The one real difference: the licence
Starling is a fully licensed UK bank. Tide is an e-money provider — your money sits with a partner bank rather than with Tide itself. In day-to-day use you'd struggle to notice, and e-money accounts are used perfectly happily by hundreds of thousands of small businesses. But if you like the reassurance of a banking licence behind your working balance, that's a point to Starling and it's not a close one.
Cash and cheques settle it for a lot of trades
If customers pay you in notes — market stalls, mobile trades, anything with a cash till — Starling takes cash and cheque deposits and Tide's cash deposits are limited and carry a fee. Plenty of sole traders never handle a coin from one year to the next, in which case this doesn't matter at all. If you do, it usually decides the argument on its own.
Where Tide pulls ahead
Tide leans into add-on tools — invoicing, expense cards, admin services — bundled around the account. If you want that lot in one app and you'd genuinely use it, Tide gives you more out of the box than Starling does. The thing to check is the fees: some of those services are paid, and a free tier plus three paid extras is no longer a free account. Price it against what you'd actually use, not what's on the feature list.
Neither one does your bookkeeping
Here's the bit both comparisons on the internet tend to skip. Whichever you pick, you'll still need something to keep the books in — and from April 2026 Making Tax Digital for Income Tax starts requiring digital records and quarterly updates for sole traders over the income thresholds. Neither Tide nor Starling includes accounting software.
How to choose in thirty seconds
- You take cash or cheques: Starling.
- You want a banking licence and a simple, free account: Starling.
- You want invoicing and admin tools bundled in and will pay for some: Tide.
- You want your banking and bookkeeping to be one connected system: Mettle, and read why we recommend it.
