I have been using Monzo for almost a year now but I have been using Starling a lot more recently. In particular for 2 of my vacations (one in the EU and one in the States), my Starling card proved to be superior.
Apart from the AMAZING Monzo community/service and app, Starling is “better” because of below reasons:
The ability to view your card details in-app (including CVC)
Ability to withdraw up to £400 daily domestically and internationally (including outside of the EU)
Card does not get automatically frozen randomly (ergo leading to awkward moments at the checkout)
Less security scandals/issues
I am strongly considering switching to Starling just because I don’t want to carry loads of cards. However, if Monzo were to match/correct above items, I would definitely stay!
This is not me hating on Monzo, I genuinely love it! But as aforementioned, Starling and Monzo are very similar but Starling offers a few extra practical features.
I don’t recall anyone complaining that their card was randomly freezing, did you ask monzo to investigate?
To be fair Starling had some customers passports publicly accessible and crawlable by internet bots without authentication, which is worse than monzo telling you that some engineers could see your pin number.
They do not say a lot about a lot of things though; not their style
There were mentions on the old forum which they were similarly uncomfortable with and raptured
I think we are a bit to used to Monzo staff wading here with lots of technical details for both improvements and issues and forget that you are as likely to hear from a legacy bank as Starling on that sort of thing
Monzo’s own card processor has failed on a number of occasions too. I don’t think there’s a difference between Monzo and Starling for card reliability. Luckily I’ve never had an issue with either that I can recall.
Leaving aside the effect on card transactions of the Cassandra database issue a few months back, I do not remember that ever cropping up in my 14 months with them
I remember several Faster Payments outages, hence the new gateway this November
Starling’s cards provider GPS failed quite a few times in August and September.
Then there is the maintence that happens where the card will be declined as well. I want a card that works much more than Starling has in the last 2 months.
There last outage was for maintence early Sunday 6th October 03:15 and 06:15 (UK time) where your card would be declined which would be a big problem if you were out and about enjoying the nightlife.
I cant go further back on their status page: https://starlingbank.statuspage.io/history but there has been far to many card issues to be happy with. Each line is a seperate incident.
EDIT: oh I can using the top right corner, nearly every month there is a card outage from maintence where it hits early Sunday morning…
Best I can tell from Monzo’s statuspage, which they have a somewhat better record of updating, aside from the (partial) total outage on July 29th the last card transaction issue was in November 2018
Not with Starling anymore, had both for a year, but it is the only one of the two I have been affected by back in February
This isn’t quite correct. It wouldn’t have been crawled by a bot - it was accessible via a private link, similar to how you can share Google docs, photos, unlisted YouTube videos, etc. Someone with the link would have been able to view it. I believe they have changed the process so it isn’t available via a shared link anymore.
I think you should bank with Starling if the first two points are that important to you, and you really believe the second two points, and stop living your life by consensus.
What’s their monthly limit? You can withdraw £400 a day with monzo domestically but the limit is £5500 per month. Same applies to foreign atm withdrawals (also outside the EU) but with the fee after the free £200.
If you go abroad a lot to countries with poor card acceptance rates then it’s definitely something to consider
In the UK? You might need a replacement card but an in app chat might be a good idea. Never had this
There was the PIN issue which wasn’t an issue, type form which affected a lot of companies… but I think that’s it
Do the budgeting features in Starling suit you better?