Head to head · Bank accounts · October 2026 research run
Belvo vs Plaid
Plaid scores 69.8 (B) on agent readiness against Belvo's 63.5 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Belvo leads on reliability and payments & pricing. Both do bank accounts.
Which one, for what
Belvo B
Good for Lenders and fintechs that need consented bank data in Brazil, employment or tax records in Mexico, or Pix and direct debit collection, and can sign a contract.
Ahead on
- Reliability, 84 against 68
- Payments & pricing, 20 against 15
Watch for
Production keys follow a sales meeting, a certification call with a Belvo engineer and a paid plan from 1,000 USD a month
Plaid B
Good for US and Canadian account, transaction, identity and income data, with Transfer for payments.
Ahead on
- Schema & documentation, 93 against 80
- Security & auth, 67 against 57
- Maintenance & community, 83 against 30
- Transparency & trust, 79 against 64
Also in its favour
- Runs on your own machine
- Open source
Watch for
No prices before a Production application, and Transactions, Liabilities and Investments bill per Item each month until removed
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Belvo | Plaid | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 84 | 68 | Belvo +16 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 80 | 93 | Plaid +13 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 80 | 82 | Plaid +2 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 57 | 67 | Plaid +10 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 20 | 15 | Belvo +5 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 30 | 83 | Plaid +53 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 64 | 79 | Plaid +15 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | 63.5 · B | 69.8 · B |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Belvo | Plaid |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Belvo | Plaid |
| Hosted endpoint | https://api.belvo.com | https://production.plaid.com |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, stdio, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Paid | Paid |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Belvo's General Conditions of Service Usage. The belvo npm package (0.28.0) is MIT | MIT (SDKs and MCP server) |
| Tools exposed | none | 4 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| Last release | 2026-08-10 | 2026-09-24 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-01-10 | 2025-12-01 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2021-02-22 | 2025-12-01 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 1.1k npm/wk, 240 PyPI/wk | 586 stars, 1.3M npm/wk, 657k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.5/5 (2) |
Verdicts
Belvo
Belvo publishes a 146-operation OpenAPI file, an llms.txt with a Markdown twin of each docs page, and list endpoints with field selection and pages of up to 1,000. Production access needs a sales meeting, a certification call and a paid plan from 1,000 USD a month, and no changelog or maintained SDK was found.
Plaid
Public OpenAPI file, llms.txt with about 250 entries and a Markdown twin of every docs page. No prices before a Production application, and Transactions, Liabilities and Investments bill per Item each month until removed.
Before you call either
Belvo
- Send HTTP Basic with
secretIdas username andsecretPasswordas password to https://sandbox.belvo.com, and switch to https://api.belvo.com only with production keys - Create links through the Hosted Widget with a token from POST /api/token/, which expires after 10 minutes
- Read stored data with GET list calls. Each POST retrieval in Brazil counts against monthly Open Finance limits, such as 8 a month per CPF for owners and accounts
- Retry 50x responses up to five times from a 3 second base with a factor of two, and don't retry 40x apart from
too_many_sessions - Send
Belvo-Idempotency-Keywith a UUID when creating a payment intent, andX-Belvo-Request-Mode: asyncon link deletion to avoid the limit of 5 deletions a minute
Plaid
- Point calls at https://sandbox.plaid.com until you hold a Production secret; request shapes are the same
- Create a sandbox Item with /sandbox/public_token/create and ins_109508, then /item/public_token/exchange, no Link UI needed
- Use /transactions/sync with its cursor and back off on 429 RATE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED yourself, since no Retry-After comes back
- Call /item/remove when the user is done, or subscription products keep billing
- Send an idempotency_key on
/transfer/authorization/createso a retried request can't authorise twice
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Belvo or Plaid?
Plaid scores 69.8 (B) on agent readiness against Belvo's 63.5 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Belvo leads on reliability and payments & pricing.
Do Belvo and Plaid need an API key?
Belvo needs an API key. Plaid takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.
Can an agent call Belvo and Plaid without installing anything?
Yes. Belvo has a hosted endpoint at https://api.belvo.com and Plaid at https://production.plaid.com.
Are Belvo and Plaid open source?
No open-source release is listed for Belvo. Plaid is open source (MIT (SDKs and MCP server)).
Other comparisons with Belvo or Plaid
- Belvo vs Enable Banking
- Belvo vs GoCardless Bank Account Data
- Belvo vs Salt Edge Account Information
- Belvo vs Teller
- Belvo vs Tink
- Belvo vs TrueLayer
- Belvo vs Yapily
- Enable Banking vs Plaid
- GoCardless Bank Account Data vs Plaid
- Plaid vs Salt Edge Account Information
- Plaid vs Teller
- Plaid vs Tink
- Plaid vs TrueLayer
- Plaid vs Yapily
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/belvo-vs-plaid.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/belvo.json·/api/v1/tools/plaid.json - From a terminal
anchor compare belvo plaid(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "belvo", "b": "plaid"}at/mcp, no key