Joel Bruckenstein and Bob Veres just released the 2022 T3/Inside Information Software Survey, which is available as a PDF download now.

The survey report ranks, by market share, the leading software solutions in advisory-firm tech stacks in 35 different categories. It also offers the average user rating for every product and service. They also included market share and user ranking changes from last year and how many advisors are thinking about moving or switching to each product in ranked order.

The results of this much-anticipated survey were presented live at the T3 Technology Conference in Denton, TX. Slide 19 shows the “Software All-Stars” and slide 20 shows something new this year, the “Mighty Mites.”

“Anybody looking for new solutions or for a replacement to an existing part of your tech stack should use the survey as a buyer’s guide to the most popular options and the solutions with the highest satisfaction scores from their users,” Veres said. “Looking over the 35 categories, you will find some attractive things to add to your advisory toolkit.”

The data comes from a broad sample of the marketplace: 4,495 members of advisory firms across the spectrum. Reviewing the demographic information offers some valuable insights, including the market share rankings and user ratings of CRM tools, financial planning programs, portfolio management platforms, investment data providers, risk tolerance instruments, document management and document processing tools, a new category of client communication power tools, and the ratings of all the custodial and broker/dealer platforms. Plus, it shows the votes for most valuable software category in an advisory firm tech stack.

“One of the most interesting success stories in the survey is Holistiplan in the tax planning software category,” Veres said. “Before Holistiplan entered the survey (and market) in 2020, fewer than 10% of advisor respondents reported using any tax planning solution. It’s not hard to understand why; most of the legacy programs require a brutal data-entry process, pulling different numbers by hand out of a client’s previous tax returns and then navigating clumsy interfaces that were more designed for tax preparation than forecasting and advising.”

“One category that we always watch with interest is the all-in-one software solutions” Bruckenstein said. “There is no clear winner in this race. The market share leaders are Orion (6.12%), Morningstar Office (6.10%), Envestnet Tamarac (3.92%), and the Advyzon program (3.56%). Advyzon stands out from the others as a totally home-grown solution. The people who are using these platforms are either contented with them (Morningstar and Tamarac each earned a 7.45 user rating) or quite pleased (Orion’s rating was 7.83 and Advyzon’s was 8.33).”

Additional commentary from Veres is available here: This Year’s Top-Ranked Software Products.

The report is now available at www.T3TechnologyHub.com and/or www.BobVeres.com. This 72-page report is the product of months of data analysis by Bob Veres of Inside Information and Joel Bruckenstein of T3. With 4495 respondents, this is by far the most statistically viable report on this important topic in the financial planning profession.

Co-sponsors of this year’s survey are:

• Assetbook
• Holistiplan
• Advyzon
• Addepar
• Fidelity

“We extend our thanks to everyone who contributed their data to the survey,” said Bruckenstein, “and to everyone reading this report, and to all the fintech providers who con- tribute the growing, increasingly powerful support ecosystem for the advisor community—and ultimately to their clients.”