CalculateItNow vs SmartAsset
Localized US tax and cost-of-living data down to the county, and a real service that introduces you to a financial adviser.
Everything said here about SmartAsset was read off their live site on , and the pages we opened are listed at the bottom. They may have changed since — if something below is out of date, believe them and not us.
SmartAsset is a personal-finance site whose calculators are cloned per geography. Its Cook County, Illinois property tax page states that “The typical homeowner's annual property tax bill is equal to around 1.89% of their home's value” and that the median bill is $6,349, citing the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey. Its California income tax calculator carries a sales-tax table for all 58 California counties, headed “(Updated December 2025)”, and an explicit list of the assumptions behind the numbers.
The business model is stated on the pages themselves. Calculators carry the line “SmartAsset's free tool matches you with vetted financial advisors who serve your area”, and the disclosure explains that SmartAsset “is a wholly owned subsidiary of Financial Insight Technology, is registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment adviser” and that “SmartAsset receives compensation from Advisers for our services.” Matching readers with advisers who pay for the introduction is how the calculators are paid for.
This is the comparison where we are furthest behind on data, and where the two sites are trying to do the least similar thing.
What SmartAsset does better than us
Local data we simply do not have
A property tax estimate for your county. A sales tax rate for your county. A cost-of-living comparison between two named cities. Maintaining that means a data pipeline per jurisdiction, and they have built one; we have not. Our tax data stops at the state line.
Fifty-odd localized versions of the same calculator
Their income tax calculator exists per state, with state-specific sections and cross-links to the others. We have 102 state income-tax and paycheck pages, which covers the same ground for income tax — but not property tax, sales tax by county, or city-level anything.
An actual service at the end of the calculation
If what you want after a retirement projection is to talk to a financial adviser near you, SmartAsset will match you with advisers who serve your area and offer a free introductory call, and that is a genuinely useful thing a calculator page can do. The adviser pays for the introduction, which is disclosed on the page. We offer nothing after the number.
Assumptions written out where you can argue with them
Their tax pages list what they assume about deductions and caps in plain language, including the awkward ones. It is the practice we hold ourselves to as well, and on tax specifically theirs is more detailed than ours.
Side by side
| SmartAsset | CalculateItNow | |
|---|---|---|
| Tax data granularity | State, county and city — e.g. a per-county property tax page, and a 58-county California sales-tax table | State level only: 51 US jurisdictions, with each state's brackets, standard deduction and its source |
| Cost of living | City-to-city comparison broken into tax, housing and food | Nothing comparable |
| Adviser matching | Yes — a real service; advisers pay SmartAsset for the introduction | None. We are not a registered adviser and do not refer anyone anywhere. |
| Assumptions stated | Yes — e.g. “We assume that there is no cap to itemized deductions, if a state allows them.” | Yes — listed under the results on nearly every calculator |
| Data source for local figures | Census Bureau American Community Survey, cited on the page | State revenue departments, cited per state, with the date a human last checked each one |
| API for developers or AI assistants | Not offered on any page we checked | Free JSON API and a hosted MCP server, no key |
What we do that they don’t
Nothing on our page is a funnel
Their calculator pages carry adviser calls-to-action in the copy around the result — that is the business, and it is disclosed openly. Ours have no calls-to-action at all, because there is nothing for us to sell you.
The tax brackets, not just the answer
Each of our 51 state pages shows that state's real schedule — brackets, standard deduction, exemption or credit — with a link to the revenue department page it came from and the date someone last checked it. You can audit the number rather than trusting it.
Working backwards and what-if
Goal seek on 265 calculators and sensitivity ranking on 258 — what salary gets you to a given take-home, and which input is actually driving the result.
A URL that reproduces your numbers
Every input is in the address bar, so a link reopens exactly what you saw. No account, no email, nothing stored.
Callable by software and by AI assistants
Free JSON API and an MCP server, so a spreadsheet, a script or an assistant can run the same tested code.
Where we are weak
Against SmartAsset specifically, these are the things you would be giving up by using this site:
- No county or city data anywhere on this site: no property tax by county, no local sales tax, no cost-of-living comparison.
- Our tax coverage stops at state income tax and paycheck withholding for 51 jurisdictions.
- No ZIP-code-driven defaults — you type your own tax and insurance figures.
- We cannot introduce you to an adviser, and nothing here is financial advice. We are not registered with anyone.
- We are new: every page here was published in September 2026, and no professional has reviewed any of it.
Use SmartAsset instead if…
- You need a property tax or sales tax figure for a specific county.
- You are comparing the cost of living between two cities.
- You want to be introduced to a financial adviser, and you are comfortable that advisers pay for the introduction.
- You want US personal-finance content with more localized depth than a state-level calculator can give.
Go to SmartAsset. We would rather you got the right answer somewhere else than the wrong one here.
How we checked
On we opened these pages and took the claims above from what they said that day. Nothing here comes from memory or from a third-party estimate; where we could not verify something, we left it out rather than guessing.
- Cook County property tax calculator (county data, disclosure)
- California income tax calculator (58-county table, assumptions)
- Cost of living comparison calculator
Our own figures are counted from the code that builds this site, at the moment you loaded this page: 331 calculators, 265 of them with goal seek and 258 with a sensitivity table. The test count is the exception — nothing here can count it — so it was taken by running the suite on 11 September 2026 and is written as a floor, because it goes up most weeks.