Is Simply Wall St worth it?

The free plan gives you five company reports a month, and for most people that is genuinely enough. Here is what the paid tiers add, what the Snowflake does better than anyone, and the two gaps that matter most.

By Nathan Wickham-Hurd · Founder, Oak Growth · First-class Economics & Finance, MBA · Last reviewed September 2026

The short answer

For most people, the free plan is enough, and that is the honest recommendation. Simply Wall St's free tier gives you full company reports on five stocks a month, which is more than a buy-and-hold investor typically needs. Premium at $10.95 a month raises that to 30 reports and adds export. Unlimited at $21.50 removes the cap. If you find yourself hitting five reports a month repeatedly, Premium is fair value. If you don't, you are paying for headroom you won't use.

Disclosure. We build Oak Growth, a competing stock screener. Every price and limit below comes from Simply Wall St's own pages and was checked in September 2026, so you can verify it yourself.

What you actually get, by tier

Free. Five company reports a month, one portfolio with up to ten holdings, unlimited watchlists, and the screener — though screener results are capped at the top four rows, which limits it as a discovery tool. Permanent, not a trial.

Premium — $131.40/yr, or $10.95 a month. Thirty reports a month, three portfolios of up to thirty holdings each, and three screeners with alerts. Note that you cannot download anything on this plan — see below.

Unlimited — $258/yr, or $21.50 a month. Unlimited reports, five portfolios with unlimited holdings, ten screeners. Only worth it if you consistently exhaust Premium's allowance, which most retail investors do not.

Paid plans are promoted on annual billing, and discounts are commonly only visible once you are signed in — the public pricing page shows full price. Worth knowing before you conclude it costs more than it does.

What they do well

The Snowflake — the five-axis visual covering value, future growth, past performance, financial health and dividend — is genuinely good design. It gets you to a structured view of a company in well under a minute, and it makes the shape of a business legible to people without an accounting background. Nothing else in the category communicates as efficiently.

Coverage is the other real strength. Around 150,000 companies, fully global, with data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. Their valuation work is also more considered than most competitors admit: four different valuation models chosen to suit the type of business — one for ordinary companies, another for those valued mainly on their dividends, a separate one for banks and insurers, and another again for property trusts. Valuing a bank the same way you value a software company gives you a bad answer, and most tools do exactly that.

Where it falls short

No technical indicators at all. No RSI, no moving averages, no MACD. There is a share price line and nothing on top of it. If you want any sense of whether a cheap stock is cheap and stabilising or cheap and still falling, you will not get it here.

No management quality score and no moat axis. The Snowflake covers financials thoroughly but says nothing about who is running the company or whether its advantage is durable — which for a Buffett-style approach are two of the main questions.

You cannot download anything unless you pay for the top plan. Simply Wall St lets you save a company report to your own computer — either as a PDF to read later, or as a spreadsheet file you can open in Excel and work with yourself. That download button only exists on the Unlimited plan at $258 a year. On Premium at $131.40, there is no way to get anything out of the site.

And you can never download a list of companies from the screener, on any plan. If you filter for, say, forty companies with low debt and strong cash flow, there is no button to send that list to a spreadsheet. Their own support pages confirm it and suggest adding the companies to a watchlist by hand instead. If you like working in Excel, you will be retyping.

Reports are algorithmically generated, not written by analysts. That is not a flaw in itself — it is how the coverage gets to 150,000 companies — but it is worth knowing that the prose is templated.

Cancellation friction. Complaints about auto-renewal and unclear cancellation appear consistently enough across independent reviews to be worth flagging.

The free screener is barely a screener. Results are capped at the top four rows, so you cannot use it to find companies — only to confirm ones you already know about.

Reports are rationed even when you pay. Thirty a month on Premium, then you wait for the next month. If you research in bursts, an allowance is the wrong shape for the way you work.

The subscription as a drag on returns

A useful way to judge any tool: what percentage of your portfolio does it cost each year? Premium at $131.40 is about 1.3% of a $10,000 portfolio, 0.66% of $20,000, and 0.13% of $100,000. On a small portfolio that is a meaningful headwind against typical long-run returns. On a large one it is rounding. The tool has to do less to justify itself the bigger your portfolio gets.

So is it worth it?

Start on free and use it properly for two months. If you never hit the five-report ceiling, you have your answer and it costs nothing. If you hit it in the first fortnight, Premium at around $11 a month is reasonably priced for what it does.

The question worth asking before either is whether reports are what you need. Simply Wall St is excellent at explaining one company at a time and weaker at helping you decide which company to look at next — the screener is capped on free, and there is no entry-timing layer at any tier. If your problem is "tell me about this company", it is very good. If your problem is "which of these thousand companies should I be looking at", it is a narrower fit.

If it is the wrong fit, here is the alternative we built

The difference is speed. Simply Wall St is built around reading a report on one company at a time, and it rations how many you get. Oak Growth is built around one click: run the screener and every company in the market you are looking at comes back already scored, valued and ranked. No allowance, no waiting for next month.

Search any market, get the Buffett score. Type a company name, ticker or sector and switch between the FTSE 100, FTSE 250, FTSE 350, S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, Germany or France. Whatever comes back carries a BP Score out of 100 — the four Buffett pillars of moat, management, economics and value — alongside an intrinsic value and margin of safety. You are not opening a report and reading it; the verdict is on the card.

Three screeners, not one. The Buffett four-pillar screen, a US Quality screen calibrated to S&P 500 realities, and a Best USA Performers list built on ten-year total returns. Each is a button, and each returns a full grid of scored cards in seconds.

More than shares. Separate tabs for commodities, market indices and ETFs, so you can check the oil price before you buy an energy company, or compare an index tracker against the individual names in it, without leaving the app.

News that matters, filtered. Official company announcements only — SEC 8-K filings for US companies straight from EDGAR, and RNS announcements for UK ones — filtered to the ones that actually move a price, rather than a feed of everything published.

And it tells you when, not just what. Every card pairs the valuation with entry-timing signals: RSI, moving averages, support and resistance, golden and death crosses. Simply Wall St has no technical indicators at any price.

Oak Growth is £18 a month, one plan, no report allowance, with a seven-day trial. If the five-a-month ceiling is what brought you to this page, that is the difference.

Side by side

	Oak Growth	Simply Wall St
Companies	1,000+	~150,000
Markets	8	Global
Valuation	DCF on every company	4 models by company type
Report limits	None	5 free / 30 Premium per month
Screener results	Full grid, always	Top 4 rows on free
Moat score	Yes	No
Management score	Yes	No
Entry timing	RSI, moving averages, MACD, Bollinger, Golden/Death Cross, support & resistance	None at any price
Company news	Filtered SEC 8-K + UK RNS	No
Commodities & indices	Own tabs	Equities and funds only
ETF rankings	Yes	No
Download your data	Not yet	Top tier only, never screener results
Trial	7 days, card up front	Free plan, no card
Price	£18/month, one plan	Free, $10.95 or $21.50/month

See what the business is worth

Oak Growth publishes a discounted cash flow intrinsic value and margin of safety for 1,000+ companies across eight markets, scored on moat, management, economics and value.

Explore the screener →

Common questions

How much does Simply Wall St cost?

There is a permanent free plan with five company reports a month. Premium is $131.40 a year, about $10.95 a month, for 30 reports. Unlimited is $258 a year, about $21.50 a month, for unlimited reports. Discounts are often only visible once you are signed in — the public pricing page shows full price.

Is the Simply Wall St free plan enough?

For most buy-and-hold investors, yes. Five full company reports a month covers a lot of ordinary research. The main constraint is the screener, which caps results at the top four rows on free, so discovery is limited even though analysis is not.

Does Simply Wall St have technical analysis?

No. There are no technical indicators at any tier — no RSI, moving averages or MACD. You get a share price chart with no indicator layer. If entry timing matters to you, this is the clearest gap in the product.

What is the Snowflake?

Simply Wall St's five-axis visual summarising value, future growth, past performance, financial health and dividend for a company. It is the platform's best-known feature and the fastest way in the category to get an overall shape of a business. Note it has no axis for economic moat or management quality.

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