Luum publishes this comparison. We build one of the products discussed, so read it with that in mind. Facts were last verified on September 11, 2026; the other products change too, so check their sites.
Luum vs your spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is free and encodes exactly the rules you chose. It also goes quietly wrong in four specific places. Here is how to tell which you need.
Last updated September 11, 2026 · 10 min read
Most comparison pages set two products against each other. This one sets a product against a file you already own, which you built, which cost you nothing, and which is probably still fine. That changes the honest shape of the answer: the question is not which tool is better, it is whether you have crossed the specific line where a sheet stops telling you the truth.
The short version
Your spreadsheet fits better if it holds assets no connector will ever reach, you value seeing every formula, you have one non-registered account or none, and reconciling it is still a manageable habit rather than something you have started skipping.
Luum fits better if the same security sits in more than one non-registered account, you hold funds and want to know what they collectively hold, you have currencies to convert on every transaction rather than once at the end, and you would rather the record be kept continuously than rebuilt each March.
What a spreadsheet does well
It is free, and it stays free. There is no plan to outgrow and no vendor to depend on.
It holds anything. Private company shares, a defined-benefit pension estimate, a rental property, metals in a safe, no aggregation product will ever cover that list, and a sheet does not care what you put in it.
It runs on rules you chose. If a category should be excluded from your allocation, or an asset valued a particular way, you write that and it is so. Nothing is decided on your behalf.
It is transparent all the way down. Every number has a formula you can click on and check, a claim very little software can make, ours included.
And it outlives things. A CSV opens in fifty years. Products get discontinued, companies get acquired, and terms change. That is a real argument and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Where a spreadsheet goes quietly wrong
Four places. These are not "it gets tedious" complaints. They are where a sheet starts producing numbers that are wrong without saying so. Each is summarised here in a paragraph; the long version, with the box 42 mechanism spelled out and the signals that tell you which one you have hit, is in tracking a portfolio in a spreadsheet, and where it breaks down.
Adjusted cost base across accounts. Under Canadian rules an identical security is pooled into a single average cost across every non-registered account you hold, so the calculation stops being a per-account one the moment the same ticker appears in two places. The thing that actually costs money is not a broken formula: it is a T3 arriving in March carrying a box 42 amount that never gets applied, quietly, for years, until the year you sell. Luum computes average-cost ACB across accounts and through partial sales, accurate to your inputs, so it needs your full transaction history to be right.
Currency on every row. A portfolio holding both CAD and USD positions needs a rate attached to each transaction, not one rate applied at the end. Maintaining that by hand, per row, across years, is where sheets stop being right long before they look wrong. Luum converts each transaction at a rate for its own trade date, drawn from a maintained daily series, and records how close the match was, the exact day, the nearest prior day, or an approximation, rather than presenting every conversion as equally certain.
Seeing through your funds. A sheet can tell you the size of each fund position. What it cannot tell you is which companies sit inside them, and therefore how much of one name you own once two funds overlap. That needs per-fund holdings data, kept current. There is no reasonable manual approach to it. Luum looks through the funds it has holdings data for and reports the result as a floor, at least this much exposure to that company, because fund holdings are published as the largest names and are missing entirely for many Canadian-listed funds. A floor is a useful number. A precise-looking one here would not be.
Knowing when it is stale. A spreadsheet cannot tell you it is out of date. Skip a dividend in August and everything derived from it is wrong from that day on, with nothing in the file to suggest anything changed. An error you cannot see is harder to fix than one that shouts.
And then the part a spreadsheet was never going to attempt
Fixing the four failures above only gets the record right. The reason to leave the sheet is what becomes possible once it is.
Drift against a written plan. Targets by asset class, region and sector, measured continuously across every account at once rather than one tab at a time, with a rebalance simulator that computes the trades which would close the gap. You place them yourself.
A return measured against something. Your portfolio compared to an index funded with your real contributions on the dates you made them, which is the comparison that does not flatter you for adding money into a rising market, with the return of your holdings kept separate from the return your money actually earned.
Diagnostics nobody maintains by hand. On the Wealth tier: blended risk from beta, volatility and maximum drawdown; concentration scored with the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index across asset class, sector, geography and individual holding; each fund's real management expense ratio compounded over ten, twenty and thirty years; pairwise overlap between two funds you own; and your home-country bias against the Canada weight in a global index. Your cost, concentration and return are then set against anonymised aggregates of users with similar risk profiles, goals and horizons.
A Monte Carlo projection with real assumptions behind it. Ten thousand simulated paths from your actual allocation, using the correlations between its asset classes, on the capital market assumptions published annually by FP Canada and the Institute of Financial Planning, which are the assumptions Canadian financial planners are expected to use for long-horizon projections. Against your goal it reports whether you are on track or at risk, and the gap in today's dollars. A sheet can compound a single growth rate; it cannot tell you the range.
The tax record, filed rather than assembled in March. Realised gains across every reportable account together, registered accounts excluded, exportable as a T5008-style CSV, and TFSA and RRSP contribution room drawn down from the figure on your notice of assessment on the Investor tier and above.
Market context without a second tab. Ticker Scores on five measured dimensions nightly, watchlists with optional price alerts, exchange-wide movers and 52-week highs and lows across the TSX, NYSE and NASDAQ, an IPO calendar, and an AI that explains the numbers on your own screen in plain language, grounded in your real data and unable to invent a figure.
Where they differ
| Compared on | Your spreadsheet | Luum |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free, permanently | Paid subscription |
| Assets it can hold | Anything you can type | Listed securities, plus manual assets for net worth |
| Who owns the file | You, forever, with no vendor | Your data, exportable, but held by us |
| Transparency of the calculation | Every formula is visible | Documented, not clickable |
| Pooled ACB across accounts | Possible, and the most commonly wrong thing in one | Average-cost across accounts and partial sales |
| Per-transaction currency conversion | Manual, per row | At each transaction's own trade date, match graded |
| Look-through into fund holdings | Not realistically possible | Reported as a floor, where holdings data exists |
| Staying current | Only as current as your last data-entry session | Read-only sync, CSV import |
| Knowing it has gone stale | It cannot tell you | Data timestamps on what it shows |
Two of those rows go to the spreadsheet outright, and one of them, arbitrary assets, is the reason plenty of people who could use Luum should keep a sheet alongside it for the things Luum will never hold.
What we concede
If you move, you give up the thing you liked most: total visibility into how each number was reached. We publish how the calculations work, but you cannot click a cell and read the formula. For some people that trade is not worth making, and the honest answer to those people is to keep the spreadsheet and get the March reconciliation habit right instead.
Bottom line
A spreadsheet is a good tool that fails in four specific, silent, well-understood ways. If none of them has happened to you, nothing here is urgent. If the same security sits in two non-registered accounts and there is a T3 you are not certain you adjusted for, that is the line, and it is worth crossing before the year you sell rather than after.
If what pushed you off the spreadsheet is holdings spread across several countries rather than several accounts, Luum vs Sharesight is the more useful comparison. That is the axis it is written about.
And if the reason you are still in a spreadsheet is that you want your data on your own machine and you would rather not pay for any of this, that is a real position with a real product behind it: Luum vs Wealthfolio, which is free and open source.
Common questions
Is a spreadsheet good enough?
For a small number of holdings in one account, often yes. It is free and it encodes exactly the rules you chose, which is a genuine advantage over any product. The question is not whether it works but whether you will keep it correct as the number of accounts grows.
What breaks first?
Usually cost base, because it is the calculation that depends on events rather than on prices: a distribution or a transfer changes it and nothing in the sheet reminds you. Returns break next, once deposits and withdrawals make a simple percentage meaningless.
Can I import my spreadsheet?
Holdings and transactions can be brought in from a file, and brokerage connections mean most people do not need to. Keeping the spreadsheet as a second opinion is a reasonable habit rather than a redundancy.
This comparison is educational and general in nature. It is not investment, tax, or legal advice. Verify current features and pricing directly with each provider before deciding.