Every few months, someone on a UK forum asks "what should I use to track my net worth?" and gets the same three answers in different costumes: a spreadsheet, an open-banking app, or a manual tracker. Each is genuinely right for somebody. Here is the actual trade-off, including where our own tool fits and — just as usefully — where it doesn't.
See OwnWorth with example data Compare the UK options →"Tracking money" is two different jobs that get confused constantly. Spending tracking is daily: transactions, categories, budgets, "where did it go this month". It needs bank connections, because typing transactions by hand is misery. Net worth tracking is monthly or quarterly: pensions, ISAs, property, cash, what it all adds up to and which way it's moving. It doesn't need bank connections at all, because the numbers that matter move slowly and most of them — pensions, property, private investments — aren't in your current account anyway.
If you want the first job done well, stop reading and get Emma or Snoop: open banking is the right tool for spending, and they're good at it. The rest of this page is about the second job.
Free, infinitely flexible, yours forever. Half of UK personal-finance forums run on lovingly-maintained spreadsheets and they are nothing to apologise for. The honest costs: you type every price update yourself or fight yfinance formulas that break; pension units, Section 104 pooling for capital gains, and a partner's unequal property share are all possible but each one is an afternoon of formula-writing; and the whole thing is one mis-dragged cell away from quietly lying to you. If you enjoy the maintenance, keep the spreadsheet. If you've stopped updating it — that's the tell.
Emma, Snoop and similar connect your banks and cards and update themselves. For spending, excellent. For net worth, the coverage problem appears exactly where your wealth actually is: workplace pensions mostly have no API to connect to, property has none, private company shares and angel investments have none. So the biggest numbers end up manually entered into an app designed around automation — the worst of both worlds. This is also the category with a shutdown habit: Money Dashboard closed in 2023, Yolt before it, and Moneyhub closed its consumer app in August 2026 and deleted customer data. Automation you depend on is a dependency like any other.
Enter what you own once; the tool does the valuing, the arithmetic and the history. Holdings update by live market prices (you enter units, not values), pensions track by exact fund units, property carries your own valuation and your actual ownership share. No bank connection means nothing to breach and no dependency on a connection API surviving — the trade is a few minutes of updates a month. This is the category OwnWorth is in, alongside others we list honestly on the comparison page.
Households, properly. Two people, four pension pots, a 60/40 house, a child's Junior ISA — the household is the unit, sliceable by person. Pensions by units, not stale totals. Section 104 pooling for UK capital gains, per person, per wrapper — the calculator is free if you just want that. Shown working everywhere: every number traces to what you entered, every projection states its assumptions and gives a range instead of a promise. £5.99/month, 30-day free trial, no card up front.
And where it doesn't fit: if you want automatic spending categorisation, we don't do it and won't — that's Emma's job. If you love your spreadsheet and it's up to date, you may not need anyone's app.
Only if it removes work you actually feel: price updates, pension unit maths, CGT pooling, the household split. If your spreadsheet does all that and you maintain it happily, no. If your spreadsheet is three months stale, the answer is telling you something.
Monthly is plenty; quarterly is fine. Market-priced holdings update themselves in OwnWorth — what needs your hand is the slow stuff: a property revaluation, a pension statement, a new investment.
Ask this of every tool — Moneyhub's users learned it the hard way. OwnWorth has full export (JSON backup and CSV), so your record is yours to take. Our security page says plainly what we can and cannot see.
Try it with example data — no signup Free FIRE number calculator →
OwnWorth is a record-keeping and planning tool, not financial, legal or tax advice, and we are not regulated to give any. Product observations about other tools are from their public websites and materials, current August 2026 — if we've got something wrong, email us and we'll correct it.