, a full transaction history you may have to backfill by hand, and an output format an accountant or a filing portal accepts. Trackers that do this well charge for it and restrict it to named countries.

Net worth is not a portfolio job at all. It counts property, private holdings, pensions, vehicles, cash and debt, and its output is one number over time, not a per-position return. The products built for it are priced for people with an estate to watch rather than a watchlist, and they are usually weak precisely where the first three jobs are strong.

Nothing useful comes from ranking a dividend calendar against a net-worth dashboard. Decide which of the four you are buying, then compare only inside it — and check your broker and your country first, because those two facts eliminate more of the listing below than any preference you have.

Where this category connects

The automatic broker connections these products depend on are not usually their own: almost every tracker here buys them from one of the vendors in brokerage account aggregation APIs, which is why two trackers support such different broker lists and why the fix for a missing one is rarely a support ticket. If what you want is an analysis of how you traded rather than what you hold, that is a different product — see trading journals.