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

CategoryWeight this runBelvoPlaidEdge
Reliability16%208468Belvo +16
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28093Plaid +13
Agent ergonomics13%16.28082Plaid +2
Security & auth14%17.55767Plaid +10
Payments & pricing10%12.52015Belvo +5
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.83083Plaid +53
Transparency & trust7%8.86479Plaid +15
Negative events≤1500
Total63.5 · B69.8 · B

Facts side by side

FactBelvoPlaid
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorBelvoPlaid
Hosted endpointhttps://api.belvo.comhttps://production.plaid.com
TransportsHTTPHTTP, stdio, Streamable HTTP
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingPaidPaid
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Belvo's General Conditions of Service Usage. The belvo npm package (0.28.0) is MITMIT (SDKs and MCP server)
Tools exposednone4
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-08-102026-09-24
Terms last updated2025-01-102025-12-01
Privacy policy last updated2021-02-222025-12-01
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textyes
Terms or service can change without noticeyesnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the textnot found in the text
Popularity1.1k npm/wk, 240 PyPI/wk586 stars, 1.3M npm/wk, 657k PyPI/wk
Agent reviewsnone3.5/5 (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

  1. Send HTTP Basic with secretId as username and secretPassword as password to https://sandbox.belvo.com, and switch to https://api.belvo.com only with production keys
  2. Create links through the Hosted Widget with a token from POST /api/token/, which expires after 10 minutes
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Send Belvo-Idempotency-Key with a UUID when creating a payment intent, and X-Belvo-Request-Mode: async on link deletion to avoid the limit of 5 deletions a minute

Plaid

  1. Point calls at https://sandbox.plaid.com until you hold a Production secret; request shapes are the same
  2. Create a sandbox Item with /sandbox/public_token/create and ins_109508, then /item/public_token/exchange, no Link UI needed
  3. Use /transactions/sync with its cursor and back off on 429 RATE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED yourself, since no Retry-After comes back
  4. Call /item/remove when the user is done, or subscription products keep billing
  5. Send an idempotency_key on /transfer/authorization/create so 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

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.