Simply Wall St alternative: 5 value-investing apps compared

Because most of them cannot be valued this way, and pretending otherwise would be the dishonest part.

This method needs ten years of consistent statements, a real operating history, and a business big enough that the numbers mean something. Most of a 120,000 company universe is micro caps, shell listings, funds, and companies that have not existed long enough to have a track record. Run a quality score on those and you do not get insight, you get a number with nothing behind it.

So we cover the 3,100+ largest companies in the US and Canada and go deep on them. A bigger number in a marketing table is easy. An analysis you can actually lean on is not.

The honest limit: that is two countries. There are wonderful businesses listed in Europe and Asia, and today we cannot value them for you. Every tool on this page can. If your next investment is listed in Paris or Tokyo, buy one of theirs.

A portfolio command center with global reach. Free plan, $10.95 a month for Premium, native apps on iPhone and Android, brokerage sync, and a fair value estimate with a written narrative attached.

Where it beats us: Nine global markets against our two. If you want to own quality businesses listed in Europe or Asia, they can value them today and we cannot. They also have brokerage sync and an Android app.

Where we differ: Simply Wall St hands you 120,000 companies and good tools to sort them. We hand you fewer than 100 that already cleared a quality bar, each with four fair-value estimates and a buy, watch, hold or sell zone. One is a library. The other is a shortlist.

The deepest data set here, and priced like it. GuruFocus charges per region, starting at $549 a year for the USA, and gives you 30 years of financials plus the 13F holdings of 140+ well-known investors.

Where it beats us: 30 years of financial data, guru and institutional 13F tracking, Excel integration, and screener backtesting. We do none of that.

Where we differ: GuruFocus is a research terminal. It rewards the hours you put in. We are the opposite trade: almost no learning curve, and the first pass is already done when you open the app.

Fast, clean and free, with 130,000+ stocks and funds. Pro is $6.58 a month billed annually and adds alerts and full data access.

Where it beats us: Free, fast, and worldwide. If you want to look up a number on any listed company anywhere, this is the tool, and it costs nothing.

Where we differ: Stock Analysis gives you the numbers. It does not tell you whether a business is any good, what it is worth, or what price to wait for. That last step is the whole product for us.

The closest tool here to what we do, and the honest hardest comparison on this page. AlphaSpread estimates intrinsic value with a DCF and a relative valuation, shows bull, base and bear cases, compares today's valuation to the stock's own history, and can notify you when a price falls to intrinsic value with a margin of safety. It is $144 a year, worldwide, and has a free plan.

Where it beats us: Cheaper than us, worldwide coverage, a free tier, and you can drive the DCF assumptions yourself. They also show bull, base and bear cases, which we do not.

Where we differ: AlphaSpread is a valuation workbench. You pick a company, then you value it. We work the other way round: the quality screen runs first, so you never spend an evening valuing a business that was never going to clear the bar. We also run four valuation methods rather than one, and turn the result into four price zones instead of a single undervaluation percentage.

Three of the four tools above are cheaper than we are, and every one of them covers more of the world. If price or global reach is what you are optimising for, buy one of those. We mean that.

Three of them also have a free tier and we do not. What we have instead is a 14-day money-back guarantee on the whole product, not a reduced version of it. Use it properly for two weeks, and if it is not for you, take your money back.

What none of them do is the thing we built: run a strict quality screen across every company first, so that fewer than 100 survive, then value each survivor four ways and give it a buy, watch, hold or sell zone you can act on. If your problem is “I have 500 tickers and no time,” that is the product. If your problem is “I want to model one company deeply,” it is not.