StackViewer vs Sharesight

Sharesight has been around far longer and is very good at one hard thing: turning a messy year of trades, dividends, splits and currency movements into a tax report an accountant will accept. For hundreds of thousands of investors in Australia, New Zealand and the UK that is the entire reason the product exists, and it earns its keep every April (or June, depending on where you file). If that is the job you are hiring for, this comparison should not talk you out of Sharesight.

StackViewer starts from a different question. Most investors who run more than one broker have never seen a single, honest, money-weighted return across all of them — and even fewer can tell you whether they sell too early, average down on losers out of hope, or break their own rules when a position is red. StackViewer is a portfolio tracker and a trading journal built to answer exactly those questions for people investing over months and years. It is not a tax product, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

Side by side

Prices and features checked on www.sharesight.com/pricing and help.sharesight.com/uk/plans-overview, September 10, 2026. Note Sharesight's holding caps: Free is limited to 10 holdings and Starter to 30 holdings; unlimited holdings begin on the Standard plan. Tell us at hello@stackviewer.net if anything here is out of date and we will correct it.

Who each tool is actually for

Where Sharesight is the better tool

This row is theirs, and it is not close. Sharesight's capital gains tax reporting — especially for Australian and New Zealand investors, where it models the local CGT rules including discount methods and franking/imputation credits — is the best in this category, full stop. It also handles dividend tracking, dividend reinvestment plans and corporate actions automatically, and its Taxable Income, Historical Cost and Future Income reports are genuinely useful at tax time and for planning. On top of that Sharesight ships native iOS and Android apps, records unlisted and custom investments inside its reporting, and has an Xero integration for people who want their investment data in their accounting stack. StackViewer does none of this: it produces no tax documents of any kind, excludes custom/non-broker assets from its analytics, and does not yet have a native mobile app. If your reason for opening a portfolio tool is “what do I owe, and can my accountant use this,” Sharesight wins outright and you should stop reading here. One caveat worth knowing regardless of tool: Sharesight's dedicated Capital Gains Tax report is built around AU/NZ rules; UK users are served by the Taxable Income report rather than a full CGT report (per Sharesight's UK help centre, as of September 10, 2026).

The real difference

The cleanest way to hold the two apart is this: Sharesight tells you what happened to your money; StackViewer tells you why, and whether you'd do it again. Sharesight's world is the closed record — realised gains, dividends received, tax owed, performance since inception. That record is accurate and it is what a tax authority cares about. StackViewer's world is the decision that produced the record. When you open a position, you tag your reason, your conviction and how you felt; when you close it, StackViewer grades the entry and exit, calculates the opportunity cost of selling when you did versus holding, and rolls thousands of these into behavioural patterns — 24 emotions, 7 cognitive biases, and exit-trigger cohorts that show, for example, that your “took profit early” trades cost you more than your losers ever did. Alongside that sit 15+ standard risk metrics (Sharpe, Sortino, Alpha, Beta, Max Drawdown, VaR) computed across all your connected brokers at once, so the one true return you have never had finally exists in a single place. Sharesight can benchmark and report performance beautifully; it does not ask whether you are a good decision-maker. That question is the whole point of StackViewer — and the honest limit is that it is a tool for reflection over months and years, not a real-time dashboard for day traders, since values refresh roughly every 30 minutes rather than tick by tick.

Switching from Sharesight

There is no file to migrate and nothing to export. StackViewer connects to your broker directly through read-only OAuth (via SnapTrade), so instead of importing a Sharesight backup it rebuilds your holdings and transaction history from the broker itself — across all 31 supported brokers, syncing three times a day. Trades older than what your broker exposes over its API can be entered manually, which is also your chance to backfill the reason and conviction tags that power the behavioural analysis. The sensible move is not to switch at all in the first month: keep Sharesight running for your tax reporting, connect your brokers to StackViewer alongside it, and see what the decision analytics surface once a few closed trades are graded. If StackViewer earns a permanent seat, most people keep both — Sharesight for the return, StackViewer for the reasoning. Read-only access means StackViewer can never place or move a trade.

Frequently asked

Is StackViewer a Sharesight alternative?

Partly. If you use Sharesight purely to track performance and to journal decisions, StackViewer covers that ground and adds behavioural analytics Sharesight does not have. But if you rely on Sharesight for its capital gains tax and dividend tax reports, StackViewer is not a replacement — it does not produce tax documents. Many investors run both: Sharesight for the tax return, StackViewer for decision quality. See our full Sharesight alternatives roundup for the wider field.

Can I move my data from Sharesight to StackViewer?

You do not migrate a file. StackViewer connects to your broker directly via read-only OAuth (SnapTrade), so it rebuilds your holdings and transaction history from the source rather than importing a Sharesight export. Trades that pre-date what your broker exposes over the API can be added manually. You can keep your Sharesight account running in parallel while you evaluate.

Which is cheaper?

StackViewer has a free-forever plan with no card and no holding cap on the connected brokers it supports, so for most individual investors it is cheaper. Sharesight's free tier caps you at 1 portfolio and 10 holdings; its paid Starter plan is $7/mo and Standard is $18/mo (billed annually, USD), as of September 10, 2026. If you need Sharesight's tax reports, that price buys something StackViewer does not sell.

Comparison accurate to the best of our knowledge on September 10, 2026, based on publicly available information from www.sharesight.com. Product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners; StackViewer is not affiliated with Sharesight. Not financial advice.