Best Credit Monitoring Services for November 2024

Experian earned the highest overall score thanks to its comprehensive feature set and affordable pricing. The free plan alone is a robust offering that’ll serve many people well, with FICO score access (a rare benefit), your Experian credit report, a personal privacy scan, and a dark web surveillance report.

At $24.99, Experian’s IdentityWorks Premium adds three-bureau credit reports, scores, and monitoring into the mix, as well as Experian CreditLock. Several identity protection features are included, too—SSN monitoring, a range of security alerts, $1 million in identity theft insurance, and plenty more.

Experian’s family plan ($34.99) includes all of the features of IdentityWorks Premium, but adds coverage for another adult plus identity monitoring for up to 10 kids. That’s a competitive offer, making Experian one of our favorite options for family monitoring (after Aura).

Dublin-based Experian is one of the three main consumer credit bureaus in the United States, alongside Equifax and TransUnion. Its origins can be traced back to early 19th century London, though it assumed its current name much more recently, in 1996.

If you’re looking for an inexpensive, user-friendly way to monitor all three of your credit reports, Credit Sesame should do the trick. Since its 2010 founding, California-based Credit Sesame has become a household name in the world of credit monitoring. It provides the cheapest option among services we researched to keep an eye on all three of your credit reports. Compared with many other services, it’s simpler and more precisely focused on credit, with fewer identity protection benefits.

There are three plan options. The no-frills free service offers the basic functionality you’d expect. You can check a credit score (VantageScore 3.0 based on your TransUnion report) that’s updated daily, and you can dig through your credit profile, exploring key factors that impact your credit health. Credit Sesame’s credit score simulator is also free, which is a nice plus.

Upgrade to Sesame+ and you’ll unlock perks like three-bureau credit monitoring (though neither scores nor actual reports are included), 24/7 fraud alerts, and $1 million in identity theft insurance. Sesame+ subscribers can also use Credit Sesame’s credit builder features, which let you build credit with everyday purchases via debit-style spending. This unique benefit underscores Credit Sesame’s appeal to those who are newer to credit.

Sesame+ Complete, the highest-tier plan, adds three-bureau credit reports, scores, and insights.

Credit Karma is our top pick for free credit monitoring largely because it provides daily updated credit reports and scores from both Equifax and TransUnion, allowing you to keep track of most of the goings-on with your credit. Most other free services only provide access to one credit bureau, and in many cases the scores and reports take longer to update. 

As a free service, it’s not going to offer all the bells and whistles of a plan that costs $20 or $30 per month. You won’t get identity theft insurance, internet security features, or monitoring for minor children, and there are quite a few ads for partner products, like loans and credit cards. But you will get an easy way to track your VantageScore, with notes on how changes to credit reports over time may have affected your score. You’ll get an analysis of your credit profile, and customizable alerts to notify you of any changes to your credit score or credit reports.

Credit Karma has a poor Trustpilot rating, with only 1.4 stars, but there are relatively few ratings. The mobile app, on the other hand, has excellent ratings in both the Google Play store (4.5) and Apple App store (4.8). 

Credit Karma is based in Oakland, California, in the Bay Area. It was founded in 2007.

Given FICO’s ubiquity in the American credit business, it’s likely no surprise that myFICO, FICO’s very own credit monitoring service, scored relatively well. What makes it special is in its name: myFICO is the least costly way to see regularly updated FICO scores from each of the three credit monitoring bureaus, at $29.95/month. (Experian also offers FICO scores from all three bureaus, but two of the reports only update quarterly.)

myFICO’s free plan offers an Equifax-based FICO score and credit report, updated monthly, plus credit monitoring features. Paid plans start at $29.95.

The Advanced and Premier tiers are nearly identical to one another, adding three-bureau reports and scores plus identity monitoring that scans the web for sensitive information and indicators that your SSN may be compromised. The Premier level simply offers monthly credit report updates, rather than quarterly, which is important for some people.

FICO was founded in 1956 and is now based in Bozeman, Montana.

Aura is one of the more recent entrants among well-known credit monitoring services, founded in Boston in 2017. Its paid plans feature quite a few financial and identity monitoring benefits, plus family-centric protection features and the highest level of identity theft insurance among services we reviewed, making Aura our top pick for these categories.

Aura’s identity protection features are quite thorough, so hopefully you’ll never need to access that insurance. Aura monitors for breached accounts, sensitive personal information (like your SSN), and suspicious changes to your home and auto titles (among other things), alerting you when something appears amiss. And if something does go wrong, Aura’s 24/7 fraud remediation support will help you take care of the issue.

As for its family plan, Aura covers five adults and unlimited children. That’s far more than most competing packages, which tend to cap out at two adults and usually have a limit on the number of covered children (sometimes up to 10, sometimes fewer). Family subscribers are granted the highest level of identity theft coverage, at $5 million (individual plans get $1 million, and couple plans get $2 million).

Other financial protection features include much of what you’d expect from standard credit monitoring services—three-bureau alerts, monthly VantageScore 3.0 updates, and annual credit reports from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion—along with some rarer perks, like the ability to instantly lock your Experian credit file.

IDShield is one of the more comprehensive services we evaluated, scoring well across the board thanks to the rich variety of features included in every plan. It provides many of the credit monitoring services you’d expect with a paid service, including monthly VantageScore 3.0 updates, three-bureau credit monitoring with certain plans, and alerts for certain red flags, like subprime loans and high-risk credit applications.

As its name suggests, however, IDShield seems to prioritize its identity protection features. Subscribers are eligible for up to $3 million in reimbursement for eligible losses and expenses related to identity theft—the second-highest level of insurance among the services we researched (after Aura), and one of the reasons IDShield stands out.

The service actively monitors for unusual activity related to your identity and Social Security number, from address changes to check cashing requests. You’re also granted a slew of identity restoration perks should you actually fall victim to identity theft, including 24/7 emergency assistance and dedicated, licensed private investigators. Plus, Rounding out the package is a host of cybersecurity benefits: a VPN, a password manager, credential monitoring, and various web-related protections. 

IDShield is part of Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc., founded in Oklahoma in 1969.

ID Watchdog separates itself from the competition with a more pronounced focus on digital security features. Though most of these features are only available at the premium tier, they’re noteworthy—customers have the ability to lock two of their credit reports (Equifax and TransUnion) instantly, to shut down identity theft before it can happen. You can also lock a child’s Equifax credit report. This is an uncommon feature: While both Experian and TransUnion offer credit locks as part of their monitoring services, those locks are only for those particular bureaus—but ID Watchdog lets you lock two bureaus easily at once.

You’ll also receive a NordVPN membership to support safe browsing, a BitDefender membership for device protection, access to a password manager, and phishing and malware alerts (among other goodies). That adds considerable value for those seeking a company that serves up more than just the same old, same old.

Besides those security perks, ID Watchdog delivers solid credit monitoring features. Its Select plan is straightforward, focusing on an Equifax-based credit score (VantageScore 3.0) and report. At the Premium tier you’re upgraded to three-bureau credit reports and a three-bureau credit score, though these are only updated annually, detracting somewhat from the overall appeal. 

Founded in 2005, Denver-based ID Watchdog was acquired by Equifax in 2017.