Open Net Worth vs Sure: Wealth Agent or Finance App?

We build Open Net Worth, the open-source personal wealth agent, for people who want the assistant to do the work. It comes with a 9:00 daily briefing template, checks prices every minute by default, judges your stocks against the thesis you wrote, takes emails and statements as bank data, and holds broker orders until you approve them.

Sure’s docs describe no scheduled assistant runs, per-tool permission levels, thesis-aware watching, order placement or built-in mailbox connector. Sure is the older project, with shared households and a phone app today. Read this as the maintainers’ view. Every Sure claim is taken from its own README, docs or release notes, and where those say nothing the table reads “Not documented”. Sure is a community fork of Maybe Finance, and both projects are AGPL-3.0.

Short answer: Choose Open Net Worth when the assistant should act without being asked: scheduled runs, holdings watched against your thesis in Intel, email and statement ingestion, and broker orders behind permissions you set. Sure fits if you need shared household books or a native phone app today; ours is in development, not yet released.

Note: Open Net Worth is software, not a financial advisor. This post compares how two apps work; it is not financial, investment, tax or legal advice.

Open Net Worth vs Sure at a glance

“Not documented” means the docs do not describe it, which is different from “cannot”. For the wider field, see our open source net worth tracker roundup.

Sure also has AI. What does each assistant do?

Sure’s assistant is real, and it can edit your data. Its AI guide lists tools that read accounts, transactions, holdings, the balance sheet and the budget. It also lists write tools: update_transaction, update_budget, create_goal, category and tag management, transfer fixes and bank statement import. You can point it at OpenAI, Anthropic or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, hand the chat to an external agent, or remove the in-app chat and connect your own agent over MCP.

Some of its MCP tools carry safeguards. Several support dry_run, rules are always saved inactive, and apply_rule needs a preview_token from a preview step. What the docs do not describe is an approval card in the chat, per-tool permission levels, or a run that starts without you typing. The MCP page documents one read_write scope and warns that the assistant can call write-capable tools. The roadmap lists “AI controls and transparency” as Planned and “External-agent integration and execution” as Exploring.

Sure’s proactive side is Insights, and its docs say their text comes from templates, not AI. The v0.7.6 notes add that “Dig in with AI” prepares a question for you to send. Sure also has rules that match transactions and apply actions such as a category.

Open Net Worth has three layers. A conversation has an approval mode: a new one starts in Auto, where ordinary changes go through and can be undone with Restore while risky ones ask, and Manual asks about everything. Each tool has a level: Always allow, Needs approval or Blocked. And Automations are jobs Lucius repeats on a schedule or when something happens, such as a price moving.

The templates include a daily briefing at 9:00, a weekly report on Mondays and a monthly report on the 1st. Lucius writes each one from your own book when it runs, so the report is about your money and not a filled-in template. Each Automation has its own approval mode. An Automation never approves the transactions it logs, and it cannot create or change Automations without asking you. Our AI agent guide covers a normal day.

Bank sync beats parsing emails. Sometimes.

Where an aggregator covers your bank, sync is the easier path. Sure’s onboarding guide names 11 providers: Plaid, SimpleFIN, Lunch Flow, Enable Banking (beta), TrueLayer (UK, alpha), Monobank (Ukraine), Fio banka (Czechia), Redbark (Australia), Up (Australia), Akahu (New Zealand) and CoinStats (crypto, beta). Its homepage says “Over 10,000+ institutions to choose from”. Two of them, Monobank and Fio, are direct bank APIs for one country, and we have neither.

We have seven bank and budget connectors: SimpleFIN (US and Canada), Plaid, Enable Banking (EU and UK), GoCardless (existing accounts only), Lunch Flow (banks in other countries), Lunch Money and YNAB. We also list 14 brokerages and exchanges that connect through the broker’s own MCP server, from Interactive Brokers, Alpaca and Robinhood to Coinbase and Kraken. Past that list you can add any other MCP server, and the REST API connector points Lucius at any HTTP API. Add as many as you like. Compare synced numbers with your statement at first.

The trade-off is coverage: email and statements cover any bank that writes to you or lets you download a file. Our Email connector reads a mailbox over IMAP with an app password, and Lucius logs bank, card and trade emails as transactions. Statement import reads PDF (including scans), CSV, XLSX, OFX, QIF, MT940 and CAMT.053, and shows every row before it books.

The price is that you depend on your bank sending useful emails or on you fetching statements, and reading PDF, CSV and XLSX needs an AI model. Sure also imports CSV files and PDF statements, but its docs do not describe a built-in mailbox connector. Our guides to a budget without bank sync and statement import cover the setup.

Monthly releases or daily ones?

Sure releases once a month. Its repository dates from Jul 23, 2025, and its v0.7.6 notes call it a “monthly release” and say “we haven’t missed that cadence in more than a year!”. The last four, v0.7.3 to v0.7.6, landed on Jul 31, Aug 31, Sep 30 and Oct 31.

Open Net Worth ships faster. It has published 46 releases since Oct 2, 2026, more than one a day on average, and the latest came out on Nov 11, 2026. Our October release notes list what changed in the first month.

Shipping daily only works if changes are safe. Here is what we have for that:

• A write path that validates. Every create and update goes through the ledger’s choke points. Category and account references resolve there, and a transfer whose legs imply an impossible exchange rate is refused.
• Tests. About 20,000 tests across 1,462 test files.
• Feature flags. A large or risky change ships behind a flag. Off means exactly the old behaviour, running the old code; both paths are tested, and CI fails once a flag is past its removal date.
• Changes you can undo. Every message that led to a change has a Restore button.
• Numbers from the ledger. Every balance, total and projection is computed by the ledger, not the model, and each step Lucius takes shows as its own row you can open, such as “Get net worth”.

As with any assistant, Lucius reasons over what is in your book, so check your first imports against your statements.

An agent that trades: what could go wrong?

Open Net Worth trades through your broker’s own MCP server (the protocol AI apps use to call tools), which you add under Connectors. Interactive Brokers, Robinhood, moomoo, Longbridge, Public.com, Alpaca MCP, Coinbase, OKX, Kraken and Bybit can place orders. Webull’s are only instructions you confirm in its app, and Tiger Brokers and Upstox are read-only. Our bank and brokerage data connectors stay read-only, so an order only ever goes out through a broker tool you connected. Sure’s docs do not describe placing orders.

What stands between a wrong model answer and a live order:

• Tools from an external MCP server ask first unless you set them to Always allow, in every approval mode.
• The confirm card shows what will be saved, and approving runs exactly what it showed, never a fresh guess.
• Alpaca MCP starts on paper trading. Public.com has no paper mode, and Bybit trades for real unless you add BYBIT_TESTNET=true.
• A tool set to Blocked is refused in every mode and every Automation.

Two limits, stated plainly. Text from a server is treated as data, not instructions, which lowers the risk and does not remove it. And “Always allow” also covers Automations and Telegram, money-moving tools included. An Automation set to Manually approve ignores your chat grants and pauses unless the tool is on that Automation’s own Always allowed list.

Scheduled trades are an Automation plus your broker’s MCP server. Set the Automation to run monthly, allow the order tool for that Automation only, and Lucius places the buy on schedule. We run a monthly DCA this way ourselves. Test a new job on Alpaca’s paper mode first.

A thesis has a “Stop below” level. Stop and trim levels do not fire alerts of their own, so set a price alert if you want a push.

Why not contribute to Sure instead?

If you want what Sure is, contribute there. Its README says “we’d love it if you stuck around and contributed here instead”, and a household app is a good place to put work.

We built something else. Open Net Worth is an agent harness around one person’s ledger: the assistant works the books through real tools, under permission levels, with one password and no user accounts. Sure is a Rails app for several users where the assistant is one feature. These are two different directions for managing your finances: in Sure you keep the books and can ask an assistant, and in Open Net Worth the agent keeps the books and you approve.

Both are AGPL-3.0, so neither blocks the other, and you do not have to switch in one go. Open Net Worth moves a whole YNAB or Actual Budget plan across and can keep the two in sync both ways, and the REST API connector reads and writes any app that has an API. Our MCP server guide covers the other direction, outside agents calling Open Net Worth.

How do you move your data from Sure to Open Net Worth?

There is no one-click Sure importer yet, so the move is a file import in three steps.

1. Export from Sure. Its “Export your data” dialog builds a zip of everything you have. Inside, transactions.csv carries the date, account name, amount, name, category, tags, notes and currency of every row, next to accounts.csv and trades.csv.
2. Create your accounts in Open Net Worth, with the same names as in accounts.csv.
3. Import the file. Open an account, click Import and add transactions.csv. Under “Into accounts”, add your other accounts so each row goes to the right one. Lucius reads the file, you review every row, and nothing is written until you click Confirm. Importing the same file again books nothing twice.

If you would rather run both for a while, add your Sure instance with the REST API connector. Sure has an OpenAPI document and API keys, so Lucius can pull new transactions from it until you are ready to switch. Tell us on Discord how your move goes; a step-by-step guide is next.

When Open Net Worth is the better pick

• You want reports that arrive unprompted. The briefing and report templates are sent to Telegram or a webhook, or appear in the app. Our Telegram guide shows approving by tap.
• You hold stocks and want them judged against your own thesis. Intel watches holdings, watchlists and topics, and Lucius cites your thesis when he advises on a stock.
• Your bank is not on an aggregator, or you prefer emails and statements. They work in any currency, wherever your bank sends them.
• You already pay for Claude or ChatGPT. Open Net Worth can run the Claude Code or Codex CLI you are signed in to, no API key.
• You want to try it beside the app you use now. Two-way sync with YNAB and Actual Budget, and a REST API connector for anything else with an API, let you run both for a while before you move.

When Sure is the better pick

• You share the books. Sure documents members added by invitation link, a super_admin role and OIDC sign-in. Open Net Worth has one password and no user accounts.
• You want a native phone app today. Sure has a Flutter companion app for iOS and Android, focused on login and balances. Open Net Worth’s is in development; until then its web interface works in a phone browser.

Our take

Pick Open Net Worth for an agent that acts under rules you set; pick Sure for a shared household finance app. Open Net Worth leads on scheduled runs, per-tool permissions, thesis-aware watching and broker orders behind approval, and Sure’s docs describe none of them. Sure leads on shared household books, and on a phone app until ours ships.

If you want the agent to do the work, Open Net Worth fits; check its numbers against your bank for the first few weeks. If you want a place to keep shared books and ask questions, Sure fits. Our self-hosting guide compares more tools by job.

Try it on fake data at demo.opennetworth.ai (no sign-up), or install it from the docs. Questions go to Discord, bugs to GitHub issues.