The major thing I liked was the Analysts Reports, which they offer for around 2,000 stocks in addition to 2,000 mutual funds and 100 ETF's. This, in my opinion, is one of the best things the membership has to offer. You can view the reports online or save them as pdf files. One of the things I really found useful was the list of what bulls say and bears say, so it gives you two unique perspectives.
The Morningstar Stock Rating is also useful. This provides a star rating (up to 5 stars), lists the stocks economic moat and what they consider to be its fair value.
Their Stock Screener has a ton of options on it - you can pretty much use any criteria you want to. I thought it was useful that you could screen the by their dividend growth rate or even their payout ratio. But overall, I found the screener a little difficult to use. Making a screen involves way more "clicks" than it needed to. You start off with a drop down box where you select from a huge number of choices. This really could be broken up into different categories. Once you select that, a pop-up box opens and you fill out what you want it to do. Clicking ok refreshes your main screen and you can start all over with another criteria.
Their portfolio tool has some useful features, but overall I found it too much of a hassle to be of much use. Entering transactions is a real pain. You can import them from Microsoft Money, but it did not work correctly for me. The symbols for almost all the stocks would be off, and would need to be manually changed. For example, the symbol for Duke Energy was not imported as DUK but as DUKE. Only the commissions were imported for some stocks, not the actual amount I invested.
Once you get your portfolio set up it also a pain to make changes. If I purchased more shares of DUK and enter those in at the bottom of the portfolio, it creates a completely separate holding. In order to correctly add shares, I have to hover my mouse over DUK, wait for a menu to pop up, and select edit. That takes me to a completely different page, and then I have to click yet another tab where I can now enter the transaction. If you have a lot of transactions to enter this is just way too time consuming.
With the Premium membership you also get access to the X-Ray tools for your portfolio. This is really cool. It breaks up your portfolio by Asset Allocation, Stock Style Diversification, Stock Sector, Stock Type, World Regions, Fees & Expenses, and overall Stats. Each of those tools can be expanded in detail. Another tool I really like is the Stock Intersection. This tool works best for mutual funds/ETF's. This shows you the overlap your funds have. For example, in my 401k plan, I have FUSEX, FCNTX, and FBALX. Each one of these funds holds PG. This shows you how much PG makes up of each of those funds, how much I would proportionally own in my portfolio, and the total value of that one stock in my portfolio (1.2%).
There are also more features to the Premium membership, but most of the rest were not really useful to me at this time. The current price is $18.95 a month or $174 for a year. For a small investor who only invests $100-$200 a month, that's a little too pricey for me.
As a side note, I have been very pleased with Morningstar. I have read two books authored by staff members there and they were some of the best books on investing I have read. If they paid a dividend I might even consider investing in them.
Update: Jan 31 - I canceled my trial membership. You have to call them to cancel it, but the call was quick. Other memberships I have canceled on the phone took quite a while, and you had to listen to a ton of spiels by someone you could barely understood. Not the case with Morningstar. They guy I talked to was very helpful, just wanted to know if I had had enough time to look it over and said he could give me 2 more weeks if I wanted. I said no and he didn't try to keep going. There's a lot of useful stuff there, but it's just too expensive for me.
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