Head to head · Bank accounts · October 2026 research run
Plaid vs Teller
Plaid has a score of 70 (BB) against Teller's 43 (E). Both do bank accounts. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 75 points.
Which one, for what
Pick Plaid for
- reliability (+45)
- schema & documentation (+49)
- security & auth (+18)
- maintenance & community (+75)
- transparency & trust (+36)
Pick Teller for
- payments & pricing (+25)
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Plaid | Teller | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 68 | 23 | Plaid +45 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 93 | 44 | Plaid +49 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 82 | 80 | Plaid +2 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 67 | 49 | Plaid +18 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 15 | 40 | Teller +25 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 83 | 8 | Plaid +75 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 81 | 45 | Plaid +36 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | 70 · BB | 43 · E |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Plaid | Teller |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Plaid | Teller |
| Hosted endpoint | https://production.plaid.com | https://api.teller.io |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio, Streamable HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | Token |
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT (SDKs and MCP server) | ISC (Connect React wrapper, per package.json) |
| Tools exposed | 4 | none |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-24 | 2025-03-18 |
| Popularity | 586 stars, 1.3M npm/wk, 657k PyPI/wk | 10 stars |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (2) | 2/5 (2) |
Verdicts
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.
Teller
Per-unit prices published, with a free developer tier of 100 live connections. US only.
Before you call either
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
Teller
- In sandbox call https://api.teller.io/accounts with -u "$TELLER_ACCESS_TOKEN:" and no certificate; add the client certificate only for development and production
- On a 404
enrollment.disconnected.*code, stop and send the user back through Teller Connect in update mode; retrying won't help - Pin the Teller-Version header so a dashboard upgrade doesn't change response shapes under you
- Widen transaction syncs 7 to 10 days past the last sync to catch pending items that change date
- Send an Idempotency-Key on every payment request; keys are kept for 72 hours
Other comparisons with Plaid or Teller
Machine-readable
/api/v1/tools/plaid.json·/api/v1/tools/teller.json- This page as Markdown,
/compare/plaid-vs-teller.md