Plaid - 2026 Pricing, Features, Reviews & Alternatives

Plaid is a technology platform which enables connection between applications and users’ bank accounts for account authentication, real-time balance checks, identity verification, income validation, asset verification, and more. Thousands of US and Canadian financial institutions are supported, as are business and consumer bank accounts.

Plaid’s Auth solution can be used to authenticate bank accounts for ACH payments without requiring microdeposits, allowing transactions to be authenticated instantly. Users are added with the credential-based flow, and account holder information can be retrieved to authorize transactions at any time once a user is added. The Balance solution can pull real-time current and available balance information as well as historic balance data, account type and status information. This solution can be used to prevent non-sufficient funds (NSF) and overdraft fees for customers by ensuring they have sufficient available balance before transactions are processed. Identity enables the verification of user identities against bank records to reduce fraud. Email and mailing addresses, phone numbers, and names can be checked, and forms can be auto-filled with account holder information.

The Transactions solution pulls transaction data for the past 24 months, with context including geolocation, category, and merchant information. Both pending and completed transactions can be accessed. Plaid’s Assets solution enables the verification of borrower assets from bank records, and generates reports in JSON and PDF formats. Income can be used to validate multiple income sources and verify employment information in real time, including the previous year’s pre- and post-tax income, projected pre- and post-tax income, and number of income streams.