The Best Credit Monitoring Services of 2025

Credit Karma is the best free credit monitoring service of 2025. But we all have different financial goals, so checking out Experian for its FICO® access and adding Aura for its identity theft protection can help you secure your credit activity.

Credit Karma offers everything from checking account access to daily credit monitoring. Experian gives an overview of key factors impacting your FICO® Score, which is important to lenders. And Aura goes in-depth into identity theft protection for you and your kids, including monitoring the three major bureaus.

Read on below for what we liked, what we didn’t, and what features may be the most important for your financial health. Plus, learn the difference between your FICO® Score and VantageScore and how they influence your creditworthiness. 

The best credit monitoring services of 2025

We tested 20+ services and found that Credit Karma, Experian, and Aura offer the best credit monitoring coverage based on cost, features, usability, and extra credit building and security tools.

• Credit Karma: Best free credit monitoring
• Experian: Best credit monitoring for FICO®
• Aura: Best ID theft with credit monitoring

Top 3 credit monitoring services compared

	Our Pick
Star rating	4.9 AllAboutCookies writers and editors score products based on a number of objective features as well as our expert editorial assessment. Our partners do not influence how we rate products.	4.7 AllAboutCookies writers and editors score products based on a number of objective features as well as our expert editorial assessment. Our partners do not influence how we rate products.	4.8 AllAboutCookies writers and editors score products based on a number of objective features as well as our expert editorial assessment. Our partners do not influence how we rate products.
Starting price	Starts at	Starts at Free	Starts at $9.99/mo
Free plan
Financial account monitoring
FICO® Score
Credit score	Yes — TransUnion and Equifax	Yes — Experian	Yes — Experian, Equifax, TransUnion
Credit score update frequency	Daily	Daily	Monthly
Credit report	Yes — TransUnion and Equifax	Yes — Experian (Upgrade to see TransUnion and Equifax)	Yes — Experian, Equifax, TransUnion
Credit report update frequency	Daily for TransUnion, weekly for Equifax	Up to daily	Annually
Credit lock
Credit analysis
Credit building
Extras	Identity monitoring, free-to-open checking account, and helps you find insurance policies, loans, and credit cards	Free identity protection scan	Safe gaming feature, antivirus, VPN, password manager, parental controls, child credit freeze, AI spam call & message protection
Learn more	View Plans Read Credit Karma Review	View Plans Read Experian Review	View Plans Read Aura Review

Credit Karma: Best free credit monitoring

Who it’s best for

Credit Karma is a free credit monitoring service with lots of features, such as light identity monitoring, access to a checking account, and plenty of offers for loans and credit cards. It also provides insights into your spending habits and can help you when it comes time to file taxes.

What we liked

Credit reporting: Credit Karma gave us access to our Equifax and TransUnion credit scores directly on the main dashboard. While having all three bureaus would be ideal, having two at our fingertips, especially from a free service, was a nice touch. In addition, we were given information that broke down the main components of our credit score. This helps you better understand what’s affecting your credit and what you can do to improve it.

Identity monitoring: Another impressive feature that Credit Karma provides is light identity monitoring. While an identity theft protection service will go in-depth with identity monitoring, Credit Karma can alert you to certain issues about your identity, accounts, and credit. Not every service does this, so it’s nice when a free service offers this.

What we didn’t like

Data collection: Credit Karma collects a lot of data, and, as stated in its privacy policy, it shares it with third parties. We don’t love that, but free services often do this, so we aren’t surprised. Credit Karma says it will never sell your information, but that doesn’t mean it won’t share it with its affiliates.

False claims: We also found that Credit Karma had deceptive marketing practices. The FTC found that Credit Karma told users they were pre-approved or had a good chance of being approved for credit, but when people applied for those credit cards and loans, they were denied. As a result, the FTC required Credit Karma to pay consumers $2.5 million after complaints about the company were registered.

Credit Karma pros and cons

Read Our Credit Karma Review

Experian: Best credit monitoring for FICO®

Who it’s best for

Experian is a worthwhile service for people who are looking to get a loan. Many lenders look at your FICO® Score, which most credit monitoring agencies don’t monitor. If you’re working on improving your credit for a loan, apartment, or other service, knowing your FICO® Score will help you see what the potential lender sees.

What we liked

FICO® Score reporting: Experian provides a free overview of your FICO® Score based on your Experian credit report. (You can upgrade to access your FICO® Score from all three credit bureaus.) The overview includes your score, the “score ingredients” — or the factors that impact your score, a breakdown of the key factors with an explanation of how they are helping or hurting your score, and a debt summary.

Money management tools: Linking your financial accounts to your Experian account can help you better manage your spending. There’s a helpful dashboard that we liked that gives a breakdown of your finances coming in and going out. If you’re saving for a big purchase, monitoring your money can give you insights into how and where to make changes to hit your goals.

What we didn’t like

Annoying marketing: Experian constantly prompts you to update to its premium plan, Experian IdentityWorks. It doesn’t make the service unusable, but it is annoying. We were also surprised that Experian didn’t offer a credit lock or freeze feature. Even Aura includes the ability to enable Experian Credit Lock.

Experian pros and cons

Read Our Experian Review

Aura: Best ID theft with credit monitoring

Who it’s best for

Aura is one of the best services for identity theft protection, which includes credit monitoring. Parents will find the parental controls and child credit freeze features useful, but even if you don’t have children, you can benefit from the additional security features like real-time antivirus protection, a password manager, a basic virtual private network (VPN), and more.

What we liked

Identity theft protection services: We’ve been reviewing and retesting Aura for several years and have found it to be one of the best services for credit monitoring and identity theft protection. It provides you with a variety of alerts for its services and keeps them in a central location that’s easy to read. Aura is thorough, and we like that.

Online protections for children: Aura is the only service on this list that gives parents tools to help keep their children safe. Online parental controls help monitor your child’s internet use, including a Safe Gaming feature, while the child credit lock helps protect your kids from identity theft. Child identity theft is more common than you’d think, and protecting your kids so they have a clean slate when they turn 18 is an important step.

What we didn’t like

Missing monitoring features: Aura is a robust service, so we were surprised there wasn’t access to our FICO® Score. It’s an important number when applying for larger loans, so you’ll want to monitor it. We were also surprised that social media monitoring wasn’t included in all the child protection features.

Aura pros and cons

Read Our Aura Review

Credit monitoring vs. identity theft protection

Credit monitoring is a service that looks at your credit history and activity and helps you track what is affecting your score. You may receive alerts that a new account has been opened or if a late payment has been reported to your credit. Most credit monitoring services also offer you credit card and loan offers. You may also find credit-building features to help you boost your score.

Identity theft protection monitors many credit, financial, and other personal accounts and services tied to your Social Security number (SSN). This includes credit activity but can also include your banking, savings, and retirement accounts. Different providers offer different features, but many include maps of predators in your area, social media monitoring, home title monitoring, email checks for data leaks, and alerts about potential warrants or legal actions against your name — plus additional cybersecurity features and tools.

FICO® Score vs. VantageScore

VantageScore is the credit score reported by the three major credit bureaus: Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. Your credit score reflects factors such as credit history length (including how long you’ve had credit and the types of credit in your history), credit utilization (the ratio of your available credit), payment history, hard and soft credit inquiries, collections amounts, and payment penalties. These factors influence your credit score, which banks, lenders, and even landlords use to determine if you are reliable and worthy of a loan, etc. There are a few different VantageScore models for lenders to use when determining your eligibility.

FICO® Score is also a credit model but differs from VantageScore regarding how the factors are weighted. This means your FICO® Score and VantageScore will differ. If you apply for a new line of credit, a mortgage, an auto loan, or a personal loan, it’s more likely that the lender will use your FICO® Score to determine eligibility and creditworthiness. In fact, 90% of lenders defer to an applicant’s FICO® Score.

There are also industry-specific FICO® Score models that depend on the loan type, though models typically consider your credit history length, how much you currently owe in total, your mix of credit (e.g., student loans, credit cards, personal loans, auto loans, etc.) payment history, and new credit lines (e.g., if several new accounts were open within a short period).

FAQs

Bottom line: Credit Karma is the best free credit monitoring service

Credit Karma provides robust features, especially for a free service, and can help you find new credit cards and loans. It also includes some identity monitoring. Credit Karma is the best free service we’ve used.

If you’re in the market for a loan or want more in-depth identity protection, Experian and Aura are at the top of their respective games. You can check your FICO® Score with Experian and monitor broad aspects of your identity with Aura.

If your goals differ from what these three services offer, you may want to consider the best identity theft protection services we’ve outlined below. We’ve tested them all and even use them ourselves.

3 best identity theft protection services of 2025