Morningstar Reviews 130

The service I have had from the global contacts/data questions/global product support team has been truely appalling. In setting up a product a/c I was required to reset p/w, link never gets sent - I have emailed the above team about 10x over the last 3 months, and keep being told this is being looked at etc. I hace tried to escalate and raise a complaint, all to no avail.

This team really couldn't care less about helping their customers, as a result I will be taking my custom to another company who actually cares about their customers

They auto renewed my "Premium" subscription , and charged me three times on the same day. Still waiting for a refund
Apparently this has happened to multiple customers

Used the predecessor Plum Software very happily for seven years, the company unilaterally decided to discontinue this in favour of their latest “WealthCraft” offering, closed our software down a month before the system told us it was going to be closed (referring to a six month old email) and wouldn’t reactivate, beware current users of WealthCraft for fear that they will close that without warning. Sad to have left after so long but treated us with contempt. No customer consideration whatsoever.

My IFA moved all of my investments to this company (then named Praemium) a year or so ago. I very quickly realised that their software and administration was appalling and noticed that transactions, including one of £20,000 appeared, disappeared and then reappeared randomly, some of which were backdated months. This meant reconciliation was impossible and I asked my IFA to move to another platform. This took 8 months. In the meantime, I asked my IFA to arrange significant compensation from Praemium?Morningstar as I felt their system was not fit for purpose, and had wasted significant amounts of my time trying to work out what they were doing with my investments. My IFA negotiated a 50% reduction of all the Praemium charges for me. Unfortunately there was nothing in writing from Praemium/Morningstar to confirm this reimbursement, and subsequently I was reimbursed 50% of four months charges. If you MUST deal with this company, please make sure that you get EVERYTHING in writing!!

UNBELIVEABLE - same claim of other customers -
1) My 'Account Profile' page never contains any data. I don't know when my subscription renews.
2) They auto-renewed my subscription, unknown to me. They don't warn you. There is no way to cancel the service on their site.
3) I contacted them via "Contact Us". They replay once asking me the Credit Card number to renew the subscription. No additional contacts
4) All-in-all, a slow web site and terrible customer service.
5) The Home page is full of advertaising
6) I have all my data in Porfolio Premium but I can not analyze them.
7) Morningstar decided to suspend the delivery of Monthly Portfolio Report even if it was in the cost of the subscription

Wrong?
1) My 'Account Profile' page never contains any data. I don't know when my subscription renews.
2) They auto-renewed my subscription, unknown to me. They don't warn you. There is no way to cancel the service on their site.
3) I contacted them via "Contact Us". They don't reply.
4) All-in-all, a slow web site and terrible customer service.

Update 2025-01-15: They were very quick to reply to my ratings/comments, 23 MONTHS AFTER REVIEWING !!! Unbelievable. I cancelled my subscription long ago.

As with other subscribers I have been unable to access the portfolio manager for well over a week now. All I get is, “it’s a known error”. Shocking IT.

After logging in with 2 different browsers I am unble to access my Portfolio. Therefore I cannot update and cannot see the value of my investments or access my watchlist. This happened 3 weeks ago since then I ahve not accessed until today and the problem is still there. It is a waste of my time logging on and waiting for a fat zero

I love the data but someone needs to montetise this service properly. The person currently responsible definitely needs to be fired. Awful that for that last two months the portfolio monitor has not worked. The poor support staff on India are supportive but clueless as to when the problem will be resolved. I cannot believe they continue to sell memberships under false promises. What a waste of good data.

I have premium service, but just does not work. Every time I try to use a function reserved for a premium subscriber, like a derailed stock report, it reverts to my being a basic subscriber and I have to logout and log back in. I have been telling the support people for months. Finally I asked them to just send me a report for a security by PDF, and they replied they could not as the problem is system wide and they cannot even access it themselves. Problem is with the UK site. Maybe US site ok, dunno.

UPDATE 30TH Jan. The site was working for a few days last week which was great, however its been down again for 48 hours and I'm told there is no ETA. Its impossible to rely on this service.

I have the UK site premium portfolio manager and there are major problems every week. I like the info on stocks and the Simple portfolio manager. However the portfolio summary screen has had numerous problems for months. It didn't pull UK stocks for a while, then (and let's face it, this is not technically difficult) didn't add up for a while, then it wouldn't sort or correctly calculate gains. Now it is impossible to see my portfolio (for days) or even click from elsewhere to get stock info. I really want this to work but it's the worst built system I have ever come across.

I have paid for Morningstar premium for a number of years. The portfolio monitoring facility is useful. I have had a number of incidents when I couldn’t access my portfolio. The latest started with the X-ray facility stopped working. This was reported. A few days later I could not access portfolios at all. The customer support is slow. The issues are still not resolved after 10 days.

What they offer I find very useful especially the X-ray and portfolio tool, the problem is the website never works properly and when you email them all you get back is it’s a known problem. For the last few weeks X-ray hasn’t worked and now it’s impossible to even access your portfolio, I’m referring to the UK site which I use. Will be cancelling my £20 a month subscription as it’s just not worth the grief.

Maybe other reviewers are seeing a different website to me, but personally I find Morningstar to be an amazing service. After a free trial I was happy to pay the high price for premium. As a value-focused investor, their detailed analysis and valuation of companies saves me a lot of time and energy. I sometimes disagree significantly with their valuations, as they often focus more on growth prospects than historical performance. However, this provides a valuable additional layer of safety to my investment process and has prevented a few bad choices. I also really enjoy the user interface of the website and the partnership with Sharesight for portfolio performance tracking.

Abysmal experience. New "improvements" were the opposite. They have no idea what advisors need. Inconsistent quality of data, brutal search refinement capabilities.
Finally, I gave up. Went to cancel, and of course, I could not online. In fact, even though I was logged in, my account subscription info page was blank!
Called to cancel; no interest in understanding the problems. Just doing their job. This ship is going down...

Morningstar, for many of us, has always been a go to for research and portfolio tracking. Not anymore. They busted the retail investor tools with the worst Investor tools. They are built overseas by rude and nonresponsive personnel.

The portfolio tracking DOES NOT WORK, its incorrect and cannot be relied upon.
The current CEO, Kunal Kapoor, needs top be relieved of his duties. He has poorly managed the company. I tried to get a refund, forget about it they said. Live with our junk....They just don't care.
Avoid them at all cost.

Signed up to Morningstar UK premium. The website wouldn't allow me to subscribe so had to call the customer service phone line. After subscribing to premium realised the website was terrible, slow and lacked information that it was suggested of having.
After this I signed up to Morningstar US premium, which is a lot better so if you want the subscription pay for US. I tried cancelling my UK subscription in the free trial period and was told it had been done, guess what? Today I'm billed £159! So I call the customer service again, they tell me they'll rectify it. And even though I specified the UK subscription they have gone and refunded my US subscription and not the UK one (bearing in mind I want the US one).

Overall: terrible website, lack of info for the price and terrible customer service (with email replies being slow and phone operators lacking intellectual ability).

I've tried everything to login and pay for a premium subscription but it just takes all the details and then loops back to the start of the whole process. Have contacted Morning Star, no response. Very very poor.

I have been a Morningstar Premium member since 2008. As a stock investor I have to say that I really liked how they compiled data on stocks, providing ten years of data, making it easy to see trends in a company. The "Key Ratios" page was wonderful and compiled a decade worth of data at a glance. It also had accessible tabs to more information based on percentages of revenue which made it easy to compare competitors.

The problem is they frequently reformat the website, making the data hard to find, or worse yet, eliminate it entirely. Over the years, it seems as though they are more interested in making the website "pretty" than in providing the data. This has happened several times that I have been a member. Each time you need to spend time learning the new formats and how to access the desired data. The problem is, I believe, that the people who revamp the website are designers and not investors, for they seem to always take out important data while introducing pretty new bells and whistles. Stupid, stupid, stupid...

The final straw for me is that they have eliminated "Key Ratios", replacing it with "Key Statistics" which does not have the same data, and requires you to click on more pages. I don't know if they get paid per click, but it is very frustrating, and worst of all, the most important data has been removed. As others have also written, their customer service is tone deaf. Each time the website is redesigned, I call and remind them that the data is more important than how pretty the page looks. To the best of my knowledge, they have never listened. Their tech support/customer service is in India, though the company is headquartered in Chicago. The tech support people do their job correctly, but customer service is very poor and it is virtually impossible to reach anyone in Chicago whose job to customer service related.

What has kept me over the years is the decade of compiled data for stocks, and the cost of membership being reasonable... under $200 per year. Unfortunately, the removal of Key Ratios is the final straw. I discovered this comment page while searching for "morningstar alternatives", and if I find another website I will not be renewing my annual membership.

I hope the C-Suite at Morningstar is listening, because I don't think customer comments and concerns via the Indian call center are making it to Chicago. It is a shame that this is what it takes to get their attention.

Morningstar is planning on changing the display fir showing portfolio information. It still provides its old legacy display but it is NOT accurate. Whereas a quote for an individual stock eg AAPL, is accurate, the summary tables in the portfolio are not. The Forward Dividend Yield has been listed at 0.66% every day for weeks, even though it changes daily and is currently 0.58%. I can no longer rely on the accuracy of Morningstar, and although I have written 3 times to point out the error, it has not been fixed, and no one responds.