The one-paragraph verdict
Keep the spreadsheet if you want total control over every formula, zero software cost, no third party ever touching your data, and you genuinely enjoy the maintenance — a well-built Google Sheets or Excel portfolio tracker is free, private, and infinitely flexible.
Choose StackViewer if you hold positions for months rather than minutes, run 2–4 brokers, and are tired of stale prices, manual FX conversions, and the fact that a sheet can tell you what your balance is but never whether your decisions were any good.
Almost everyone reading this already has a spreadsheet. You built it because no single broker showed you your whole picture, and it worked — a tab per account, a column for cost basis, a GOOGLEFINANCE or Stock-datatype cell pulling prices, a total at the bottom that finally answered “how much do I actually have?” That sheet is not a mistake, and this page is not here to talk you out of it. It is here to be honest about what it costs you that you may not have priced in, and about the two or three jobs it structurally cannot do.
We build a portfolio tracker for a living, and we still keep a spreadsheet open for scratch modelling. So take this as a comparison written by people who respect the tool, not one written to bury it. If the sheet is serving you, the most useful thing on this page might be the free Google Sheets template further down — take it and go. If you have started to resent the maintenance, read on.
Side by side
| StackViewer | A DIY spreadsheet | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost in cash | Free plan; paid tiers above it | Free — Google Sheets is free for personal use (as of 15 July 2026) |
| Who sees your data | Read-only broker access via SnapTrade; we hold it | Nobody but you — the file lives in your own drive |
| Flexibility / customisation | Fixed feature set; we choose the metrics | Total — any formula, any layout, any custom column you want |
| Getting prices in | Automatic; synced 3× daily, values refresh ~every 30 min | Manual formulas; GOOGLEFINANCE price is delayed up to 20 min and can go blank |
| Multi-currency & FX | Handled automatically at daily rates | Manual — you wire up FX cells and hope you got the direction right |
| True blended return across brokers | One money-weighted figure across all accounts | Possible, but only if you build XIRR correctly across every cash flow |
| Risk metrics | 15+ incl. Sharpe, Sortino, Alpha, Beta, Max Drawdown, VaR | Only what you can build and maintain by hand |
| Benchmarks | 10, incl. S&P 500, NASDAQ, MSCI World | One or two, if you wire the index in yourself |
| Trading journal | Yes — with reason, conviction and emotion tags | A “notes” column, if you remember to fill it |
| Behavioural analysis | Reason / conviction / emotion tags, exit-trigger cohorts | None — a sheet cannot tell you your FOMO entries win less often |
| Maintenance burden | Effectively none once connected | ~1 hour a week of updating, reconciling, fixing broken cells |
| Works offline / no account | Needs the app and a broker connection | Yes — nothing to sign into, nothing to revoke |
| Tax reporting | Not a tax tool — export figures to your accountant | You can build cost-basis and realised-gain tabs yourself |
| Custom / non-broker assets in analytics | Excluded from analytics | Anything you can type — property, crypto wallets, collectibles |
| Free plan | Free forever, no card | Free forever, no card |
Spreadsheet facts checked on Google's own documentation — the GOOGLEFINANCE reference states the “price” attribute is “delayed by up to 20 minutes”, and Google Sheets is free for personal use — both as of 15 July 2026. Tell us at hello@stackviewer.net if anything here is out of date and we will correct it.
Who each tool is actually for
Keep the spreadsheet if…
- You want a formula you can see and edit for every single number, with no black box in the middle.
- You track things no broker feed carries — a rental flat, a private company stake, a crypto cold wallet — and want them in the same total.
- You will not connect a third party to your brokerage on principle, and you value that there is no OAuth grant to revoke.
Choose StackViewer if…
- You hold across 2–4 brokers and have never had one true, currency-adjusted return number.
- You suspect your exits are costing you more than your picks are earning — and want it in numbers.
- You set rules for yourself and want to see how often you break them, which a notes column will never surface.
Where a spreadsheet is the better tool
Be clear-eyed about this, because it is the reason the rest of the page is worth trusting. A spreadsheet wins on cost: Google Sheets is free for personal use, and StackViewer has paid tiers above its free plan. It wins on privacy in the strictest sense — the file sits in your own drive, no external service ever reads your positions, and there is no connection anyone could breach or that you would ever need to revoke. It wins on total flexibility: you can model a covered-call ladder, blend in a rental property's cash flows, track a private startup stake, or invent a bespoke metric at 11pm, and no product roadmap is standing between you and the cell. StackViewer deliberately excludes custom and non-broker assets from its analytics, so if a meaningful slice of your net worth lives outside the 31 supported brokers, the sheet genuinely reflects more of your life than we do. And a spreadsheet works with nothing to sign into and nothing to break — no OAuth, no sync outage, no vendor. Those are real advantages, not consolation prizes, and for a lot of people they settle the question.
The real difference
The gap is not “automation is nicer than typing.” It is that a spreadsheet answers a different question than the one that actually improves your investing. A sheet is excellent at telling you your balance — the state of things right now. It is structurally poor at telling you about your decisions — the pattern across everything you have bought and sold. Three costs hide inside a maintained tracker, and they compound quietly. The first is the hour a week: updating prices, reconciling a dividend that landed, fixing a GOOGLEFINANCE cell that went #N/A overnight, re-checking an FX conversion. Over a year that is a working week spent on data entry. The second is stale, wrong numbers you act on anyway: the delayed price you glance at is up to twenty minutes old, and the FX cell you set up in a hurry is a common place to quietly point the conversion the wrong way and misstate a whole account. The third is the one no spreadsheet can ever close on its own — it cannot tell you that your FOMO entries win less often than your patient ones, that your average exit is three weeks and eight per cent too early, or that you break your own rules most in the trades you feel most sure about. That requires tagging the reason, conviction and emotion behind each trade and grading the outcome against them, which is exactly what StackViewer's journal and behavioural analysis are built to do. A notes column will never surface it, because a notes column cannot count.
Switching from a spreadsheet
There is refreshingly little to migrate, because StackViewer does not read your sheet — it reads your brokers. You connect each account through read-only OAuth (via SnapTrade), and StackViewer rebuilds your holdings and history from the source, so you are not re-keying rows or reconciling your own typos. The practical move for most people is not “replace,” it is “retire the tedious tabs.” Let StackViewer own the prices, FX, blended return and risk metrics — the parts that broke or went stale — and keep a small sheet for the genuinely bespoke things we exclude, like a property valuation or a private holding. If you want your old trade notes in the journal, you can paste them in as entries; there is no bulk importer for spreadsheet notes yet, so budget a few minutes per position if that history matters to you. Nothing is destroyed and nothing is locked in: the broker connection is read-only and revocable at any time, and your sheet is still sitting there if you decide the trade was not worth it.
Want the good version of the sheet first? Grab our free Google Sheets portfolio tracker template — multi-broker tabs, an XIRR block wired up correctly, and an FX helper that points the right way. Get the free template →
Frequently asked
- Is StackViewer a spreadsheet alternative?
- Yes. StackViewer does the parts of a portfolio spreadsheet that are tedious and error-prone — pulling prices, converting currencies, and computing a true blended return across every broker — automatically, and adds risk metrics and a trading journal on top. It does not replace a spreadsheet for genuinely custom modelling or one-off analysis, so many people keep a small sheet alongside it.
- Can I move my data from a spreadsheet to StackViewer?
- You mostly do not need to. StackViewer connects to your brokers directly through read-only OAuth and rebuilds your holdings and history from the source, so you are not re-keying rows. If you want your old sheet's notes as journal entries you can paste them in manually; there is no bulk CSV importer for spreadsheet notes yet.
- Which is cheaper?
- A spreadsheet is cheaper in cash: Google Sheets is free for personal use as of 15 July 2026. StackViewer has a free-forever plan with no card, and paid tiers above it. The honest comparison is not cash but time — a maintained tracking sheet quietly costs about an hour a week, and StackViewer is built to give that hour back.
Look before you switch
The live demo is a real portfolio with six months of history — prices, FX, blended return and every analysis screen populated. No signup, no email. See what the sheet was never going to show you.
See the live demo or start freeNo credit card · Read-only broker access · Free forever plan
Comparison accurate to the best of our knowledge on 15 July 2026, based on publicly available information from Google's own documentation (support.google.com). Google Sheets, Google Finance and Excel are trademarks of their respective owners; StackViewer is not affiliated with Google or Microsoft. StackViewer values are not real-time (synced three times daily, refreshed roughly every 30 minutes), it is not built for day traders, and custom or non-broker assets are excluded from its analytics. Not financial advice.