Hazel
Hazel is an AI platform for wealth management firms, offered by the custodian Altruist and sold to advisers wherever they custody. It captures and summarizes meetings, drafts follow ups, builds client profiles from custodial records, emails and life events, and answers questions across a firm's data. Its tax and financial planning agents read tax returns, pay stubs and statements and produce plans in minutes.
Hazel publishes per seat prices: $60 a month for the platform, $160 with the Tax Planning Agent and $300 with the Financial Planning Agent. It says AI providers delete data after each request and are contractually barred from training on it, stores all data in the United States, and holds SOC 2 Type II.
Hazel says more than 1,000 firms and 1,500 advisers use it, including Ritholtz, Pando Wealth, Domain Money and Root Financial. It is based in Culver City, California.
Capability Axes
Capability grades
15 of 15 axes rated · 12 graded A or B
Tax returns, pay stubs and meeting notes go in, and meeting summaries, follow up drafts and tax and financial plans come out, all of it model work.
Advisers review the reports and client drafts Hazel produces. Whether it can act in custodial accounts, and what confirmation that would need, isn't described.
Accuracy and error rates for the tax and financial plans aren't published, and neither is how the tax logic keeps up with rule changes.
More than 1,000 firms and 1,500 advisers use it, saving an average of 20 hours a month, but named users such as Ritholtz and Pando Wealth come without figures of their own.
Each request's data is processed only to answer it and then deleted, and model providers are contractually barred from training on customer data.
Altruist's privacy policy, revised May 1, 2026, reaches Hazel's meeting audio, email and calendar data. Retention is stated only as long as reasonably necessary, with no period for recordings or tax documents.
SOC 2 Type II and an independent penetration test from August 2026 are both claimed, with a trust center linked, though neither report is published on the security page.
An SEC registered adviser and a FINRA member broker dealer sit among the affiliates of Altruist Corp, which offers Hazel, and the outputs are labeled as not legal, tax or investment advice.
One set of tax and planning logic serves every firm on the platform, so a systematic error would repeat for each client it touches, and no testing across client situations is published.
Responsibility rests with the adviser, and a client whose documents were misread has no published way to get the error fixed.
SS&C Technologies processes documents and Plaid is among the other named providers, but no model provider is named.
Custodial records come straight from Altruist, the parent company's custody platform, alongside CRMs, email and calendars.
All data stays in the United States, and no private deployment option is offered.
Seats cost $60 a month for the platform, $160 for the Tax Planning Agent and $300 for the Financial Planning Agent, with a 14 day trial on each.
Registered investment advisers and wealth firms are the buyers, including those that custody outside Altruist.
Compared With
Most editorial comparisons pair two vendors the index assesses as direct competitors for the same buyer. Some pair vendors that are adjacent rather than rival, where the useful question is where one ends and the other begins. Each carries a verdict, the buyer conditions that favor each vendor, and a graded side by side.
Alternatives to Hazel
Vendors in the same categories as Hazel whose profiles look most alike, each with a line on what the product does. Similar is not the same: check that each one does the job you need. No vendor pays for placement.
Focal is an AI assistant for financial advisers and insurance producers in the United States and Canada.
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The index publishes no overall score or ranking. See what we assess and the methodology.
Pricing
Vendor-published figures are labeled as such. Figures labeled “Estimated” are derived from third-party sources and have not been confirmed by the vendor.
| Entry Price | Pricing Basis | Data Protection Terms | Implementation | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Hazel Platform at $60 per seat a month, Tax Planning Agent at $160 per seat a month, Financial Planning Agent at $300 per seat a month. Enterprise quoted.
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Per seat monthly subscription. Hazel Platform includes AI meeting preparation and transcription, follow up automation, a client database, document synthesis, integrations, chat, meeting insights and customizable templates. The Tax Planning Agent adds tax planning reports, multi year modeling, tax opportunity identification, conversion strategies and live client questions. The Financial Planning Agent adds plan generation, scenario modeling, financial calculators, cash flow optimization and investment, retirement and estate planning analysis. Enterprise plans give larger firms access to every agent with dedicated onboarding and discounted pricing. | Not tiered on the pricing page. The security page states SOC 2 Type II and an independent penetration test in August 2026, with data stored in the United States. | No implementation fee is published. Every plan includes a 14 day trial, and Enterprise includes dedicated onboarding. | Vendor Published |
Prices taken from the vendor's own pricing page as of 3 October 2026, in US dollars, billed monthly per seat. Whether Altruist custody clients pay the same rates is not published.