Holistiplan vs Income Lab 2026: Tax Tool or Income Plan

Key Takeaways

Tax projection software turns a client's filed return into forward-looking bracket, Roth conversion and Medicare surcharge scenarios, while retirement income software models how much a client can spend and which accounts should fund it. Holistiplan sits in the first group and Income Lab sits in the second, so the two are less direct rivals than the search query suggests.

TL;DR: Pick Holistiplan if your pain is reading and explaining 1040s and running year-specific tax scenarios. Pick Income Lab if your pain is turning a plan into a defensible monthly spending number. Firms with both pains run both.

• Holistiplan prices by household count, from the entry tier to the largest published tier, and Income Lab prices per advisor. A growing client list inflates the first bill and a growing advisor team inflates the second.

• Neither vendor's pages we opened name a rename, merger or discontinuation. Holistiplan's pricing page does not state an owner or parent company, so verify ownership in diligence if your compliance team asks.

• Both vendors publish usable prices. Holistiplan's Premium Tax plan is the one to price for state tax and multi-year Roth work, and Income Lab's Pro plan is the one to price for Medicare/IRMAA planning, estate tools and account aggregation.

• Holistiplan exposes a documented API, which makes automation above it practical. We found no public API reference for Income Lab, so plan on exports or manual entry at that edge.

• The expensive failure is not the license fee. It is the hand-off between a tax report and the retirement plan, where someone re-keys numbers every tax season.

The category decision: tax projection or income engine

Advisors typing this query usually have a specific gap. Either clients hand over a tax return and the advisor wants a fast, clear read of it, or clients ask how much they can safely spend and the advisor wants a plan that adjusts as markets move. These are different jobs, and the products reflect that.

Holistiplan is built around the filed return. Its pricing page lists automated federal tax return and transcript scanning, an auto-generated federal tax report, and scenario analysis. The Premium Tax plan adds state tax modeling, multi-year Roth conversion projections and tax preparation letters. The product answers "what does this return say, and what happens if income changes?"

Income Lab is built around the plan. Its pricing page describes retirement income, tax, Social Security, scenario and reporting tools, with the Pro plan adding Medicare/IRMAA planning, estate planning tools and account aggregation, according to Income Lab (2026). The product answers "what can this client spend, from which accounts, and when should that change?"

On renames and ownership: nothing we found shows either product renamed, merged or retired. Income Lab's December 2025 announcement describes it as Income Lab, Inc., a company working with Cetera Financial Group, according to FinancialContent (2025). Holistiplan's pricing page shows only a 2026 copyright line and names no parent entity. Treat both as independent vendors unless a contract review says otherwise.

The facts above come from vendor pages and a press release. Our analysis, which follows in later sections, is that the choice reduces to one question: is your bottleneck understanding the tax return, or building the spending plan? If the honest answer is both, budget for both and invest in the hand-off between them.

Who this is for

This guide is for advisors and practice managers who are close to buying and want to know which tool, or which pair, fits their workflow and client list.

• Choose Holistiplan first if you meet clients around tax season, you want a branded tax report from a 1040 in minutes, and you want to model Roth conversions against the client's actual return.

• Choose Income Lab first if retirement income is your core service, you want ongoing monitoring of a spending plan, and tax is one input among Social Security, withdrawals and Medicare costs.

• Choose both if you want Income Lab to set the long-term strategy and Holistiplan to check that strategy against the filed return.

Red flags: you need a full financial planning suite with insurance, goals and cash flow in one tool, because neither product is positioned as that. You have no one to own the hand-off between a tax report and a retirement plan. You expect either vendor to refund or pro-rate a per-household or per-seat commitment without reading the contract.

How we evaluated these tools

This is a buyer's guide built from public pages, not a lab test. We read each vendor's pricing page, the Holistiplan API reference, press releases, one trade-press article and one Kitces industry roundup, and weighted the criteria below by how often they decide a purchase for a small or mid-size advisory practice. The weights are our judgment, not a standard.

Everything labeled vendor data below is cited. Everything labeled analysis is our reading of that data.

Feature matrix, normalized

The matrix uses only what the vendors' own pages state. Where a page is silent, the cell says so, because silence is not the same as absence.

Sources for the matrix are Holistiplan's pricing page and Income Lab's pricing page, cited above, plus the joint webinar notes. Income Lab says the two products are used side by side, and that no defined integration exists between them (webinar notes, undated). Because those notes are undated and mention planned 2024 additions, confirm the current integration list with each vendor.

Wealthbox users get a documented sync. Households flow to Holistiplan, and Holistiplan creates activity feed entries and tasks in Wealthbox, according to Wealthbox (2026).

Pricing and total cost

Both vendors publish prices, but on different units, so a sticker comparison is misleading. Holistiplan scales with households. Income Lab scales with advisors and support seats. Pricing checked October 12, 2026.

Premium Tax at 75 households: $1,999 a year according to Holistiplan (2026). Kitces reported in early 2025 that Holistiplan's late 2024 restructuring "nearly doubled the cost of the tool" and cited the same $1,999 figure for the 75-household plan, according to Kitces (2025). The price has been stable since, but anyone budgeting from older posts should expect a higher number than the pre-2025 figures they may remember.

Pro plan, annual billing: $2,990 a year according to Income Lab (2026). The same page lists the Core plan at $1,990 a year on annual billing, or $199 a month, and the Pro plan at $299 a month. Support staff seats are $80 a month or $800 a year on annual billing and can be added to either plan. Enterprise pricing is Quote-based, as is Holistiplan's pricing above 750 households.

Older figures still circulate. A January 2024 trade article reported Income Lab's full suite at $159 per month per seat, according to Wealth Management (2024). That is below today's published monthly price, so a quote built from that article will come in low.

Because Holistiplan bills by household tier, the cost per household falls as the practice grows. The table below divides the published Premium Tax price by the household count at each tier. These are our calculations from the published prices.

Holistiplan's Basic Tax plan includes unlimited users, so adding an advisor does not add a license fee. Income Lab works the other way: adding an advisor adds a plan, and adding a paraplanner adds a seat. A practice with few households and many advisors tilts toward Holistiplan on cost. A practice with many households and few advisors tilts toward Income Lab.

The scenario below shows the math. A firm has 2 advisors, 1 support staff member and 300 households, and chooses Holistiplan's Premium Tax plan at $6,499 a year plus Income Lab's Core plan for both advisors at 2 × $1,990 = $3,980 and one support seat at $800. The annual total is $6,499 + $3,980 + $800 = $11,279, or about $37.60 per household. In tax season, 60 clients receive a Holistiplan report, and a planner re-keys each client's bracket headroom into the retirement plan in about 20 minutes, which is 60 × 20 = 1,200 minutes, or 20 hours. If a script reads each completed record by the external_reference field that Holistiplan's API reference lists, and pre-fills a review task so the planner only verifies the number in about 5 minutes, the work drops to 60 × 5 = 300 minutes, or 5 hours, saving 15 hours per season. Every count and duration here is an assumption chosen for illustration, not a measurement from any firm.

Trials are asymmetric. Holistiplan offers a free 7-day trial across subscription plans, and Income Lab offers 14 days with full Pro access but requires a credit card and converts to a paid Pro subscription unless you switch or cancel. A seven-day window can fall entirely outside the weeks when you have returns in hand, so start Holistiplan's trial when you actually have returns to upload.

Holistiplan profile

Best fit: Planners who run tax-focused meetings, work with CPAs, and want a clear report from a filed return. The Premium Tax plan fits firms that do Roth conversion planning every year.

Strengths (vendor data): The pricing page lists SOC 2 Type II, multi-factor authentication and unlimited users. Holistiplan's press release reports a tax planning market share of 38.92% according to Newswire (2026). The same release cites 8.86 out of 10 average satisfaction in the 2026 T3/Inside Information survey. Both numbers come from Holistiplan's own announcement, so read them as the vendor's account of a survey. Kitces separately reported a 9.1 average satisfaction rating in its own advisor technology research, according to the Kitces article cited above. Those are different surveys, so do not treat 8.86 and 9.1 as a conflict.

Limitations (vendor data and analysis): The pricing page shows estate planning as waitlist only, and it lists no Social Security optimization or spending-guardrail tools. That means Holistiplan will not tell you how much a client can spend. Per-household pricing also rises with practice size, with a Quote-based tier above 750 households.

Implementation: Setup centers on CRM sync and return intake. The Wealthbox integration uses a personal API access token generated in Wealthbox, and the Redtail integration flows client information in and notes back out. The API reference lists endpoints such as POST /households/create_or_update_many/ and POST /tax_returns/{id}/multipart_upload/, and GET resources including /roth_projections/ and /scenario_analyses/ in its API reference. The page enumerates processing statuses (awaitingFile, processing, error, done, needsReview, ignore) but shows no webhook or event identifiers, so any automation above it should poll.

Disqualifier: If your main deliverable is a retirement spending plan, Holistiplan alone will leave you building that elsewhere.

Income Lab profile

Best fit: Practices that sell retirement income planning and want ongoing plan monitoring, with tax, Social Security and Medicare handled in the same model.

Strengths (vendor data): Income Lab's Pro plan adds Medicare/IRMAA planning, estate planning tools, account aggregation through Yodlee, SSO and advanced team permissions. Distribution has grown. Cetera network reach: about 12,000 advisors and institutions according to FinancialContent (2025). On September 29, 2026, XYPN added Income Lab as a member benefit and said more than 300 of its members already use the platform, according to XYPN (2026). The 2024 Wealth Management article lists integrations with Schwab, Fidelity and Altruist.

Limitations (analysis): The Pro plan costs $2,990 a year per advisor on annual billing, so a multi-advisor firm pays that multiple times before adding support seats. We found no public API reference, so automation above it depends on exports, integrations Income Lab already supports, or manual entry. Without a custodian or portfolio integration, the joint webinar notes say Income Lab projects balances from target allocations, which you can reconcile manually. Moving from Pro back to Core also removes the Penny AI features while keeping planning tools and data, per the pricing page.

Implementation: Expect the heaviest work in connecting data sources and agreeing on planning assumptions. Income Lab's pricing page lists a 14-day Pro trial, which is enough to build a few real client plans if you prepare the inputs beforehand.

Disqualifier: If your sole need is reading 1040s and producing a tax report for a client meeting, the pricing page lists no 1040 upload feature, so confirm before paying for a plan built around retirement income.

Running both: where the hand-off breaks

Many firms end up with both tools, which is exactly where the manual work lives. Income Lab sets a long-term strategy such as a target bracket for conversions, and Holistiplan checks that strategy against the filed return. Between them sits a person copying numbers and writing notes. The remaining sections describe what we would propose for that seam, using a configurable workflow rather than anything deployed.

Here is a proposed workflow that US Tech Automations could configure. The trigger is a scheduled poll of Holistiplan's /tax_returns/ resource for records whose status reaches done. The action pulls the matching /roth_projections/ and /scenario_analyses/ records and matches the household to the CRM record by external_reference. The output is a CRM task for the lead advisor that contains the bracket headroom figure, the year, and a link to the report. Prerequisites are an API token from Holistiplan, a CRM that accepts task creation, and a firm-agreed rule for which households are in scope. The human review point is the advisor: nothing is sent to a client, and no plan is edited, until the advisor accepts the task.

A second proposed workflow handles the other direction. When an advisor updates the target bracket in an Income Lab plan, a person or an export records the new target in the CRM, which triggers a task to refresh the Holistiplan scenario for that household. The action compares the plan's target against the latest Holistiplan headroom, and the output is a short reconciliation note stating whether the two differ by more than a threshold the firm sets. Prerequisites include an export or manual field for the Income Lab target, because we found no public Income Lab API. Review points are the threshold itself and the advisor sign-off. Retries are keyed on a household identifier so a failed run does not create duplicate tasks, and every run writes a log line the compliance team can read.

When NOT to use US Tech Automations. If you run one advisor, a few dozen households and a single tool, the built-in CRM sync from Holistiplan to Wealthbox or Redtail already creates tasks and notes, and adding a layer above it buys little. If your only pain is that the Income Lab number has to be typed into one field, a spreadsheet and a calendar reminder win. If your firm has no one to own an exception queue, an automation layer will fail quietly, and a simpler process is safer.

Stitching it together in Zapier, Make or n8n

The honest alternative to a custom design is a no-code automation tool or an in-house script. Zapier, Make and n8n can all poll an API, branch on a status, create CRM tasks, retry on failure and keep run histories, and many firms build exactly this. The buyer owns the design: you decide how to handle duplicate records, who gets alerted when a run errors, who holds the API token, how the workflow is documented for an examiner, and who fixes it when a vendor changes an endpoint. A proposed design from US Tech Automations would configure the same pieces differently, with a shared exception queue, idempotency keys per household and tax year, role-based access to the credentials, and a standing review step, but each of those still requires your firm to accept the prerequisites above. If you already have someone comfortable with n8n or Make, start there and revisit when the maintenance burden grows.

The same trigger, log and review structure appears in other industries. See our walkthrough of lab result notification automation, the athenahealth and Twilio variant, and the dental in-house membership plan comparison for how recurring-billing workflows get monitored.

Decision checklist

• Does most of your client conversation start from a filed return, or from a spending question?

• Will you run Roth conversion projections every year? If so, price Holistiplan's Premium Tax plan, not Basic Tax.

• Do you need state tax modeling? Holistiplan lists it on Premium Tax; Income Lab's pricing page does not state it.

• Do you need Medicare/IRMAA, estate or aggregation tools in the same platform? Price Income Lab's Pro plan.

• How many households and how many advisors do you have? Run both formulas from the pricing section against your own counts.

• Which CRM do you use, and does it appear in the vendor's integration list today?

• Who owns the hand-off between the two tools, and what happens when that person is out during tax season?

Common mistakes

• Pricing from a per-seat figure in an old article. The 2024 article's $159 per seat is not the 2026 published price.

• Starting a 7-day trial before you have returns to upload. The trial runs out before you learn how the report handles your hardest clients.

• Comparing sticker prices across different units. Per-household and per-advisor numbers cannot be compared until you plug in your own counts.

• Treating a vendor press release as an independent benchmark. Holistiplan's market share and satisfaction figures are from its own announcement.

• Skipping the exception path. A report that errors or needs review, which the API represents with an error or needsReview status, needs a named owner.

FAQ

Is Holistiplan or Income Lab better for Roth conversion planning?

Holistiplan's Premium Tax plan is better for modeling conversions against a client's actual filed return, and Income Lab is better for choosing a conversion strategy inside a long-term income plan. Holistiplan lists multi-year Roth projections on Premium Tax, and Income Lab's joint webinar notes describe a tax center that compares withdrawal sourcing and Roth strategies across the plan, so many firms use both.

Can Holistiplan replace retirement income software?

No, Holistiplan's pages list tax scenario, Roth, state tax, insurance review and reporting features, and none for Social Security optimization or spending guardrails. Its pricing page also shows estate planning as waitlist only.

How much does Income Lab cost compared with Holistiplan?

Income Lab's Core plan is $1,990 a year on annual billing and its Pro plan is $2,990, per advisor, while Holistiplan's Basic Tax plan runs from $749 to $11,049 and its Premium Tax plan from $1,499 to $15,499 by household count. Which is cheaper depends on your household and advisor counts, so use the tables above with your own numbers.

Do Holistiplan and Income Lab integrate with each other?

Income Lab's joint webinar notes say there was no defined integration between the two and that advisors use them side by side, so confirm the current status with both vendors. A firm can still connect them through its CRM or through an automation layer built on Holistiplan's API.

Does Holistiplan have an API?

Yes, Holistiplan publishes an API endpoint reference with resources for households, tax returns, tax reports, scenario analyses and Roth projections. The reference we opened shows no webhook or event identifiers, so automation should poll.

Is it safe to rely on the satisfaction ratings?

Treat them as directional, because the 8.86 out of 10 figure comes from Holistiplan's own press release about the T3/Inside Information survey and the 9.1 figure comes from Kitces research. We did not find a comparable satisfaction figure for Income Lab that we could verify on a page we opened.

Bottom line

Buy Holistiplan when your gap is understanding and explaining the filed return. Buy Income Lab when your gap is the retirement spending plan. Buy both when you want the plan's long-term strategy tested against actual returns, and budget time for the hand-off, because that is where the recurring labor sits. If you want to see how US Tech Automations configures that hand-off with human review, see how US Tech Automations configures this, and compare it with a Zapier, Make or n8n build before you decide.