A credit score identifies your creditworthiness to potential lenders such as banks, as your credit score shows how responsible you are in paying off your balances.

Credit monitoring apps make it easier for you to stay on top of your credit. They send you an alert if they discover any significant or unusual activity in the credit reports so you can check for suspicious activities.

Why Do We Need Credit Monitoring?

Credit monitoring can help you spot fraud or signs of theft so that you can take steps to address them. Errors on credit reports can occur more often than you think and they will hurt your credit score. Monitoring your credit score also makes it easier to quickly identify suspicious activities such as new accounts you did not open.
Being alert to your credit is a healthy financial habit, and credit monitoring is an easy way to make it a part of your routine. Therefore, to make it easier for you, our team has compiled and presented to you with details regarding the best credit monitoring apps:

Credit Karma

Credit Karma offers free credit score tracking, once you register for a free new account. It provides a credit report card, which shows a list of every factor contributing to your credit score health such as average age of open credit lines and helps you identify how your actions are affecting your credit score. It allows you to track your credit score from TransUnion and Equifax. However, you should know that these scores are not your official FICO score. 

Mint: Money Manager, Budget, And Personal Finance

Mint Money Manager is a free credit monitoring and debt management app that provides some guidance on how to improve your credit score. It gives you your Equifax Credit Score. This app shows your banking and credit card transactions collectively so that you can quickly view where you are spending money. You can also receive bill reminders, payment notifications, set up financial goals and make budgets.

Credit Sesame

Credit Sesame allows you to take a look at your Experian National Equivalency Score (ENES). Through Credit Sesame you can look back at your credit history, and it shows you how much you owe, what are your current interest rates and what is your credit score.
Also, Sesame shows you refinancing options in collaboration with Lending Club to pay off your high-interest debt. It provides a free look at your credit score using the VantageScore model from TransUnion. You also receive credit reports with letter grades based on your payment history, credit usage, and credit age.
One of the distinct features of this app is My Borrowing Power, which shows the amount of credit you may be able to obtain based on your current credit information.

Credit.Com

Credit.com is another app that gives you the feature of accessing your Experian National Equivalency Score and Vantage credit score for free. The app provides you a grade from A+ to F, based on the factors: payment history, debt usage, credit age, account mix and number of inquiries. However, this app has a unique feature of identifying credit blunders and understanding how to fix them.

Experian

Experian monitors changes to your credit profile, and you can receive push notifications on your phone whenever a change occurs. Every 30 days your Experian credit report is updated, in addition to details about credit card account activity, outstanding debt and about how your credit card activity affects your score.

TransUnion

The TransUnion app allows you to check your TransUnion credit report through your phone. The TransUnion is similar to the FICO credit score. However, it ranges from 300 to 850 and is not the same.

CreditWise

CreditWise offers free credit monitoring services from Capital One. If you are already a customer of Capital One CreditTracker Service, you can use your current username and password details at the Capital One website. This app provides you with your TransUnion credit score weekly. One thing that makes it a unique application is the simulator that shows you how to improve your credit score. This app gives you personalized suggestions for improving your score, along with the industry-standard alerts to keep you updated on any critical changes.

Are These Credit Apps Useful?

Your FICO score is a combination of 28 different factors, which are used widely by different issuers of loans. Each of the apps mentioned above provides free credit scores to keep you updated. Also, the advice provided by these apps can be of great value to improve your credit score, however, do not forget that your lender may be working with a different score than yours.
Therefore, before getting a loan, please make sure to ask your lender which credit score they use so that you could download a more appropriate app that gives you the best estimate.