Relay vs Novo

Relay operates like a traditional bank. Once you hand out your routing and account numbers, vendors can pull ACH payments just like they would with any other bank. This is risky because once someone has your routing and account numbers, they have the bare minimum they need to try pulling money out of your account without you pushing “send” on anything.

That’s why “just handing out” your routing and account numbers is more risky than sharing a unique payment link and why most businesses tend to prefer stronger controls.

With that, Relay’s FDIC coverage goes up to $3 million dollars. Relay spreads your money across several FDIC-insured banks automatically so that more of your balance stays insured instead of being stuck at the $250k limit of a single bank.

Relay does not have a treasury account.

Instead, it offers a savings account where you can earn interest on your balance. With that, the interest rate varies and depends on the subscription plan you pay for. So if you're on the free plan of Relay, expect to get a lower interest rate.

While this is simple, the reality is you are not investing in government securities, treasury funds, or multi-pool yield strategies and it means you miss out on the higher yields.

In summary, if you have a large amount of money in your account (e.g. $250K+) you should automatically consider switching to Mercury since you will make more money on your money.

When you forward a bill to Relay's unique Bills Inbox email, it automatically extracts key details like vendor name, invoice number, amount, and due date using built-in document recognition so that you don't need to manually enter in the details. You can then review and edit the bill before paying.

The thing is, Relay doesn’t have vendor onboarding, which means it doesn’t automatically collect W-9s. This puts more admin on your plate before tax time. It’s a small thing that makes a huge difference if you work with a lot of contractors. You’ll need to email everyone separately, and it’s just a pain.

Similar to other banks, with Relay you can create a check payment and they will print it off and mail it on your behalf.

That said, you cannot send a physical attachment (e.g. PDF or form) with the check. You can upload it to their system and include a memo line, but if you need to send a physical document to the government for example, you'd need to figure out a solution outside of Relay.

Domestic and International wires to a USD account are free.

Relay includes invoicing and payment links so you can create, send, and track invoices without needing a separate tool.

Relay lets you open up to 20 checking accounts per business, which you can nickname for things like Income, Profit, Owner’s Pay, Taxes, and Operating Expenses, plus up to 2 savings accounts that currently earn around 1–3% interest on idle cash.

Relay is built around "Profit First" banking, that is one of their core marketing messages.

You can create percentage‑based auto‑transfer rules (e.g. Say you set a target of $1K in your income account, and twice a month, anything above that is distributed by percentage to Payroll, Tax, Owners Comp, etc.). So say your balance hits $5k, the $4k will be distributed accordingly to your percentage rules.

As a heads up though, these rules only apply between Relay checking accounts (not to savings accounts) where as with Mercury for example, you can set up similar rules that also work between savings and Treasury accounts.

If you run multiple businesses, Relay lets you register several entities under a single login and then toggle between them from a dropdown, with each business having its own set of accounts, cards, and permissions.

That said, Relay does not offer any Personal Banking solutions so you'd still need a totally separate bank for that (we are obsessed with Mercury Personal Banking, which is why we use Mercury for both business + personal, but hey, even if you use Relay for business we'd recommend switching to Mercury for personal use since its that good).

Relay gives you team access controls with several permission levels like Administrator, Manager, Cardholder, Deposit‑only, Approver, and Read‑only, and you can restrict people to specific checking/savings accounts so, for example, your marketing manager only sees the Marketing account and not Payroll.

Relay supports bill approval workflows inside its bill pay module: you can set rules like “bills over 1,000 dollars require approval” and route them to one or more approvers before they can be paid, which is great for small teams wanting oversight on vendor payments.

As a heads up though, these approval rules are tied to only bills in Relay (not any payment over X amount via ACH, wire, internal transfers, etc must be approved).

Relay has an easy to use interface, especially when it comes to setting up the auto-transfers between accounts for Profit-First banking. The app is clutter free and the dashboards are simple, intuitive, and uncluttered.

Novo it works like a normal business checking account: once you've given someone your routing and account numbers, they can initiate ACH pulls into or out of your account, and you’re relying on your own monitoring plus Novo's dispute process if something sketchy shows up.

With that, Novo covers the basics for fund safety (coverage up to $250K), but you do not get extra protection beyond standard FDIC insurance. Unlike Mercury and Relay, they do not automatically distribute your funds across multiple banks.

This should tell you a lot: they are building for businesses with small balances and expect their customers to hold relatively small amounts (think freelancers and solopreneurs).

Their customers usually hold somewhere between $5K–$100K in their account, so if you plan to scale your business, it is better to skip Novo. And in general, since other banking solutions are free too, you might as well use Mercury since it has a better user experience all around.

Novo has no interest-bearing savings account and no treasury product.

Their business checking pays 0% APY and they don’t offer any built-in way to move cash into higher-yield investments or a separate savings account.

Think of Novo as purely an operational checking account, which is why we don't recommend it for any business that intends to scale.

While you can add payees (vendors, contractors) to Novo, there is no self-service vendor onboarding like the other banks have (e.g. no secure link where vendors can enter in their payment details and no automatic collection of W-9s).

Unlike with other banks, Novo won't automatically scrape your invoices and enter them into the system.

Novo's target audience seems to be more freelancers who don't need to often make payments to others, so if you're a growing business, skip Novo.

Novo will write and mail checks on your behalf, however if you need to attach a PDF or form, you're out of luck and will need to figure out another way outside of Novo. This is a bummer if you're trying to send in something like a government form.

Incoming domestic wires are free, although outgoing domestic wires are $30.

International wires are handled through their Wise integration, and you will need to pay the fee's associated.

Novo offers basic invoicing capabilities, although the user experience is not as smooth as with other banks.

Novo gives you a single business checking account per entity, but you can create up to 20 "Reserves," which are internal budgeting buckets for things like taxes, payroll, profit, and expenses.

But heads up, Reserves are not separate accounts or sub‑accounts, they have no unique account/routing numbers, all funds remain part of one Total Balance.

Novo Reserves let you automatically allocate a percentage of each incoming deposit into specific Reserves, which is good for simple Profit‑First‑style budgeting (e.g., 25% of all future deposits to Taxes). However, those rules only move money inside the one checking account into non‑account "envelopes". You can't set target balances like with Mercury and Relay (e.g. when my envelope reaches X amount, transfer money).

Novo lets you open a separate business checking account for each business as long as each has its own EIN, but you need a separate login for each entity, so there’s no single dashboard where you can quickly toggle between multiple businesses under one username.

Novo is business‑only, there is no Novo personal banking product.

With Novo, when you add another user to your account, you're granting them full access and account‑owner‑level privileges. This means they can transfer and withdraw funds since Novo doesn't offer partial or read‑only access.

This is much less safe and protected than other banking solutions out there, which is why if you have a team we don't recommend using Novo.

Novo does not have rule‑based approvals for payments, again making it subpar for any business with a growing team.

Novo's interface is simple to use, although it's not as modern or thoughtful as other banking solutions available.