Credit Karma Review

Thursday, May 22nd

2025 Credit Monitoring Company Reviews

Credit Karma

• Free to use: no-cost access to credit scores, credit reports, ID monitoring
• Monitors two credit bureaus (TransUnion, Equifax)
• Can help with disputing credit report errors
• Can be used on desktop or via app

Are you among those who find the intricate details shaping your credit score a bit bewildering? Fear not, because as soon as you land on Credit Karma's homepage, you're greeted with a step-by-step article explaining what credit monitoring is and why you'll benefit from it.

Packed with resources

As a partner of well-known financial company Intuit, Credit Karma positions itself as your advocate, focused on helping you achieve a healthier credit profile. The platform is packed with an array of resources to empower you in this endeavor, including tools like a credit score simulator, debt repayment calculator, loan calculator, insightful articles, community forums, and more.

All features here are free

Every service offered by Credit Karma comes at no charge, including credit monitoring. Setting up an account and inputting your personal details, including your social security number, is the initial step. Subsequently, they conduct a "soft pull" or inquiry that doesn't impact your overall credit score. Beyond just viewing your score, the platform keeps you in the loop with alerts and updates if any anomalies arise. This proves invaluable in detecting potential identity theft. Through Credit Karma's user-friendly interface, you can visualize your credit history's trajectory via graphs and benchmark your score against age, state, and income groups.

Get recommendations for financial products

When it's time to make substantial financial decisions like purchasing a house, a car, or selecting a credit card, Credit Karma steps in to guide you. The platform offers tailored matches for products and services you might require. As you explore, you'll find candid reviews from fellow customers about the recommended companies and products. It's noteworthy that these reviews run the gamut from blistering critiques of a specific credit card, insurance provider, or loan company, to glowing endorsements. These firsthand experiences offer unfiltered insights that empower you to make well-informed choices that suit your needs.

You're the product here

How is Credit Karma able to give you all of this for free? It's the right question to ask, because it leads into why this credit monitoring service has taken a nosedive in our rankings since our last review. The answer is that Credit Karma will give you access to your credit scores, sourced from Equifax and TransUnion (but not Experian, by the way), and in return, offer recommendations that can save you money by analyzing your financial data. Should you choose to act on these suggestions and opt for a product, the lender compensates Credit Karma. Essentially, they leverage your personal information to tailor advertisements to your needs.

Reputation has tanked with the BBB

And that's where the problem comes in. We were almost horrified to see that Credit Karma's rating from the Better Business Bureau had dropped from a perfectly-respectable "A” all the way down to a "D+”, with over 2,200 complaints filed in the last three years (and nearly 900 in the most recent 12 months alone). An alert on the BBB listing details how Credit Karma settled in a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission, accusing the company of sending pre-approval notices for third-party financial products (like credit cards) to customers that Credit Karma already knew wouldn't qualify. That resulted in "hard pull” inquiries being made, which damaged the consumers' credit reports. It's not a good look when the service you're entrusting with monitoring your credit is the one bringing it down.

Customers are very unhappy

Even without the misleading offers (which you can always ignore and avoid the problem entirely), users of Credit Karma are not happy these days. Looking at extremely recent feedback on Trustpilot (left within a few days of our evaluation), people say that their CK scores are much lower than what's reported through other channels (like bank accounts or from the credit bureaus themselves), it's hard to get help from the company's support reps, and that the system as a whole uses outdated information to provide "insights” on users' credit profiles. Two-thirds of the people who left a rating for Credit Karma on Trustpilot gave it a sad 1- or 2-star score, averaging a disappointing 1.5 stars overall.

Choose a different credit monitoring service

First to worst? That's about the only "honor” we can give Credit Karma now. Getting credit monitoring at no cost sounds amazing, until you realize that there are plenty of rival services that can do that for you too - and without trying to trick you into applying for a credit card or other financial product that will only wind up benefiting Credit Karma. You'll get much more for your time with one of the higher-ranking credit monitoring options on our list.