Portfolio Visualizer Basic vs Pro: Which Plan Advisors Can Use

Portfolio Visualizer Pro, at $55 a month billed annually, is the only tier licensed for commercial use. The free tier and the $30 a month Basic tier are both labeled "Personal and Educational Use" on the pricing card itself. If you run backtests as part of paid client work, the $30 figure that every roundup quotes is not the number that applies to you, and the real gap is 1.83 times, not a rounding error. We read the pricing page at source on September 4, 2026.

That is the short answer. The longer answer is more interesting, because the tier that carries the commercial licence turns out to be the same tier that lets you put your firm's disclosures on the report you hand a client. Those two things sit behind one paywall, and no comparison article we have seen mentions either.

What is the difference between Portfolio Visualizer Basic and Pro?

Here is the whole comparison as the vendor states it, read from the pricing page and its footnotes on September 4, 2026.

Notice what is not in that table. The analysis engine is identical across all three tiers. Every one of them backtests, runs Monte Carlo, optimizes and does factor regressions. What you buy as you climb is scale, persistence, presentation and a licence. That is unusual, and it is genuinely good design on the vendor's part: the free tier is not crippled analysis, it is analysis you cannot keep.

Can financial advisors use Portfolio Visualizer with clients?

On the Pro tier, that is the tier the vendor licenses for commercial use, so it is the one to start from. On Free or Basic the pricing card says Personal and Educational Use, and paid client work is commercial on its face. The vendor does not publish a longer definition next to the tier names, so if your situation is genuinely borderline, ask them in writing rather than reasoning about it, and keep the answer.

This shape is now common enough in this market that it deserves a name. Several vendors ration access by who you are rather than by what you pay, and the tier you read about in a review is frequently not a tier you are eligible to buy. TradingView states that only its Ultimate plan is available to professional users, which moves an adviser from the $59.95 a month Premium headline to $199.95 a month billed annually. Option Alpha states its platform is intended only for retail, non-professional investors as the NYSE defines them, with no higher tier to escalate to. We wrote up the exchange definition and every gated tier we could find on professional versus non-professional subscriber status, because the definition is stricter than most people assume. It turns on whether the account is in a natural person's name, and it treats an unregistered adviser exactly like a registered one.

Firms that already run a control-mapping process for their security and vendor reviews tend to catch this early, because a software licence term ends up recorded as an evidenced control rather than something one person remembered reading. Firms that do not tend to find out when someone asks which plan the client-facing report came from.

The disclosure feature and the commercial licence are the same paywall

This is the finding that made us write the article. Portfolio Visualizer lists a feature called Customized PDF Reports, and footnote 4 on the pricing page defines it as the ability to "Customize fonts, color themes, branding logos, and disclosures. Include or exclude specific report sections."

Disclosures. On a report you hand to a client or a prospect. That feature is excluded from Free, excluded from Basic, and included only on Pro. So the ability to attach your firm's required language to the output lives on exactly the same tier as the commercial licence, at $55 a month billed annually. If you were planning to use Basic and add the disclosures by hand afterward in a PDF editor, that is a manual step in a process the SEC has been actively examining, repeated for every report, forever.

Is Portfolio Visualizer output hypothetical performance?

The vendor answers this itself, and unusually plainly. Its global disclosures state that "All outputs (including backtests and performance results) are hypothetical and not indicative of future outcomes", and that the operating entity "does not provide investment, legal, accounting, or tax advice and is not registered with the SEC, FINRA, FCA, ESMA, or any other regulator."

That matters because the SEC Marketing Rule, 17 CFR 275.206(4)-1, defines hypothetical performance at (e)(8) and names backtesting inside the definition: "performance that is backtested by the application of a strategy to data from prior time periods when the strategy was not actually used during those time periods." Subsection (d)(6) then bars hypothetical performance in an advertisement unless the adviser adopts and implements policies and procedures reasonably designed to ensure it is relevant to the likely financial situation and investment objectives of the intended audience, provides sufficient information for that audience to understand the criteria used and assumptions made, and provides sufficient information for them to understand the risks and limitations of relying on it.

Read (d)(6)(ii) again with a software purchase in mind. You have to be able to explain the criteria and assumptions. If the tool will not tell you what it assumed, you cannot satisfy that condition no matter how good your policies are. The rule is, in a quiet way, a specification for your vendor.

The enforcement history is short and specific. On September 11, 2023 the SEC announced settled charges against nine registered investment advisers that had "advertised hypothetical performance to the general public on their websites without adopting and/or implementing policies and procedures required by the Marketing Rule", with $850,000 in combined penalties. Two of the nine, Macroclimate LLC and MRA Advisory Group, also failed to maintain required copies of their advertisements. The staff has kept the guidance current too: the Marketing Compliance FAQs were updated on January 15, 2026 with two new responses, on model versus actual advisory fees in performance and on self-regulatory organization disqualifications. Confirm any of this with your compliance function rather than with a software vendor, including us.

The exception most advisers have never read

There is a carve-out, and it is directly about tools. Rule 206(4)-1(e)(8)(ii)(A) says hypothetical performance does not include "an interactive analysis tool where a client or investor, or prospective client, or investor, uses the tool to produce simulations and statistical analyses", provided the adviser does four things: describes the criteria and methodology used, including the tool's limitations and key assumptions; explains that the results may vary with each use and over time; where applicable, describes the universe of investments considered, explains how the tool selects investments, discloses any selectivity and states that other investments not considered may be similar or superior; and discloses that the tool generates hypothetical outcomes.

So the same arithmetic can land in two different regulatory buckets depending on who drives the tool. A backtest you run and then paste into a PDF is hypothetical performance. The same tool operated by the prospect, with those four disclosures in place, is not. That is not a loophole, because the four conditions are real work, but it does mean the question "is this compliant" has no answer until you say who is clicking.

Does Portfolio Visualizer export to Excel or PDF?

On Basic and Pro, yes. On the free tier, no, and that single row disqualifies the free tier for anything you intend to show anyone. Rule 204-2(a)(16) requires an adviser to keep "all accounts, books, internal working papers, and any other records or documents that are necessary to form the basis for or demonstrate the calculation of any performance or rate of return" presented in an advertisement, including copies of all the information provided or offered under 206(4)-1(d)(6). A tool that cannot export cannot produce those working papers.

The retention period is longer than people expect, because of how it is measured. Rule 204-2(e)(3)(i) requires those records to be kept "in an easily accessible place for a period of not less than five years, the first two years in an appropriate office of the investment adviser, from the end of the fiscal year during which the investment adviser last published or otherwise disseminated" the advertisement. The clock does not start when you publish. It starts at the end of the fiscal year in which you last disseminated it. Post a backtest chart on your website in December 2026, leave it up through 2028, and the five years run from the end of fiscal 2028, which puts the file's retirement date in 2033. Nearly seven years from publication, for a page nobody remembered was still live.

Is Portfolio Visualizer free for advisors?

There is a free tier, and it is genuinely capable for personal research: full backtesting, Monte Carlo, optimization and factor regression, with no login required. It is capped at 15 assets per portfolio with limited history and no month-to-date results, it saves nothing, and it exports nothing. For an individual testing an allocation with their own money it is one of the better free tools on the internet. For an advisory firm it is unusable for client-facing work on two independent grounds: the licence line and the absence of any export.

What Basic is actually good for

Basic is a fair deal for the person it is licensed for. Fifty saved portfolio models, 150 assets per portfolio, Excel, CSV and PDF export, configurable asset backfills, all for $30 a month billed annually. If you are managing your own money, or you are researching for your own account alongside a day job, this is the tier. The trap is only the one people fall into by accident: a solo adviser who tests allocations for their own portfolio on Basic, then uses the same login to prepare something for a client, has quietly crossed a line the pricing card drew.

Worth adding, since it comes up in the same conversation: on the exchange-status question specifically, moving a subscription onto a company card can matter on its own. The NYSE Nonprofessional Subscriber Policy classifies an individual as a Professional Subscriber where market data is received through an organization's account "because the account through which the market data is received is not registered to a natural person", even where the use is purely personal. That rule governs real-time market data rather than Portfolio Visualizer's end-of-day analysis, but it catches the same person on a different subscription.

The verdict

If you bill clients, budget $55 a month billed annually and stop reading the $30 number. You are not paying 83% more for features. You are paying for the licence that lets you do the work at all, and you happen to get the branded, disclosure-carrying PDF report on the same tier, which is the thing you were going to need anyway.

If you are testing your own money, Basic at $30 is well priced and the free tier is a genuinely useful place to start.

And if the reason you are comparing tiers is that allocation backtesting is only part of the job, the wider comparison sits on backtesting software for financial advisors, where the question is which tool documents its assumptions well enough to survive (d)(6)(ii). Portfolio Visualizer's specific gaps and the tools that fill them are on Portfolio Visualizer alternatives, and the day-to-day workflow view is on stock research tools for financial advisors. One capability worth checking before you commit: Portfolio Visualizer does moving average crossover work on the free tier, and it does not do RSI at all, because what it calls relative strength momentum is cross-sectional return ranking rather than Wilder's index. If RSI is your rule, see RSI backtesting instead.

Nothing here is legal, tax or investment advice, and none of it is a substitute for your own compliance review. Prices and licence terms were read from the vendors' own pages on the dates given and vendors change both. Verify before you buy.