Wealthfront review 2025

Pros: Where Wealthfront stands out

Portfolio management

Wealthfront distinguishes itself in how it manages your portfolio, offering features that are atypical among robo-advisors. You can quickly sign up for an account, and you’ll run through a few questions on your risk tolerance and timeline, and then Wealthfront builds you a portfolio. You can move on or change your responses to the questions and receive a new portfolio or otherwise adjust the allocations in the portfolio to your own preferences.

Wealthfront has expanded the range of investments that clients can buy, and it’s well beyond what most robo-advisors offer. Instead of being limited to a core selection of low-cost funds within an expert-built portfolio, Wealthfront allows clients to invest in the following:

• Low-cost funds in a professional portfolio
• Socially responsible, or ESG, funds
• Cryptocurrency funds
• A range of other sector or niche funds, such as commodity and tech exchange-traded funds (ETFs)
• Bond ETFs and automated bond ladders
• S&P 500 direct indexing, with the ability to customize holdings

You can even bring your portfolio over from a traditional broker, and Wealthfront will manage that. It also now allows clients to buy individual stocks in a stock account, and you’ll be able to purchase fractional shares of them, too.

If your taxable portfolio has more than $500,000, you’ll be able to access Wealthfront’s smart beta feature. This strategy weighs the stocks in your portfolio to increase your return, based on a variety of factors that may drive higher gains. Even better, there’s no extra charge for this service.

Given the complexity of the strategy, Wealthfront’s website does a great job of disclosing how they work and why you might want them, so you know exactly what the robo-advisor is doing.

Stock investing

Investors who want the freedom to customize their portfolio mix will appreciate that Wealthfront includes the option to trade individual stocks and ETFs at no commission, giving you yet another reason to consolidate your financial life with the company.

The ability to trade stocks is a less common feature for a robo-advisor, and positions the company somewhere between robo-advisor and stock broker, meaning you’ll be able to get the best of both worlds. And with individual stocks, Wealthfront allows you to buy fractional shares — a small slice of a company's stock — with as little as $1.

You can easily mix and match your investments, if you want to own both. For example, if you’d like Wealthfront to manage most of your money, you could set aside, say, 10 percent to buy individual stocks, while the robo-advisor manages the remainder. You’ll have total flexibility to adjust the portfolio as you see fit.

Robust cash management account

With robo-advisors, it’s easy to focus on the fact that they manage your investment accounts. But the better ones also add in a cash management account, and the very best make it as fully featured as the best fintech banking apps. That’s the case with Wealthfront’s cash management account.

Wealthfront’s account seems to do it all – so much so that you might consider relinquishing your traditional bank account: 

• Competitive interest rate
• Bill pay, check deposit and check writing
• Automated savings plan
• Debit card and more than 19,000 no-fee ATMs
• Access to your direct-deposit paycheck up to two days in advance
• No monthly account or overdraft fees
• Unlimited free transfers

With a Wealthfront Cash Account linked to your outside accounts, you can automate your financial life. Want to remove the stress of paying bills and never miss a payment deadline? How about sending regular contributions to your investment accounts or put aside for other goals without lifting a finger? With Wealthfront's automated savings, you simply set it up how you want the money in your cash account managed and then sit back.

You’ll also receive FDIC insurance for up to $8 million in cash through Wealthfront’s partner banks in individual accounts, or $16 million in joint accounts. This ensures that those holding a large amount of cash at Wealthfront are protected well beyond the traditional FDIC limits.

Wealthfront’s cash management account is at the top among robo-advisors. The upshot for clients is that you don’t have to run around searching for the best savings accounts and can rest easier knowing you’re receiving among the best rates out there.

Tax-loss harvesting

Wealthfront’s tax-loss harvesting may be the best in the industry, and the company touts its ability to recoup the advisory fee for more than 97 percent of its clients in the form of tax savings. Unlike much of the competition, tax-loss harvesting is available for any taxable account, not just those with a certain balance.

As a refresher, tax-loss harvesting is when you sell a losing investment to gain a tax advantage and offset other gains. It’s a time-tested (and legal) method of reducing your tax bill, and having a computer optimize your portfolio is much more efficient than having a human manage it.

Wealthfront says that the average annual after-tax benefit is more than six times the advisory fee. So if you’re investing in an aggressive portfolio, you’re likely to recoup your 0.25 percent fee by four times or more.

If you're an index investor, you'll also want to check out Wealthfront's newer portfolio addition: S&P 500 Direct. This direct investing product purchases the individual stocks that make up the index as opposed to buying the entire basket of companies in a single chunk like in an ETF. This enables the robo to more precisely optimize gains and losses for tax-loss harvesting. S&P 500 Direct requires a $20,000 minimum and comes with a 0.09 percent management fee.

Stock-level tax-loss harvesting on other funds is also available for portfolios between $100,000 and $500,000. In its portfolios, Wealthfront replaces the U.S. stock fund with its constituent stocks, so it can take tax losses on the individual stocks rather than on the fund as a whole. (Larger portfolios have access to its smart beta program.)

Access to a portfolio line of credit

Another unusual feature is Wealthfront’s portfolio line of credit, which allows you to take a margin loan against up to 30 percent of your portfolio’s account value, much as you could at a typical brokerage. You won’t need a credit check or see a hit to your credit score, and money will be deposited in as little as one business day.

This service is available to customers with at least $25,000 in a taxable individual, joint or trust portfolio. (Funds in retirement 529 and cash accounts do not apply toward eligibility.)

Wealthfront's loan rates are based on the federal funds rate plus a markup. The markup was 1.08 percent as of June 2025, which translated to a rate of 5.41 percent.

Like a margin loan, you can pay back the line of credit as you see fit, with no fixed repayment schedule. Keep in mind that rates are variable, no fixed. And if the value of your portfolio falls significantly, you’ll need to repay some of the loan or Wealthfront will liquidate some of your positions, as is typical in the industry.

Comprehensive wealth-planning tool

Whether you become a paying Wealthfront customer or not, you’ll be able to access its Path financial planning tool. You can start building your financial plan and getting your financial accounts in order. 

You can use the tool to automatically load all the information from your accounts into the planner. That’s not only brokerage accounts or retirement accounts, but also bank accounts, credit cards and even your mortgage. You won’t have to manually update anything either. 

You’ll be able to project your net worth over time, establish financial goals (a house, college tuition, retirement) and see how financial decisions may affect each of these goals. Will you have enough to retire? How will buying that new car affect your overall financial picture? You don’t just get a “yes” or “no,” and you’ll see the effects on your wealth in a graphic. 

To measure your potential future financial position, the planning tool pulls in third-party data on retirement spending, earnings growth, property prices and estimated college costs. Then you’ll get detailed estimates of future costs so you can make informed decisions about how to act.

It’s a spiffy tool that allows you to easily make adjustments and see the results of your decision.

Cons: Where Wealthfront could improve

Access to human advisors

Wealthfront’s customer support is available by phone from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern and typically responds to emails within one business day. Team members all have Series 7 licenses, and several hold further designations such as the chartered financial analyst (CFA) or certified financial planner (CFP), the latter of which is a fiduciary tasked with acting in your best interest.

If there’s a downside, it’s that Wealthfront doesn’t offer unlimited access to planning from a human advisor. (A growing number of robo-advisors do – but often at much higher prices.) That said, most clients will have absolutely no concerns, and the robo's useful online help center can walk you through the vast majority of issues.

Account minimum

Wealthfront requires an initial $500 to get started with its robo-advisor – and that is higher than many rivals who allow you to get in for no account minimum. That’s a small negative and it’s nitpicking, given the range of Wealthfront services offered at a reasonable price. Plus, it's lower than comparable robo-advisors such as Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, which requires an initial $5,000 for its base level service and even more for its premium tier.

That said, you can access Wealthfront’s planning tool at no cost or establish a Wealthfront cash management account for just a $1 deposit, and then build toward the robo-advisor account.

No fractional shares in managed portfolios

Wealthfront doesn’t let you buy fractional shares of ETFs in your managed portfolio, meaning you may not get fully invested right away. That may matter less if you have a lot of money in the account, but when you’re just starting out it can take a while to build up enough cash to be meaningfully invested. You want your money working for you as long as you possibly can, and fractional shares help.

The lack of fractional shares in managed portfolios at Wealthfront is a demerit when several other major robos offer this feature. However, you still can buy fractional shares of stocks in your Wealthfront stock account.

Our writer’s take

One of the major benefits of robo-advisors like Wealthfront is that they do the work for you. You won’t have to worry about checking your portfolio regularly because Wealthfront monitors and automatically rebalances your portfolio when allocations differ from the desired amounts.

For investors who are more knowledgeable about portfolio management, it may be possible to achieve similar results to Wealthfront, while avoiding the annual management fee, if you choose to do it yourself. (And the robo does allow DIY investors to manage their own stocks and ETFs outside of its paid account ecosystem.) However, some of Wealthfront's star benefits — such as tax-loss harvesting — won't provide any value to customers who are mainly invested in tax-advantaged accounts such as an IRA.