Plaid API
Plaid is a self-serve REST API with instant sandbox signup at dashboard.plaid.com and official SDKs in five server languages plus Link for web and mobile. Coverage spans transactions, auth, identity, investments, liabilities, income, and transfers, with webhooks throughout.
Frequently asked questions
Plaid scores A on the API Report Card. Plaid is a self-serve REST API with instant sandbox signup at dashboard.plaid.com and official SDKs in five server languages plus Link for web and mobile. Coverage spans transactions, auth, identity, investments, liabilities, income, and transfers, with webhooks throughout.
Plaid has a workable official integration path. Most engineering teams can build against it directly. Open API: self-serve, documented, with SDKs
Plaid (Plaid Inc., San Francisco, founded 2013 by Zach Perret and William Hockey) is the dominant US open banking / financial data aggregation and embedded fintech platform, and the de facto reference API in the category.
Vertical: Financial Services (open banking / data aggregation / payments / KYC / credit infrastructure). Account aggregation from 12,000+ US/Canada/UK/EU financial institutions (screen-scrape + OAuth + FDX where supported).
Extremely high, Plaid is the default open banking / aggregation reference in the US and the highest-mindshare developer brand in the category.
End-user (consumer / SMB) consumer-permissioned FI credentials and OAuth tokens (held by Plaid, abstracted from the API caller; per-Item access_token returned to the caller).
Plaid was founded in 2013 in San Francisco and is approximately 13 years old as of 2026.
Grades measure one thing: can a customer's engineering team get their own data out programmatically? We check six things (whether a real API exists, how access is gated, data coverage, auth quality, docs and developer experience, and stability) and roll them into a letter grade. Grades get re-verified, and they only move on evidence.