Redtail vs Orion: Which One in 2026?

Redtail and Orion sit next to each other on a surprising number of advisor software tables, which is how a CRM and a wealthtech platform end up in the same partner meeting even though they do different jobs. Neither vendor prints a price a buyer can take to a committee, so the comparison has to be about workflows, data ownership, and the months it takes to unwind a bad pick.

This page treats pricing as withheld on purpose. Redtail is not in a public vendor store we can cite, and Orion publishes no figure, so every cell that would have held a dollar amount reads quote only or not published. What you should ask for instead is a written quote that splits seats, modules, conversion, training, and any asset-based line, then hold that quote against the work each product actually does.

TL;DR: Pick Redtail if the gap you feel is contact history, tasks, and archived communication. Pick Orion if the gap is portfolio accounting, billing, trading, and household performance reports. They share a corporate family, they are not substitutes, and a firm that buys the wrong one still has the original hole six months later.

How we evaluated

We scored the two products on the same six questions: which daily job each one is built to do, what data it is the system of record for, how staff actually get trained, what a conversion from the current stack looks like, how much of the work still happens in email after go-live, and whether a partner can defend the pick with a paper trail. Vendor marketing was used only where the vendor publishes the claim on its own site; anything we could not confirm was left out.

Pricing was a binary test. A dollar figure appears next to a vendor only when we fetched a dated public number we can link. Neither Redtail nor Orion meets that test, so this page prints no vendor price of any kind, including words that pretend to be a range.

The reader for this page is already down to these two names and has to walk a partner through the choice. That is why the method stays in the open: if a capability is not on the vendor's current product pages, it is not in the tables.

The industry sitting behind that choice is large enough that a sloppy pick is expensive in staff time even when the invoice is still unknown. SEC counted 22,932 investment advisers in 2025. According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, those advisers reported $177 trillion in regulatory assets under management in 2025, a 21.0% year-over-year rise. A CRM or a portfolio platform that fails at that scale does not fail quietly.

Who Redtail is actually for

Redtail is a client relationship system built for financial professionals who need household records, notes, workflows, and archived communication in one place. The vendor's own site lists CRM, Speak (archived text), Imaging (documents), and Email as separate modules, plus more than 100 integration partners. That is a contact-and-compliance job, not a performance-reporting job.

The firms that get value from Redtail are the ones whose pain is dropped follow-ups, scattered notes, and an audit trail that lives in inboxes. A solo advisor who already produces reports from a custodian portal can live on Redtail for years. An operations lead who needs household billing, model trading, and quarterly performance PDFs will hit a wall because those are not the product.

Redtail also shows up at broker-dealer affiliated teams that need supervision over communication. The vendor describes office-wide CRM, archived email, and text that can be reviewed against SEC and FINRA expectations. If that is the requirement you are buying for, say so in the quote request, because a portfolio-accounting license will not archive the text thread.

Staffing matters here. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, personal financial advisors held 299,400 jobs in 2025, and 65% of those jobs sat in securities, commodity contracts, and related financial activities. Many of those people work in small teams where the CRM is the only shared system of record. Redtail is for that team.

Who Orion is actually for

the other product is a wealthtech platform that combines portfolio accounting, trading, planning, compliance, a client portal, and an AI layer the vendor calls Denali, with a CRM in the same corporate group. The vendor publishes that it administered $6.6 trillion in advisor-managed assets as of 30 June 2026 and that it holds ISO/IEC 42001 certification for its AI management system. Those are scale and governance claims, not prices.

The firms that get value from Orion are the ones whose pain is reconciling positions, billing households, producing performance reports, and placing trades without a second operations vendor. A mid-size RIA that has outgrown custodian PDFs is in this seat. A two-person shop that only needs a shared contact list is not, unless it is already planning to outsource investment operations through Orion's OCIO or TAMP paths.

Orion's own materials split the stack into Advisor Technology (accounting, CRM, trading, planning, compliance, portal) and Wealth Management (TAMP, OCIO, custom indexing). A quote that does not say which of those you are buying is not a quote you can take to a partner. Ask the seller to map each line to a named module and to state whether conversion, report templates, and billing rules are in or out.

Orion is also the heavier implementation. Staff have to learn householding, lot-level accounting, and the reporting calendar. That is a different training plan from teaching someone where to log a call. If you only have one operations person, put that constraint in the first sales call.

CRM records versus portfolio books

The honest split is this: Redtail is the system of record for people and conversations; Orion is the system of record for positions, lots, and bills. Mixing those jobs in a single "which CRM" meeting is how firms buy twice.

A household in Redtail is a contact graph with notes, tasks, and files. A household in Orion is an accounting object with accounts, lots, performance, and fees. Both use the word household. They do not mean the same object, and a conversion that copies names without mapping accounts will look finished and still be wrong.

If your current complaint is "we cannot find last quarter's email about the Roth conversion," you are in Redtail territory. If your current complaint is "the blended household return does not match the custodian and billing is a week late," you are in Orion territory. Write that sentence down before the demo so the demo cannot talk you into the other product.

The rest of the stack still has to move. A CRM without a report still needs a reporting path, and a portfolio platform without a task list still needs a follow-up path. That is the job US Tech Automations is for: connecting the two records after you pick the system of record, not replacing either vendor.

Side-by-side: job, data, and quote posture

Positioning from each vendor's current product pages; pricing rows reflect the confirmed absence of a public figure as of 2 September 2026.

Feature rows confirmed against each vendor's published product pages; depth is qualitative because neither vendor publishes a scored benchmark.

Industry numbers that change the buy

These figures are not vendor prices. They describe the book of work a CRM or a portfolio platform has to sit inside, which is why a partner will ask for them.

Sources: SEC Investment Adviser Statistics; BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Personal Financial Advisors.

According to SIFMA, U.S. retirement assets were $53.6 trillion in 2025 and FINRA-registered broker-dealers numbered 3,184. A CRM that cannot archive the advice on those accounts, or a portfolio platform that cannot bill them cleanly, becomes a compliance file, not a software preference.

According to CFP Board, CFP professionals reached 107,529 as of 31 December 2025, up 4.3% from 2024, with 6,709 new certificants that year. CFP professionals numbered 107,529 at year-end 2025. Those planners live in CRM notes and in plan files; Redtail captures the first, Orion is built to capture the second only if you also buy planning and reporting.

According to Financial Planning, SEC-registered RIAs numbered 15,870 in 2024 and reported $144.6 trillion in assets, with 45% of firms providing financial planning services. If your firm is in that 45%, a CRM-only buy still leaves planning and reporting to be solved, and a portfolio-only buy still leaves the meeting notes to be solved.

Pros and cons

Redtail

Pros: It is built as a CRM, so notes, workflows, and communication archive are the product rather than an add-on story. Modules for text, email archive, and imaging are named, which makes a quote easier to split. More than 100 listed partners mean a Zapier-style or custodian-adjacent workflow is a known path, which is why Consolidate Redtail to Zapier for Advisors 2026 (With Templates) is the companion read if the CRM is already chosen. Training can start with one person logging calls, which is a smaller change-management load than lot-level accounting.

Cons: It will not become your performance reporting system, no matter how many workflows you build. Public pricing is not published, so you cannot budget from this page. Speak is subject to broker-dealer approval, which is a delay you should put on the project plan if you are still BD-affiliated. Firms that think they are buying "the Orion stack" when they only license the CRM still have to buy accounting later.

Orion

Pros: Portfolio accounting, trading, billing, and reporting are the core job, which is the job a growing RIA actually escalates to a partner meeting. The vendor publishes SOC 2 posture and ISO/IEC 42001 for its AI layer, which a CCO can file. Custodian connections and trade files are documented against named partners on the vendor site. A firm that wants OCIO or TAMP can stay inside the same vendor family instead of standing up a second operations shop.

Cons: Implementation is an operations project, not a CRM login. Quote only, with no public figure, so the first number you will see is a sales spreadsheet. Buying the platform because you wanted a cleaner contact list is the wrong reason and will not fix the contact list. Staff who only ever used a CRM will need a longer training calendar, and you should not pretend otherwise in the partner memo.

What the quote should include

Ask both vendors for a written quote that names modules, seats, conversion, training hours, and the length of any parallel run. If the seller will not split those lines, you cannot compare the two bids, and you should stop the process until they will.

For Redtail, the lines that move the number are seats, Speak, Imaging, Email, conversion of existing contacts, and whether onboarding is included. Ask whether archived historical email comes over or starts on day one. Ask who maps household IDs to your current files.

For Orion, the lines that move the number are which Advisor Technology modules you are licensing, whether Wealth Management (OCIO/TAMP) is in the same paper, conversion of historical performance, report template work, and billing-rule setup. Ask whether the quote is AUM-based, seat-based, or mixed, and get that answer in writing even though this page cannot print the resulting figure.

Ask both what happens to exports if you leave. A CRM without a usable contact export and a portfolio platform without a usable position-and-lot export are both traps. Put the export format in the contract, not in a slide.

Switching cost when the jobs are different

Switching is not a weekend. Contact conversion, household mapping, and a parallel run are calendar items, and they stack if you are moving both a CRM and a portfolio book.

Durations are planning ranges for a small RIA operations team, not vendor SLAs; neither vendor publishes a public conversion timetable.

The month that hurts is the parallel-run month, when staff log notes in two places or reconcile two report packs. Budget that month in the partner memo as lost client-facing time, not as a software line.

Retraining is the second cost. A CSR who can log a Redtail workflow still cannot explain an Orion performance composite. Put named people on a training list before you sign, and do not assume the vendor's office hours replace that list.

If you are keeping one system and adding the other, the switching cost is integration, not replacement. That is a better outcome for many firms. After a Redtail task is marked complete, US Tech Automations can write the follow-up date into the household calendar and attach the note ID so the CRM remains the system of record for the conversation.

When Orion finishes a quarterly household PDF, US Tech Automations can send the file, log the send, and open a review task so reporting does not depend on someone remembering to email the portal link. That is a concrete workflow, not a slogan, and it is the reason the homepage exists next to these two vendors rather than instead of them.

Reporting still has its own shortlist if Orion is not the pick; 7 Best Reporting Software Picks for Financial Advisors 2026 is the page for that job. Billing follow-up is a third job; 6 Payment Reminder Tools for Advisors: Guide 2026 covers that lane so this comparison can stay on CRM versus portfolio accounting.

Verdict

Choose Redtail when the failure you can point to is a missed follow-up, a missing note, or an unarchived text, and when reporting already works well enough from the custodian or another accounting tool. Choose Orion when the failure is late bills, unmatched performance, or trades that cannot be supervised in one place, and when you have operations staff who can sit through an accounting implementation.

Choose neither as a "platform" story if you have not named the job. A partner who hears "we need better technology" will not know which demo to take. Name the system of record you are missing, then buy that, then automate the handoff.

If the two products are close in your stack because you already sit in the same corporate family, say that out loud. The decision is then which modules to license this year, not which logo to put on a slide. Get the quote split, get the export rights, and put the parallel-run weeks on a calendar before anyone trains on a new screen.

For the workflow layer that sits between the CRM record and the portfolio record, see pricing. Compare workflows.

FAQs

Can I treat Redtail and Orion as the same product?

No. Redtail is the CRM; Orion is the wealthtech platform that includes portfolio accounting, trading, billing, and reporting, with the CRM in the same corporate group. A license for one does not perform the other's daily job.

Why is there no price on this page?

Neither vendor has a public figure we can fetch, date, and link. Redtail is not in a store we can cite, and Orion is quote only. Ask for a written split of seats, modules, conversion, and training.

Which one should a two-person RIA buy first?

Buy Redtail first if your notes and tasks are the fire. Buy Orion first if billing and household performance are the fire. Do not buy the second until the first job is named.

How long does a switch take?

Plan on 8–16 weeks for a CRM conversion with a parallel run, and longer if you are converting historical performance into portfolio accounting. The table above is a planning range, not a vendor promise.

Do I need a third system for reminders and reports?

You might. Redtail does not replace reporting, and Orion does not replace a full communication archive unless you also license those modules. Use the companion reporting and payment-reminder pages linked above, and put the handoff in a workflow rather than in someone's inbox.

What should compliance ask before we sign?

Ask where the books and records will live, how email and text are archived, how long exports remain available after termination, and whether AI outputs are reviewed by a person before a client sees them. Orion publishes that Denali outputs should be reviewed by financial professionals; put that review step in your procedures.

Will a custodian portal make Orion unnecessary?

Sometimes, for a very small book with simple accounts. Once you have multiple custodians, SMA sleeves, or household billing, a portal PDF is not an accounting system. That is the line where Orion enters the conversation.

Key Takeaways

• Redtail and Orion are a CRM and a wealthtech platform, not two flavors of the same tool.

• Neither publishes a price; every vendor dollar on this page is withheld on purpose.

• Personal financial advisors held 299,400 jobs in 2025, so the training load is a real operations cost even when the invoice is still a quote.

• Write down the system of record you are missing before you sit through either demo.

• Put seats, modules, conversion, and export rights in the quote, then put the parallel-run weeks on a calendar.

• Use US Tech Automations for the handoff between notes and reports, not as a substitute for either vendor.