I plan to test out Starling for a couple more months, but already prefer Monzo. I think the best ‘base’ unit to show spending analysis is a month, which Monzo shows with the graph. This depicts my pay-in at the start of the month and then decreasing balance as I spend, unevenly across the month, and even predicts into the future a best guess of when my balance will reach zero.
Starling’s base unit is a day and I’m already frustrated to open the app in the morning to be shown I haven’t yet spent anything, something which is usually blindingly obvious. So, although it must be fun for Starlings developers to see how many times they’ve visited Benugo for coffee in a day, for me it’s just not analytical enough.
This will worsen when I begin to have direct debits coming out irregularly throughout the month, whereas it already seems Monzo will cache this in a ‘committed’ spending target.
Finally, Monzo’s spend notifications are super fast, quicker than the receipt printing on the card machine usually. Starling’s are, erm, uneven.
I like Starling’s colour palette though 