The app-store rating barely separates one neobank from another
July 21, 2026 · NeoBase · 5 min
Comdirect scores 1.30 on Trustpilot and 4.42 in the app stores. Same bank, same customers, same year — a gap of more than three stars.
It is tempting to turn that into a rule: app-store ratings are inflated, Trustpilot tells the truth. The data does not support the rule, and what it supports instead is more useful.
We compared both sources for every neobank in our directory that has at least 100 reviews on each side — 79 companies, 1.84 million Trustpilot reviews and 37.3 million app-store ratings.
The average gap is a trap
Across those 79, app stores score 0.61 stars higher on average. That number is close to meaningless, because the distribution behind it is badly skewed. The median gap is 0.19 — and half of all the banks sit between 0.05 and 0.73.
In other words: for most neobanks the two sources broadly agree. The average is dragged upward by a small tail of companies where they violently disagree.
| Trustpilot score | Companies | Average gap | Average app-store score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 2.0 | 10 | +2.72 | 4.39 |
| 2.0–3.0 | 4 | +1.89 | 4.29 |
| 3.0–4.0 | 24 | +0.46 | 4.20 |
| 4.0 and above | 41 | +0.05 | 4.39 |
Read the last column downwards. The Trustpilot score moves across almost the entire scale. The app-store score does not move at all.
The app-store rating barely separates anyone
That is the actual finding, and it is easier to see as spread than as averages:
| Trustpilot | App stores | |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest | 1.30 | 3.41 |
| Highest | 4.90 | 4.89 |
| Range | 3.60 | 1.48 |
| Standard deviation | 0.94 | 0.33 |
| 10th percentile | 1.90 | 3.92 |
| 90th percentile | 4.56 | 4.75 |
51 of the 79 app-store scores fall between 4.0 and 4.6 — a band six-tenths of a star wide holds nearly two-thirds of the market. On Trustpilot the same band holds 37.
A rating that assigns almost everyone the same score cannot tell you who is better. If you are choosing between two neobanks and both show 4.4 in the App Store, you have learned nothing. The comparison that looks most authoritative — millions of ratings, prominently displayed — is the one carrying the least information.
Where the two sources disagree, and why
The widest gaps in our set:
| Company | Trustpilot | App stores | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Comdirect | 1.30 | 4.42 | +3.12 |
| Affirm | 1.80 | 4.84 | +3.04 |
| Abanca | 1.40 | 4.36 | +2.96 |
| PayPal | 1.30 | 4.24 | +2.94 |
| Stripe | 1.70 | 4.52 | +2.82 |
| Ally Financial | 1.80 | 4.55 | +2.75 |
| Chipper Cash | 1.70 | 4.30 | +2.60 |
| ActivoBank | 1.90 | 4.36 | +2.46 |
The mechanism is not mysterious, though we can only infer it rather than prove it from this data. The two ratings are collected in opposite circumstances.
App ratings are prompted. The dialog appears inside the app, typically after something has gone right — a transfer landed, a payment cleared. The people asked are, by construction, people currently succeeding at using the product. Volume follows: across our 79 companies there are 20.3 app-store ratings for every Trustpilot review. PayPal alone carries 4.2 million app ratings against 39,754 Trustpilot reviews.
Trustpilot is sought out. Nobody opens a review site because their transfer worked. They open it after a frozen account, a failed transfer, a support queue that went nowhere. It measures a different thing: not whether the product works when it works, but what happens when it doesn't.
Neither is dishonest. They answer different questions, and the industry's habit of quoting whichever is higher obscures that.
One explanation we checked and discarded
Fifteen of the 79 run the other way, rated higher on Trustpilot than in the app stores. The obvious hypothesis is that these are business and freelancer accounts, where the customer is likelier to write a considered review and less likely to rate an app.
It does not hold. Among the 15 reversals, 6 carry a business, small-business or freelancer tag — 40%. Among the other 64, 24 do — 37.5%. That is not a difference. Whatever separates the reversals, it is not who the bank sells to, and we would rather say so than offer a tidy story the numbers do not carry.
How to actually use the two numbers
Use the app-store score for the app. It is a decent read on whether the thing is pleasant to use day to day, and a genuinely bad app does show up — the floor in our set is 3.41.
Use Trustpilot for the failure case. It is where account freezes, KYC deadlocks and support collapses surface first.
Treat a wide gap as information, not as noise. A company at 1.4 on Trustpilot and 4.4 in the App Store is not a contradiction to resolve. It usually describes a product that works smoothly until it doesn't, and a support function that struggles when it does.
That is why we publish both on every profile rather than averaging them into a single score. Averages hide exactly the disagreement worth seeing. The full directory — every neobank, both sources, per-country breakdowns — is at our neobank directory.