Relay vs Rho

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.

Rho doesn’t have “every ACH debit needs your explicit approval” workflows, so it works more like a traditional bank. Once you share your routing/account number, ACH debits can hit your account and you manage risk through monitoring yourself, and disputes rather than pull approvals.

On the contrary, Rho uses a huge sweep network (400+ banks) to offer up to $75 million in FDIC insurance per entity. Your money is split into chunks of up to $250K and parked across many FDIC‑insured banks.

Despite the large FDIC coverage, Rho itself was last publicly valued at around $1.5B in its Series C round and they're likely not yet profitable.

Rho Treasury requires a $350K minimum to even unlock it, which is a bit of a bottle neck for most early business owners (unless you've raised funds).

Once you have access, you can set up auto-transfer rules (called "auto-sweeps"). They work between checking and Treasury to maintain your cash flow. You can set a minimum checking balance (e.g., $50K operating float) and top-up amount (min $25K).

Rho Treasury also gives you the option to keep some cash in a same day liquid pool while putting the majority into a higher-yield option that takes 2–3 business days to pull back, letting you get better returns without fully sacrificing cash flow.

While Rho handles payments well, it's more of a "finance team tool" rather than a "delightful minimalist banking solution like Mercury for example.

Rho lets you forward invoices into a dedicated Bill Pay inbox, where it scans invoices and create draft bills so you're not hand-entering everything. From there, you can send invoices for approvals so invoices can be reviewed before you make payment. You can also make payments in bulk (batch approving a bunch of invoices) to help streamline workflows.

It handles vendor management, where you can store profiles, and payment methods in one place.

It streamlines W-9 collection and 1099 filing workflows automatically, which is helpful for high-contractor teams.

With Rho you initiate the payment, and it handles printing and mailing the physical check along with any attachments. This is especially useful for vendors (or landlords) who still insist on paper.

Domestic and International wires to a USD account are free.

Rho allows you to create and send invoices, but it's user experience is not as "delightful" as Mercury.

Rho lets you create multiple operating accounts (checking sub‑accounts) so you can organize cash for things like payroll, taxes, and other expenses.

Rho does not support "Profit First" style banking.

You can have a rule that says "transfer $5K each month to this account" but you cannot have rules like "take 10% of all deposits into this account and spread it to these 10 sub‑accounts" the way Mercury or Relay's auto-transfer rules can do percentage of balance/percentage of incoming funds across multiple destinations.

So if this type of banking is important to you, skip Rho as you'll need to do it manually.

If you run multiple businesses, you can associate multiple business entities with a single Rho user login and easily switch between them.

That said, Rho 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 Rho for business we'd recommend switching to Mercury for personal use!).

Rho gives you granular control over who can see what and who can move money.

There are six pre‑set roles: Account Owner, Administrator, Department Owner, Employee, Bookkeeper, and Investor each with its own permission bundle.

Rho has a full payment approval framework that lets you define when transactions need sign‑off, how many people must approve, and which specific users are allowed to approve.

You can create rules like "for X dollar amount or above, require Y approvals," and assign one or more approvers. For example, you might require one approver for payments over $1k and two approvers for payments over $10k.

Rho has a good user experience for finance teams, but if you're a business owner or founder you'll find the interface feels a lot more dense than something like Mercury.