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Comment by meangreen | Hacker News Reader

Awesome news! Does anyone have a detailed and unbiased pros/cons of Plaid vs. Yodlee - thinking about integrating with one for my startup. I think the one area I'm most interested to learn about is the data quality / depth / breadth - do they offer the same? Which one is better? Why?

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regarding data quality, i've run into a few issues using Plaid for pulling my own financial data. I've had instances where the API returns duplicate charges that I confirmed were not duplicate on my bank/credit card accounts. I've also had issues with their unique id's too. When a pending charge is returned by the API they give it a unique id, but when the charge is approved they generate a new unique id for the approved charge rather than updating the existing id. They provide a field that lists the pending charge id for you to match up but i've had instances where those id's don't match up. I also run into issues where the access token for some of the institutions i have connected expire or suddenly don't work anymore so I need to re-authenticate.

I've emailed them about these issues and they've been pretty helpful in getting them resolved, but it made me reconsider building a consumer facing product on their API. I still use the API for personal use however

Totally understand on the duplicate issue - its a hard problem to solve with the inconstancies from the end financial institution, and it definitely caused issues for us in the past. That being said - we've spent the past couple months making some huge improvements - I definitely encourage you to give it another shot.

Though I'll admit, I'm quite biased!

I can offer an (obviously biased) opinion :), feel free to shoot me an email charley@plaid if ya want!

Would you be willing to share your opinion here so everyone can learn? biased or unbiased :) info is info

Sure! Here's my super biased opinion :)

A lot of the comparison is also dependent upon the use case, but I usually bring up coverage, performance, and simplicity.

Coverage - Custom integrations with the largest banks in the US that's also supplemented by "longtail" providers to give comprehensive coverage across the US.

Performance & Quality - 12 seconds or less to connect a user's bank account and begin to pull down data, which is particularly important for a mobile experience. We've also completely optimized our drop-in module used for onboarding bank accounts! (I think it looks pretty sweet: plaid.com/docs/quickstart)

Simplicity - Check out the docs yourself! (plaid.com/docs/api) usually takes only a few days to integrate, rather than a few months.

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