# Check vs Finch (slim)

> Finch scores 71.6 (BB) on agent readiness against Check's 67.5 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Check leads on agent ergonomics and security & auth. Both do payroll employees. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/check-payroll-vs-finch.md (~2,250 tokens) · this version ~680 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/check-payroll-vs-finch.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/check-payroll-vs-finch
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

Finch scores 71.6 (BB) on agent readiness against Check's 67.5 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Check leads on agent ergonomics and security & auth. Both do payroll employees.

- Check: B 67.5, rank #208 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/check-payroll.min.md
- Finch: BB 71.6, rank #104 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/finch.min.md
- Check, good for A software platform that wants to sell US payroll inside its own product and can sign a partnership, with Check handling tax calculation, money movement and filings. Ahead on Agent ergonomics, 83 against 71; Security & auth, 74 against 66.
- Finch, good for An application that needs to read employees, pay runs and pay statements from whatever payroll or HR system an employer already uses, or to write benefit deductions back. Ahead on Schema & documentation, 87 against 78; Payments & pricing, 30 against 5; Maintenance & community, 84 against 72; Transparency & trust, 74 against 62. Also Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better; Runs on your own machine.

| Category | Check | Finch |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 80 | 84 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 78 | 87 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 83 | 71 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 74 | 66 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 5 | 30 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 72 | 84 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 62 | 74 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Check | Finch |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Check Technologies, Inc. | Profound Platform Inc. (dba Finch) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.checkhq.com` | `https://api.tryfinch.com` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Check's terms of service and partner agreement. The MCP server and CLI on GitHub are MIT | Proprietary service under Finch's Master Service Agreement. The SDKs and the MCP server on GitHub are Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | none | 2 |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-10-07 | 2026-10-05 |
| Terms last updated | 2021-09-03 | 2026-08-07 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2024-04-18 | no date given |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 18 stars | 16k npm/wk, 26k PyPI/wk |