Wealthfront, on the other hand, assigns a small (5%) portion of your money to Natural Resources or Real Estate. Their Path planning tool helps you compare your projected retirement income against your current spending habits so you’ll be able to see whether you can maintain your lifestyle later. Both Betterment and Wealthfront run on intuitive sites that are easy to understand and navigate. When it comes to giving financial advice and customer service, it appears that Betterment has thought through a lot of the features investors need. Betterment is also a similar online investment platform that offers goal based savings. Most support questions posed on the Wealthfront Twitter account are answered relatively quickly, though we saw one that took more than a week before there was a response. Betterment: 0.25% – 0.40% annual fee; Wealthfront: 0.25% annual fee; Betterment offers two tiers of service. This is where the differences between Betterment vs Wealthfront start to really show. Management Fees: Wealthfront charges management fees between 0% – 0.25%. Ed is … Wealthfront charges the same 0.25% annual advisory fee that Betterment charges, but it also charges a fund fee of 0.07% to 0.16%, depending on the funds your money goes into. Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Wealthfront and Betterment were very close across our rankings. But Betterment has more advanced functionality such as direct real-time contact with financial advisors via encrypted text messaging, spousal tax loss harvesting, and tax coordinated portfolios. Their offerings in terms of features are almost similar and standard to all Robo-advisor designs. In the robo-advisor space, there are few firms that can undercut these two on price while offering comparable service. Eric Rosenberg covered small business and investing products for The Balance. Wealthfront is a member of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) and client accounts are protected up to a maximum of $500,000. The site actually has an article on why SIPC insurance doesn’t protect investors in the way they think it does, but the company still holds the coverage. Their trades are cleared at RBC Correspondent Services, a Canadian company that focuses on wealth management and financial advisors rather than clearing firms that serve broker/dealers with very active traders. Wealthfront has comparable management fees of 0.25%. Betterment has two plans available: a Digital plan, which assesses an annual fee of 0.25% with a $0 minimum balance, and a Premium plan, with a 0.40% annual fee and a $100,000 minimum balance. Features & Tools. Betterment vs Wealthfront: Other Features. Betterment allocates your money exclusively across stocks and bonds. Many of the robo-advisors also provided us with in-person demonstrations of their platforms. Wealthfront vs. Betterment: At a Glance Wealthfront is an online financial advisor based in California’s Silicon Valley. If you have more than $100,000 in your Wealthfront investing account, you can choose a stock portfolio rather than portfolios of ETFs. Otherwise, Wealthfront offers a more or less identical investing service to Betterment. Betterment offers checkings and savings account with an annual APY of up to 2.38%. You can expect the same annual advisory fee of 0.25%, which is a competitive rate for online financial platforms. Betterment vs. Wealthfront. Accessed Sept. 5, 2020. Betterment has no minimum deposit, whereas Wealthfront's minimum deposit is a $500 minimum. That said, Wealthfront provides a full whitepaper that shows how robust their methodology is in dealing with taxable events.