Mint vs. CreditKarma - Personal Finance Management Products Comparison

Mint

Do you need to take better care of your finances? 

Would you like to see all of your accounts in one place?

Would you like to receive advice on how to reach your financial goals? 

Credit Karma

Then you should read further to see whether Mint or CreditKarma (or both tools) will help you on your journey...

Description: First of all, let me answer this question. Do you need either of these services? I believe so and here is why. Most of us - even those of us with college degrees - never really learn how to take care of our money and because of that, we struggle coming to terms with unfulfilled dreams that all go to the way side because we did not have the means to take control. So here are two tools that are available FREE of charge that will help you take control over your finances and they both have their own benefits and drawbacks that I will try to elaborate on based on my own experience. 

Evaluation of Pros and Cons:
Account Set-up: The initial registration for Mint seems to be a lot faster and less intrusive as compared to CreditKarma. This may be because CreditKarma collects enough information to actually look up your credit score (including Social Security Number), while Mint asks you to provide your credit score for better personalization. Slight advantage goes to Mint.

Adding Bank Accounts: Both services have very similar process for adding accounts (credit cards etc.) The strength of CreditKarma is that when it pulls up your credit report, it automatically also adds all of the accounts associated with your report (however you then need to take another step to fully connect them which seems to take much longer). This can turn out to be pretty scary/interesting/valuable when you find out that you have a line of credit you opened ages ago that you apparently never closed... Lastly, I was personally unable to add some accounts to each of these services, which was frustrating, and interestingly those accounts differed. I experienced the most problems with accounts through credit unions and merchant credit cards. Overall, I would have to give a slight edge to Mint on ease of adding accounts and to CreditKarma for finding an account I did not know about.

Website Navigation: Mint has a much cleaner design and as a result better navigation than CreditKarma. Mint is the clear winner in this category.

Analysis of Transactions and Trends: Mint has a far superior synchronization and actual interface for tracking transactions. Makes it much easier to categorize the types of transactions as well. Below is an example of a nice chart Mint offers that is created for you virtually automatically; I just assigned some expenses from uncategorized to their appropriate categories if they were not automatically recognized by the system - this happened with transaction for which I wrote checks, all other transactions were appropriately categorized automatically. 

Mint - Example of Spending Analysis

The nice thing about the spending analysis is that now you can see where your money goes and you can also address which piece of the pie you might be able to shrink in order to reach your financial goals. There is a spending analysis tool available in CreditKarma as well, however I found it far inferior to the one provided by Mint. Thus, Mint takes this category as well.

Budgeting and Goals: This is not easily available in CreditKarma, however it is very well done in Mint. At first you get to choose a financial goal that means something to you at a given point in time, ranging from travel, to investment, to retirement savings, to car loans... 

Mint - Selecting your financial goal(s)

Then you go through a 4 step process to configure your goal. The images provided below illustrate this process for a landscaping project goal. In the first step you select the project cost.

Mint - Financial Goal Setting - Step 1

In the second step, you choose the account you will use to track your progress (not shown) and in the third step you select the target date. The tool than calculates your monthly contribution that you need to put away to reach your goal.

Mint - Financial Goal Setting Step 3

This step is followed by a congratulations screen and a suggestion to share your goal with others for accountability purposes with links to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. What was more interesting to me, actually came after my goal was all set. The following screen not only showed my progress towards my goal, but also gave helpful tips on how to evaluate the impact of my landscaping goal on my home's value and provided other helpful links.

Mint Helpful Information About Achieving a Particular Goal

Suggestions for Other Services: Both products do a great job of providing links to various offers related to personal finance, from applications for credit cards to applications for IRA accounts... Each have their own little pros and cons, though I would have to say that I felt Mint's offerings are a little better organized and overall I sensed more of an interest in providing resources that would be of value for a good financial future, while CreditKarma feels a little more commercial in a sense of offering products for particular providers they may have deals with.

Alerts and Messages: Both products provide various different tools to alert you about due dates for payments and other important information. These are very comparable. 

At this point, I am sure some of you are wondering why we are even talking about Credit Karma... Here is why. This is my most favorite aspect of this service that I believe it makes it worth signing up for. CreditKarma provides you with your own personal credit score and grades the different categories that have an effect on this score so that you can see what you need to/can do specifically to help improve your credit score. 

CreditKarma Credit Report

When a person then clicks on any of the categories, they get another screen that shows them how this particular category is graded and what one can do to improve their credit score. Where it gets even better - there is a built in simulator that allows you to assess how your credit score would change if you made a particular change such as adding a new credit card to your account.

Conclusion: I see a definite value in both of these web tools. At first they appear to offer a similar service, however after experiencing them in more detail, I can see some distinct features to both. Since they are both FREE, I would recommend playing with both. I have to admit I learned a lot about my personal financial situation by creating these accounts and will personally continue using both Mint and CreditKarma in the future, though each for a slightly different purpose.

Update - After a few days since I have created these accounts, I have to report that one of my banks temporarily disabled my online access to the account, which I am assuming is due to the fact that a third party was trying to access it. This of course can be a serious issue and thus I would caution you that something like this is possible and so please be careful if you decide to sign up for either of these services. 

Customer Service Evaluation: I can today also report on an experience with customer service. I have reported a problem to both Mint and CreditKarma. CreditKarma took longer to respond past the initial automated email that they have received my message, once they responded, it was a good experience. Mint responded pretty fast and we have exchanged multiple messages within a span of about 24 hours, however I was disappointed because it was obvious that the customer support employees simply worked with a script and did not actually care about what I was saying.

Update after almost a year (3/18/2014). I regularly use CreditKarma today and find it very helpful. It helps me in updating my credit score as my balances differ, as I open up new accounts etc. Most of the functions work really well, one of my accounts does not update automatically because it requires another layer of authorization, however once that is provided, it works very well. In all honesty, I no longer use Mint, because from my personal experience, there are more issues of accounts not updating properly. Also, it does not update ones credit score the way CreditKarma does. In my personal opinion, at this time, KreditCarma seems to be the superior service, though I would appreciate your feedback if you have some :-).

Disclaimer: Please note that all of the information provided above is accurate at the time of posting and works within the United States, though access to this tool may be limited in some other parts of the world.