Head to head · Bank accounts · October 2026 research run
Plaid vs TrueLayer
Plaid has a score of 70 (BB) against TrueLayer's 62.4 (B). Both do bank accounts. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 45 points.
Which one, for what
Pick Plaid for
- agent ergonomics (+9)
- payments & pricing (+5)
- maintenance & community (+45)
- transparency & trust (+15)
Pick TrueLayer for
No category where it leads by five points or more.
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Plaid | TrueLayer | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 68 | 71 | TrueLayer +3 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 93 | 89 | Plaid +4 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 82 | 73 | Plaid +9 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 67 | 66 | Plaid +1 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 15 | 10 | Plaid +5 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 83 | 38 | Plaid +45 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 81 | 66 | Plaid +15 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | 70 · BB | 62.4 · B |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Plaid | TrueLayer |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Plaid | TrueLayer |
| Hosted endpoint | https://production.plaid.com | https://api.truelayer.com |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio, Streamable HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth |
| Pricing | Paid | Paid |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT (SDKs and MCP server) | Apache-2.0 or MIT (signing libraries) |
| 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 | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-24 | 2026-06-25 |
| Popularity | 586 stars, 1.3M npm/wk, 657k PyPI/wk | 23 stars, 17k npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (2) | 3/5 (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.
TrueLayer
FCA and Central Bank of Ireland authorised, holding the AISP and PISP licences itself. No public pricing anywhere on the site or in the docs.
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
TrueLayer
- Use auth.truelayer-sandbox.com and api.truelayer-sandbox.com with a separate sandbox client; live credentials don't work there
- Send the user's IP when they're present, or a bank allows 4 calls a day per account
- Check the retry column of the Data API error table before retrying; codes marked No need the user or a config fix
- Set data_access_type to one_time for a single read and skip the 90-day reauthorisation
- Append .md to any docs URL to get the page as Markdown
Other comparisons with Plaid or TrueLayer
Machine-readable
/api/v1/tools/plaid.json·/api/v1/tools/truelayer.json- This page as Markdown,
/compare/plaid-vs-truelayer.md