RoyInsights

RoyInsights vs Sharesight

Managing your portfolio becomes increasingly complex as it grows.

At this point, using spreadsheets becomes time-consuming and costly, so you are considering using software to help you track and manage your portfolio. You’ve heard about many different tools – RoyInsights, Sharesight, Snowball Analytics. Feature lists are comprehensive, and you are now trying to figure out the differences and whether to choose RoyInsights or a different app.

In this post, we will compare the capabilities of RoyInsights and Sharesight to help you decide which one is a better fit for you. (Although we’d love it if you tried RoyInsights – it’s completely free!)

Table of contents:

  • Performance analysis
  • Risk analysis
  • Portfolio investment policy
  • Benchmarking
  • Multi-currency reporting
  • Broker coverage and data import
  • Dividends
  • Taxes
  • Plans and pricing
  • Support
  • Final verdict

TL;DR

Choose RoyInsights if you are a serious investor who wants structured portfolio management workflows, risk analytics, and benchmarking. If you need broker integrations for Australia and New Zealand, or comprehensive tax reporting for these regions, choose Sharesight.

Performance analysis

Both RoyInsights and Sharesight calculate the core performance metrics. They include money-weighted return (MWR), time-weighted return (TWR), IRR, and ROI. RoyInsights calculates a few additional metrics as well, such as Calmar ratio, information ratio, and R-squared.

Next, both products decompose returns into capital, currency, and dividend/income gains, so you can see where returns came from for each holding and the overall portfolio.

Furthermore, both Sharesight and RoyInsights offer contribution analysis, breaking down holdings by their share of total portfolio P&L.

In short, their performance analysis offerings are comparable, with RoyInsights having a slight advantage if you care about the additional metrics.

Risk analysis

Managing and analyzing risk is one of RoyInsight’s strongest advantages. There is a dedicated risk dashboard that contains many relevant metrics and visualizations to help you understand:

  • where risk comes from
  • whether you’re adequately compensated for it
  • how it changes over time
  • which holdings are creating hidden concentration/correlation risk

RoyInsights answers these questions with Sharpe and Sortino ratios, volatility, rolling metrics to compare changes over time, drawdown analysis, value at risk and conditional value at risk metrics, and correlation and concentration ratios.

Sharesight’s documented risk functionality centers on maximum drawdown and Return-over-Max-Drawdown (RoMaD). Their report compares annualized return versus MDD for the portfolio, holdings, groups, and optionally a benchmark.

Portfolio investment policy

Serious and professional investors both create an investment policy statement and stick to it. RoyInsights can assist with that, offering structured portfolio investment policy statement configuration settings – target return, maximum drawdown and volatility, allocation targets, liquidity needs, and investment restrictions. RoyInsights can also alert you when any policy targets are breached, prompting you to review your portfolio and decide what to do.

Sharesight does not currently offer any functionality related to investment policy statements.

Benchmarking

Like many other tools on the market, Sharesight offers benchmarks against any stock, ETF, or mutual fund in its database.

This is also available in RoyInsights. But RoyInsights takes a different approach and provides structured blended benchmark creation. You can create many different benchmarks that are a weighted combination of the indexes/assets you choose. This reflects the way serious investors and professionals build their benchmarks.

For example, if your target allocation is 90% equities and 10% bonds, with 45% in European equities and 45% in US equities, it makes no sense to compare it only to the S&P 500.

Instead, a blended benchmark consisting of 45% S&P 500, 45% STOXX Europe 600, and 10% US Treasury Index would be more accurate in this scenario. This kind of blended benchmark can be created in RoyInsights, but not in Sharesight.

Multi-currency reporting

Sharesight and RoyInsights both incorporate multi-currency reporting as their core functionality. In both products, you can easily analyze holdings in foreign currencies, see currency gains or losses for each holding in absolute and percentage terms, hold as many currencies as you want in your portfolio, manage and track your brokerage cash, and calculate the overall impact of currency changes on your returns.

So, for complex multi-currency portfolios, both products are a great choice.

Broker coverage and data import

Broker coverage can mean different things. We can roughly divide it into three different levels of coverage:

  • Direct integration – live API connection
  • Automatic trade import – confirmation-email ingestion
  • Supported import – CSV/PDF/statement import

So when you see portfolio analytics companies claiming they support a certain broker, it is a good idea to check the type of coverage.

RoyInsights supports over 40 brokers, all directly integrated for the smoothest imports. RoyInsights focuses mostly on European and US broker integrations.

Sharesight supports over 200 brokers, with only a handful supporting direct integration; the rest use trade imports or broker CSV/PDF/statement imports. Sharesight focuses primarily on broker integrations in Australia and New Zealand.

Both RoyInsights and Sharesight support generic CSV/Excel trade imports.

Dividends and dividend tracking

Both RoyInsights and Sharesight offer automatic dividend tracking. In both products, you can see all your dividends and distributions. Both also show dividend gains separately for each holding and for the overall portfolio.

In Sharesight, you can estimate future dividends and view your income on a calendar. In other words, Sharesight offers slightly better visualization of your current and future dividend income.

Tax reporting

Sharesight is stronger in tax reporting. It can provide a taxable income report and a sold securities report, giving you the information you need for your tax return. It lists net dividends, tax credits, tax deducted, TFN Withholding Tax, and gross dividends received within the selected time period. Sharesight produces the numbers for you but does not submit government tax forms on your behalf – you need to fill out the paperwork and make the submission yourself. For portfolios with tax residency in Australia or Canada, Sharesight offers a capital gains tax report with country-specific rules support, while for other countries, you need to calculate capital gains tax manually.

RoyInsights is working on adding tax reporting, initially in the DACH region, but currently does not offer tax-related features. If you are interested in tax functionality and you are from the DACH region, it is worth keeping an eye on RoyInsights’ announcements and changelogs.

Plans and pricing

Both Sharesight and RoyInsights offer a free tier. Their free offering is similar – 1 portfolio, up to 10 holdings, and basic analytics and support.

There are some differences in paid plans. Sharesight offers a starter plan, which includes increased holding limits (up to 30 holdings instead of 10) and basic reporting.

RoyInsights does not have a starter plan and instead includes most of the functionality an investor would need in a comprehensive Pro plan. Its Pro plan includes up to 5 portfolios, unlimited holdings, performance and risk analytics, benchmarking, and more.

Sharesight’s Standard plan is comparable, reflecting the differences already discussed above – lacking risk analytics, portfolio investment policy and alerts, and blended benchmarking, while being stronger in tax reporting in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

All RoyInsights paid plans include a 30-day money-back guarantee with no questions asked.

RoyInsights Pro is also slightly cheaper than a comparable Sharesight plan (15 EUR/month for RoyInsights Pro vs 17 EUR/month for Sharesight Standard).

Support

Both companies offer great support, but their approaches and support tiers differ across pricing plans.

Sharesight provides priority support only on its highest plan, while RoyInsights includes priority support starting with its middle Pro plan. RoyInsights can also help with portfolio setup and provides concierge-like support to ensure you get the most value from using the product.

Who is RoyInsights best for?

RoyInsights is best for serious investors who want structured portfolio management workflows, risk analytics, and benchmarking. It is also a great choice for investors in Europe and the USA because of current and future features that cater to this region.

Who is Sharesight best for?

Sharesight is best for investors from Australia and Canada who want tax reporting functionality. It is also a great choice for investors from the ANZ region who want to connect with regional/local brokerages, since Sharesight’s coverage is strongest in Australia and New Zealand.

Final verdict

RoyInsights and Sharesight are similar in many areas, but they focus on different customers’ needs and approaches in others.

For example, RoyInsights focuses on portfolio construction, management, monitoring, and benchmarking, with features like investment policy statements, alerts, and blended benchmarks. Sharesight focuses on the tax and accounting part of investing. RoyInsights focuses on Europe and the USA. Sharesight focuses on Australia and New Zealand.

Choose RoyInsights if you are an investor who wants structured portfolio management workflows, risk analytics, and benchmarking. Choose Sharesight if you need tax reporting or broker integrations for Australia and New Zealand.