Simply Wall St

Why 8 million investors choose Simply Wall St over Morningstar

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Before we start be aware there are range of Morningstar products:

Morningstar Portfolio Manager
Morningstar Investor
Morningstar Premium
Morningstar ARC

They are all different and all require a dedicated subscription.

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TL:DR What are the key differences between Simply Wall St and Morningstar?

Simply Wall St lets you build and maintain a Portfolio using narratives - this is not possible on Morningstar
Morningstar primarily caters to finance professionals versus Individual investors
Morningstar products are more difficult to use and built using older technology, with some users reporting outages
Individuals may find they are treated as 2nd class customers compared to Morningstar's professional customers
Simply Wall St was built for individual investors and does not have dedicasted product for finance professionals
Simply Wall St is built on the principles of long term investing and focuses on simplicity, leveraging visuals to make data and analysis easy to understand
Simply Wall St is a single subscription that gives access to all features
Morningstar does not have a community of investors sharing ideas unlike Simply Wall St

Intro

Choosing the right investment research platform can make a huge difference for a retail investor. Both Simply Wall St and Morningstar are popular among savvy stock pickers but they are fundamentally different, lets explore why.

Foundational Principles

Simply Wall St is explicitly designed for individual investors, whereas Morningstar’s products have traditionally catered to investment professionals. Simply Wall St emphasizes an accessible and visual approach to stock research – its platform presents key financial data in easy-to-read charts and infographics. The service is popular among retail investors (over 8 million users worldwide as of 2025), and its design reflects this focus: complex financial metrics are distilled into intuitive visuals (like the Snowflake diagram) that help users quickly grasp a company’s fundamentals.

Morningstar, on the other hand, is a 40-year veteran in investment research known for its rigorous analysis and professional-grade tools. Its platform (especially Morningstar Premium and higher tiers) is intense and robust, built for users who want exhaustive data and expert insight. Morningstar’s heritage is in mutual fund and equity research for advisors and institutions, and it shows – the interface prioritizes depth over simplicity.

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Stock Research Reports

For any stock worldwide, Simply Wall St gives you an instant visual summary (the “snowflake” graphic) that distills the company’s fundamentals into five dimensions (value, future growth, past performance, financial health, and dividends). Key metrics and fair value estimates are right there on the page, with color-coded graphics and sliders indicating how the company stacks up. This approach lets you quickly grasp a stock’s strengths and weaknesses without reading lengthy reports. It’s a fundamentally unbiased, by-the-numbers analysis – every stock is evaluated with the same rigorous criteria and data from S&P Global. The method used by Simply Wall St is also well documented on their Github account.

15 models sounds impressive until you realise most of them are not relevant

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Investing Pro provides a Financial Health Rating and a Fair Value. Their method for Fair Value uses the average of 15 models - on the surface this might seem like a good thing, but in reality most of these models are not applicable for all companies. A simple example would be using a Dividend model to value a growth company or a PB multiple to value any company which is not a bank, neither make any sense.

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Likewise their Financial Health Rate is based on:

InvestingPro’s Financial Health uses a scale of 1-5 based to rate a stock by taking into account its five parameters, our Health Checks: Relative Value, Price Momentum, Cash Flow Health, Profitability Health, and Growth Health. Financial Health is calculated as a weighted average of the Health checks.

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This is strange as many of these parameters or checks are nothing to do with Financial Health, in fact all of these metrics are simply based on comparing ratios to their percentiles. For example "Growth Health" is simply based on PEG ratio.

This is substantially different to the Snowflake analysis where each check is specifically designed to correctly analyse an aspect of the company.

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‍Relevant links

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Community Ideas

Investing Pro does not feature a community unlike Simply Wall St, this means investors can't share and discuss ideas or build a portfolio using narratives.

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Example Community Narrative on Nvidia on Simply Wall St

Relevant links

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Portfolio Management

Investing Pro does not feature Portfolio Management, only the creation of watchlists.

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Simply Wall St Portfolio - Detailed Returns

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Relevant Links

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Cost (Plans and Pricing)

Simply Wall St Pricing: Simply Wall St has a freemium model with three tiers: Free, Premium, and Unlimited.

Investing Pro Pricing: Investing Pro’s basic plan gives one article for free but afterwards is paid.

Plan	Simply Wall St	Investing Pro
Free / Basic	Free Plan – $0 • 5 company reports/month • 1 portfolio (10 holdings) • Basic screener	Free Plan – $0 • Real-time prices (limited) • Some articles and news • Ads shown
Standard / Premium	Premium – $120/year (~$10/month billed annually) • 30 reports/month • 3 portfolios (30 stocks each) • Screener, alerts, broker sync	Investing Pro – $249/year (~$20.75/month billed annually) • Fair value estimates & Pro Picks • Advanced screening & fundamentals • Stock comparison tools, no ads
High-End / Unlimited	Unlimited – $240/year • Unlimited stock reports • 5 portfolios (no size limit) • Export tools, advanced analytics	No higher tier publicly available (Occasionally bundled with Investing.com institutional plans)