Capitally

Data stays on your device

Capitally is a desktop and mobile portfolio tracker built for serious DIY investors who hold stocks, ETFs, crypto, real estate, options, mortgages, and private investments across multiple accounts. Rather than linking to brokers through Plaid, Capitally imports transactions and balances via CSV files, keeping all data encrypted on your device before anything ever leaves it. The product is made by an independent developer and the app runs on desktop, tablet, and mobile with full feature parity, meaning desktop users and mobile users access the same tools and analysis.

The read-only model means Capitally never holds money, never accesses your broker login credentials, and never watches your accounts in real time. This approach trades real-time syncing for complete control over your data and a built-in privacy guarantee: Capitally cannot see your holdings, your transactions, or which assets you own. You upload a CSV export from your broker's download center or a spreadsheet you've maintained, and Capitally tracks everything from there. The encryption happens on your device before the data is transmitted, which is why Capitally distinguishes itself from both traditional web apps and tools that rely on third-party aggregators.

Bringing in transactions and balances

Getting data into Capitally starts with a CSV export. You can migrate a decade of transaction history from your brokers, paste spreadsheets directly into the app, or import from more than a dozen brokers on the list (including DeGiro, Swissquote, and others). The import supports both full transaction histories, which preserve your cost basis and capital gains calculations, and balance-only snapshots if you prefer speed over tax precision. This flexibility matters because some investors care about precise tax tracking and need every buy and sell date, while others simply want to see their current net worth and do not need the full history.

Once imported, your holdings populate one combined dashboard alongside real estate valuations you estimate, mortgages you track manually, P2P loans, private equity commitments, and any custom asset you can assign a price to, watches, art, collectibles, businesses. The site says Capitally indexes over 400,000 instruments worldwide: stocks, ETFs, crypto, options, and futures. A single interface shows your net worth across all of it, updated whenever you re-import a fresh export. This breadth of asset support is genuinely unusual; most portfolio trackers focus on financial instruments and leave real estate, mortgages, and collectibles as manual overrides or afterthoughts.

Capitally does not auto-refresh; you control when data syncs by uploading new CSV files. This means a weekly or monthly export becomes part of your workflow, rather than something the app handles passively. For investors accustomed to checking a dashboard daily and expecting live balances, this is a genuine workflow difference from apps that aggregate automatically. You are also not tied to syncing schedules or connectivity outages at your broker; you control the timing and the data. It also means your broker credentials are never shared with a third party: your data never flows through Plaid's infrastructure or any aggregator that would require you to store passwords in a central system.

How budgeting and analysis work

Capitally is not a budgeting tool in the traditional sense, there are no spending categories or bank account tracking, no groceries versus dining-out breakdown. Instead, it focuses on portfolio analytics and wealth growth. Its core workings revolve around performance measurement and the question of how well your investment strategy is actually performing. You can calculate TWR (time-weighted return), MWR (money-weighted return), IRR (internal rate of return), and ROI depending on the question you are asking. Returns slice by capital gain, currency gain, and fees separately, so you understand not just how much money you made, but what portion came from your actual investment choices versus currency moves or fees you paid.

The dividend tracker forecasts future dividend income years ahead, accounting for DRIP reinvestment, and shows yield and yield on cost at a glance. This is useful for income-focused investors who want to understand their passive income stream and plan for it. A capital gains tax calculator reports your tax liability by jurisdiction, lets you choose your cost basis method (FIFO, average cost, or specific-lot identification), and includes presets for different countries so you can model how taxes shrink your real return. This matters when you file taxes; getting the cost basis right can be the difference between a simple return and an audit. An options tracker captures strike prices, expiry dates, and Greeks alongside stocks and ETFs, a feature almost no other general portfolio tracker includes.

Return attribution pinpoints which single position or asset class drove a move, and multi-currency support with proper FX attribution separates foreign exchange gains from capital gains. If you hold Tesla and the euro strengthens against the dollar, you need to know whether your returns came from the stock gaining or your euro-denominated cash appreciating; Capitally separates them. You can organize holdings by nesting accounts, tagging transactions, and building custom categories, then filter and group however you need. A what-if scenario feature lets you test a strategy against your real history before committing actual money, so you can model whether a different allocation would have performed better. The app is fully customizable, you choose which charts, filters, date periods, and tables appear on your dashboard, reducing clutter and letting you focus on the metrics that matter to your investing approach.

Cost and what you get free

The site lists a "Start for Free" option and a "Pricing" link in the navigation but does not show prices on the homepage. There is no trial period mentioned, and the free tier's exact boundaries are not declared on this page. This is one of the gaps a reader would reasonably want to settle before downloading: whether the free plan lasts indefinitely or is time-limited, and what changes once that limit is reached. You can play with a demo in your browser and download the app to explore, but the pricing page itself was not included in this capture, so a specific cost breakdown is unavailable here.

What you do get from the captured page is clarity on data handling. Capitally encrypts your data end-to-end on your device with a private key before it ever leaves your browser or computer. This is in addition to standard transport encryption and at-rest encryption. There are no third-party trackers, no ads, no upsells within the app, and no data sharing. You can export everything at any time in standard formats, and there is no lock-in. The app runs on EU servers and is built with GDPR in mind.

Who should use this, and who should not

Capitally is built for investors who prefer manual control and are not intimidated by CSV exports. If you hold multiple currencies, real estate, private equity commitments, and stock options alongside public equities, Capitally's deep customization makes it genuinely useful where spreadsheets slow you down. The dividend forecasting and tax-loss harvesting calculator are genuine differentiators, and the ability to track almost any asset type on the same dashboard is hard to find.

You should not expect real-time syncing or the convenience of automatic broker linking. You also should not choose Capitally if your primary need is tracking day-to-day spending or categorizing groceries versus utilities; it is a portfolio tracker, not a budgeting app. And if your investments live in just one or two accounts with straightforward holdings, a spreadsheet or a lighter-weight free service might suit you better than learning Capitally's interface.