Foundry Planning vs RightCapital: an honest 2026 comparison.
I run Foundry Planning, and this comparison lives on Foundry's marketing site. Same rules as the eMoney head-to-head: every RightCapital claim below links to a primary source — mostly RightCapital's own help center and pricing page — every Foundry claim is verified against the shipping engine, and the "where RightCapital wins" section is genuine. This is the second head-to-head spoke promised in the evaluation framework.
One more disclosure, because it's the honest frame for this whole post: RightCapital is the tool I'd recommend to a lot of advisors. It is the best-liked planning software in the industry right now. The interesting question is not "is RightCapital good" — it's where its simplifications sit relative to your practice, and what it costs to get its full feature set.
The short version
RightCapital is the industry's satisfaction leader: the highest-rated of the big three planning tools in the 2026 T3/Inside Information survey (8.40 vs eMoney's 8.14 and MoneyGuidePro's 7.62) on 21.37% market share, the top-rated tool in the 2025 Kitces Research report at 8.7/10, and the #1 choice of advisors in their first five years — 35.75% of them, ahead of eMoney's 30.83%. It won that position on ease of use, a great client portal, responsive support, real tax-distribution visuals, and aggressive shipping velocity.
Foundry Planning's pitch against it is depth and pricing structure. RightCapital's own documentation describes a "Simplified 1040" that splits capital gains by a blanket percentage assumption; its aggregation, Tax Analyzer, and new Iris AI are gated to the $209.95/month Premium tier and above; and its documented depth ceilings — stock options, advanced estate, module-to-module assumption consistency — are exactly where complex retirement-stage practices end up. Foundry is one engine, one ledger, one price ($199/month, everything included), with the tax fidelity — lot-aware gains, AMT with ISO treatment, trust taxation, IRMAA on the two-year lookback — that you'd otherwise buy as add-ons or approximate.
At a glance
| RightCapital | Foundry Planning | |
|---|---|---|
| Paradigm | Modular; advisor picks goals-based, cash-flow, or "modified cash flow" per plan | Cash-flow-first, single deterministic ledger |
| Federal tax engine | "Simplified 1040" + Schedules 1–3, A, B, D, Form 6251 | Full per-year computation: brackets, LTCG stacking, AMT, NIIT, QBI, SS taxability, FICA/SE |
| Capital gains | LT/ST split set as a percentage assumption | Modeled per account and transaction with basis tracking |
| IRMAA | Modeled, two-year lookback ✓ | Modeled, two-year lookback, Part B + Part D |
| Roth conversion tool | Bracket-fill visual: ordinary brackets, 0/15% gains, IRMAA thresholds | Bracket-fill that iterates against SS taxability, QBI, and deductions; Form 8606 pro-rata basis |
| Equity comp | Limited stock-option analysis (user-cited gap) | RSU/NQSO/ISO with vesting, 83(b), exercise strategies, ISO bargain element in AMT |
| Estate | Estate module; 13 state estate taxes; assumptions siloed from other modules | Estate/gift/GST on the same ledger; trusts incl. CRT/CLT; 13 estate-tax + 5 inheritance-tax states |
| AI | Iris (June 2026): data checks, cash-flow reviews, plan suggestions; Premium+ | Forge: document intake, scenario drafting, approval-gated writes, full undo |
| Aggregation | Yodlee, Premium tier and up | None advisor-side (client portal links via Plaid) |
| Pricing | $149.95 / $209.95 / $254.95 per advisor/mo, annual commitment year one | $199/mo or $1,990/yr, no tiers, everything included |
| T3 2026 rating / share | 8.40 / 21.37% | Not yet surveyed — we're too new |
Pricing and survey figures accessed July 9, 2026.
What RightCapital genuinely does well
Advisors like using it, measurably. Highest T3 2026 rating of the big three; Kitces 2025 rated it 8.7/10, the category leader in 11 areas and the sole leader on ease of use, with the fastest share growth of any comprehensive planning tool since 2020. Support runs live and scores 9.1/10 in Kitces data. (Those two links are RightCapital's own summaries of Kitces data — labeled as such.)
The tax-distribution visuals are the industry's best-known. Kitces' formal review singled out its "detailed and tax-sensitive retirement distribution planning." The conversion/distribution tool fills conversions to a chosen ordinary bracket, the 0%/15% capital-gains thresholds, or IRMAA MAGI thresholds, with clean with/without bars — and its IRMAA modeling uses the correct two-year lookback. Credit where due: most of the industry still gets that wrong.
It ships. Weekly release notes, a 2025 that added the Tax Analyzer, Smart Import, and business planning, and plan-migration OCR that reads eMoney and MoneyGuide reports to speed competitor switches. The Iris AI agent launched June 2026 with a compliance-conscious design that restricts outputs to RightCapital's own calculation engine.
Client-facing polish. The portal and mobile app took the top Kitces portal rating, the Snapshot one-page plan is a genuinely good deliverable, and student-loan planning is a real module — not a liability entry — which matters for next-gen clients.
Where the simplifications live
None of what follows is hidden; it's in RightCapital's own help center, which is to their credit. The question is whether these simplifications sit in the path of your practice's most expensive decisions.
The Simplified 1040. RightCapital's tax estimate is explicitly "a shorter form only displaying key details... that will apply to almost all clients". For most households, fine. But "almost all clients" is doing work in that sentence — the clients it doesn't apply to are usually the complex, high-fee ones.
Capital gains by percentage. The long-term vs short-term split is an advisor-set percentage assumption, not modeled from holdings and transactions. When the plan's answer depends on which lots get sold in which year — gain harvesting against the 0% bracket, basis management around a home sale, step-up timing — a blanket percentage can't see the question. Foundry models asset transactions with basis, including step-up at death.
Cross-module consistency. The conversion tool's terminal-tax-rate assumption applies inside Tax Strategies but not in Retirement Analysis, and reviewers note estate-module assumptions don't flow into other modules. This is the structural cost of a modular architecture: each module is clean, but the plan is the sum of modules that don't always share one set of numbers. Foundry's architectural bet is the opposite: one deterministic ledger that taxes, cash flow, estate, and Monte Carlo all read from, so the same inputs produce the same numbers everywhere — which is also what makes the deliverable coherent.
The depth ceiling. Documented gaps in stock-option analysis and advanced estate planning (user-review synthesis — labeled as sentiment, not audit). Foundry ships RSU/NQSO/ISO modeling with vesting schedules, 83(b) elections, exercise strategies, and the ISO bargain element wired into AMT; trust taxation including charitable remainder and lead trusts with actuarial factors; gift and GST tracking; and estate tax in the 13 states that levy one plus inheritance tax in the 5 that do.
Monte Carlo internals. RightCapital's simulation drives its retirement projections; what computes inside each trial isn't documented in detail publicly. Foundry publishes its approach: 1,000 correlated-return trials (multivariate lognormal, full covariance) with the entire tax engine running inside every trial — every trial produces its own withdrawals, tax bills, and IRMAA tiers. The deterministic ledger recomputes locally in your browser as you change inputs; the full simulation runs server-side and is cached. The Solver goal-seeks against it: retirement age, sustainable spending, Roth conversion size, Social Security claim age, life-insurance need.
Pricing: tiers vs one number
From RightCapital's published pricing, accessed July 9, 2026 — and credit to them for publishing it:
| RightCapital Basic | RightCapital Premium | RightCapital Platinum | Foundry Planning | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Per advisor/month | $149.95 | $209.95 | $254.95 | $199 (or $166 billed annually) |
| Annual cost | ~$1,799 | ~$2,519 | ~$3,059 | $1,990 |
| Account aggregation | — | ✓ | ✓ | Client-portal Plaid linking |
| Tax Analyzer / tax OCR | — | ✓ | ✓ | Forge document intake* |
| AI (Iris / Forge) | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Firm-level assumptions, workflows | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Commitment | Annual, year one | Annual, year one | Annual, year one | Monthly or annual; cancel anytime |
*Foundry's AI Import add-on for bulk document-driven onboarding is $99/month per firm, first three onboardings free; day-to-day Forge document intake is included.
The comparison that matters: RightCapital's tier with the features most practices actually want — aggregation, tax tools, Iris — is Premium at ~$2,519/year, plus $40/month per assistant seat and $30/month for RightPay billing if you use it, with firm-level customization waiting in Platinum at ~$3,059. Foundry is $1,990/year with nothing gated. RightCapital Basic is cheaper than Foundry — and if Basic covers your practice, it's a fair choice.
Where RightCapital wins, plainly
- Onboarding a team fast. It's the ease-of-use leader for a reason, and its learning curve is the industry's gentlest. Foundry is opinionated and cash-flow-first; a goals-based practice will feel that.
- Aggregation exists. Yodlee-gated-to-Premium is still more than Foundry's nothing (our client portal links accounts via Plaid; advisor-side aggregation isn't there).
- Student loans. A real module with repayment-plan options. Foundry models student debt as amortizing liabilities only.
- Integrations. 40+ integrations including Redtail, Wealthbox, and custodial tools. Foundry's CRM is native and its integration list is short (Orion; Plaid in the portal). If your stack is glued together through your planning tool, check our list first.
- Track record. A decade, thousands of firms, and survey-verified satisfaction. Foundry is new and not yet in T3's tables; that asymmetry is real and you should weigh it.
- Prospect-scale planning. RightExpress does lightweight topic plans for prospects; Foundry has no equivalent.
Who should choose which
Choose RightCapital if: you're building or scaling a practice and want the fastest tool to be productive in; your clients skew accumulator or mass-affluent where the Simplified 1040 genuinely is enough; student loans matter; or your workflow depends on its integration list.
Choose Foundry Planning if: your book is retirement-income and tax-decision heavy and you keep bumping the ceiling — option exercises, trusts, multi-account basis questions, conversion plans where the IRMAA and QBI interactions change the answer; you want one ledger where every module agrees; or you're doing the Premium-plus-add-ons math and noticing it exceeds one flat price that includes everything.
The seven-dimension framework is the longer version of this decision, and the eMoney and MoneyGuidePro head-to-heads cover the other corners of the big three.
Frequently asked questions
Is Foundry a good RightCapital alternative? For practices that have outgrown the Simplified 1040, the percentage-based gains split, or the stock-option and estate ceilings — yes, that's the case Foundry was built for. For ease-of-use-first practices, RightCapital remains excellent.
How do the prices compare? RightCapital: $149.95/$209.95/$254.95 per advisor/month with aggregation, Tax Analyzer, and Iris gated to Premium+, annual commitment in year one. Foundry: $199/month or $1,990/year, everything included, cancel anytime.
Does RightCapital model IRMAA correctly? Yes — with the true two-year lookback, and its conversion tool can target IRMAA thresholds. Foundry models Part B and Part D surcharges on the same lookback, computed inside the same engine as the rest of the plan.
What does RightCapital clearly do better? Learning curve, aggregation availability, student loans, integrations, prospect-tier planning, and a decade of survey-verified satisfaction.
Sources and methodology
RightCapital claims cite RightCapital's published pricing, help center, blog, and press coverage; market data cites the 2026 T3/Inside Information Software Survey and the 2025 Kitces Research report (via RightCapital's published summaries, labeled above). Review-site synthesis is labeled as user sentiment. All sources accessed July 9, 2026. Foundry claims are verified against the shipping product — capability tour, and if a live demo can't back a claim on this page, email support@foundryplanning.com and we'll correct it publicly.