I spent a lot of time researching robo-investors (betterment, wealthfront, and now schwab intelligent portfolios) vs. DIY through vanguard. Essentially betterment and wealthfront both invest in vanguard ETF's and charge a small fee (relative to actual financial advisors) to provide 2 main services - rebalancing and tax loss harvesting.
I went with betterment because of lower fees vs. wealthfront, and because I think tax loss harvesting will more than offset the fees. The other reason is that it forces me to be more disciplined and not try to pick individual stocks or even sector/industry etf's. It's impossible through betterment/wealthfront to buy a specific etf or stock, which in my book is actually a huge plus - it means I can avoid the behavioral mistakes that many make in trying to outsmart or time the market. I'm at a 100/0 stock/bond allocation. Have had no problems using the betterment platform though was really, really hard to sign up my wife who had a recent name change (we gave up).
If you're highly disciplined, you can go through Vanguard and replicate what betterment/wealthfront's portfolios do, and rebalance yourself, and even tax loss harvest by yourself (that's potentially a good amount of work).
As for schwab intelligent portfolios - I signed up to get notified when it would be released, and upon reading the fine print, was very disappointed. They advertise it as a fee free roboinvestor. 2 problems - #1) biased toward Schwab ETF's since they make $ off that, which I expected. But #2) is the real problem - they hold something like 6-30% of your portfolio in cash at any given point. Their claim is that this is smart "investing" but the conflict of interest is that they make interest off your $ that's in cash and you do not. So much for fee-free.
In summary, betterment, wealthfront (may be better than betterment for fees depending on how much $), and vanguard are all viable choices. Schwab sounds great at first but be careful of the fine print.
