Banking Bank Reviews

Acorns Early (formerly GoHenry) vs. Greenlight [2025]: Which Is Best?

Both Acorns Early (formerly GoHenry) and Greenlight offer kids' debit card with similar perks for parents to teach their kids how to handle money. However, Greenlight offers more value overall.

By Miranda Marquit
and Kate Underwood

Edited by Jess Ullrich

Updated May 13, 2025

2025 award winner Best for Kids and Teens

5.0

Our view

As a parent, making sure my kids grow up knowing how to manage money is one of my biggest goals. They'll need skills with earning, spending, saving, and investing all their lives, and starting early is key. Here's where Acorns Early and Greenlight come in.

When you compare Acorns Early vs. Greenlight, both platforms provide fun and useful digital tools to teach money management. They make it easy to give your kids allowance or pay them for jobs they do. Plus, kids receive their own debit card that enables them to make purchases and plan ahead.

These services come at a cost, and you might be able to teach a lot of the same lessons without one. But the fees are minimal, and Greenlight is a bit more cost-effective with added perks. You can't really go wrong with either Greenlight or Acorns Early, but I'd give Greenlight a slight edge in terms of usefulness to parents and kids.

How we evaluate products

Kids' debit cards can be helpful in teaching children financial literacy and money management skills. Greenlight and Acorns Early (formerly GoHenry) are two of the most popular companies offering prepaid debit cards for kids and teens, as well as tools for safely transferring funds between parents and their kids.

Overall, we prefer Greenlight as its basic plan is more cost-effective for families, and it provides more features to choose from, such as investing. Here's what you need to know about Acorns Early vs. Greenlight.

Acorns Early vs. Greenlight

	Acorns Early	Greenlight
Card type	Debit card	Debit card
Payment network	Mastercard	Mastercard
Monthly fee	$5 per child or $10 for up to four child accounts Included at no added cost with the Acorns Gold investing plan ($12/month)	Family plans for parents and up to five children: $5.99 Greenlight Core $9.98 Greenlight Max $14.98 Greenlight Infinity $24.98 Greenlight Family Shield
Minimum age requirement	Six years old	None
Features	Up to four kids Savings goals Automatic payments Set spending limits Ability to turn cards on and off Custom card option Mobile app for iPhone and Android FDIC-insured	Up to five kids Savings goals Automatic payments Set spending controls Ability to turn cards on and off Round up feature that saves spare change Mobile app for iPhone and Android Works with Apple Pay and Google Pay Investing component Identity theft, cell phone, and purchase protection with Greenlight Max and Infinity FDIC-insured SIPC-insured investments
Best for...	Parents focused on educational features and simple money management; Acorns investors	Parents who want to teach their kids about many financial literacy concepts, including investing
	Visit Acorns Early	Visit Greenlight

Editor's note

GoHenry was purchased by Acorns in 2023 and has since been rebranded as Acorns Early. You may still see it referred to as GoHenry in some cases, and the GoHenry app is still available for families to use, but the official name is now Acorns Early. There's an Acorns Early app, and that's the only one that'll include the latest features from here on out.

How does Acorns Early work?

Acorns Early is designed as a family money management app to teach kids about saving and how to manage money.

To fund your children's accounts, start by adding money to your parent account using a debit card or other payment account (when doing the free trial, I found I could link a credit card to fund my son's account). You can direct money into up to four kids' accounts.

Key features of Acorns Early

Funding, allowance, and chores

Set tasks and payment amounts in the app (recurring allowances, payment for extra tasks, and more). You can also send money instantly to your child's account, and direct deposit is available to teens earning their own wages.

Spending

As the account owner, you can set spending limits for your child. Acorns Early offers over 35 customizable debit card designs and lets users add their cards to digital wallets like Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Savings goals

Kids can set individual savings goals for different targets they want to hit and track their progress in the app; parents can pay interest on their savings to help encourage them, as well as lock their savings goals to freeze their access to funds until they've saved enough.

Learning

In-app Money Missions help kids and teens learn about financial concepts, and these videos and quizzes stand out as one of the strongest features the Acorns Early platform has to offer.

Other funding

Family and friends can send money to your child's Acorns Early account via Giftlinks and Relative accounts. Giftlinks let people send one-time money transfers to your kid as if they're sharing a digital gift card, while Relative accounts are set up for recurring transfers from a trusted adult to your child's Acorns Early balance. This would be a good option for grandparents and guardians who aren't account owners.

Read our Acorns Early review to learn more.

Good to know

Acorns Gold also includes Acorns Early Invest accounts, which are automated custodial investment accounts for kids that feature a 1% match. However, because these are technically separate from Acorns Early accounts, we're not going to cover them in this comparison.

How does Greenlight work?

The basics of Greenlight are the same as those of Acorns Early, with debit cards for kids and tools to help parents teach kids about money. But Greenlight offers more ways for your kids or teens to use their money and interact with the platforms.

Key features of Greenlight

Funding, allowance, and chores

As with Acorns Early, you can automate allowances and paid tasks with Greenlight to set one-time or recurring transfers from your account to theirs.

Spending

Set spending limits and ATM limits for your children. Children can customize their debit cards with a photo of their choice, and they can earn cash back on debit card purchases with some plans.

Savings goals

Greenlight not only offers the ability to create savings goals, but it also pays interest itself and allows parents to provide parent-paid interest to further incentivize saving. Depending on your plan, your child can earn between 2% and 6% on their savings from Greenlight.

Learning

Greenlight users can learn money skills through financial literacy games, called Level Up™ games. They can earn rewards in the form of coins for completing levels, then use these coins in the Reward Shop (although these don't have cash value and primarily just change the way the game looks).

Investing

All Greenlight plans above Greenlight Core offer investing for kids, letting users purchase more than 4,000 stocks and ETFs with parental approval.

Safety

Greenlight offers phone, purchase, and ID theft protection for Greenlight Max and Infinity. For Infinity and Family Shield, the platform provides driving alerts, crash detection, family location sharing, and SOS alerts.

Greenlight goes above and beyond what Acorns Early can offer, with added features like Parent-Paid Interest and investing options. If you choose an interest rate to pay your child, you can teach how compound interest works, for example.

Greenlight is also FDIC-insured for the banking products and Securities Investor Protection Corp.-insured for the investing account.

Get a one-month free trial of Greenlight | Read our Greenlight review.

How Acorns Early and Greenlight are similar

I like a lot of the primary features of both Acorns Early and Greenlight. With my kids at ages nine and eleven, they're ideal for me, with debit cards for kids and easy ways to automatic allowance payments.

Let's look at some of the ways Acorns Early and Greenlight come out even:

Free one-month trial period
Kids' debit cards with parental controls and FDIC protection
Tools to help kids set savings goals (with parent-paid interest)
Financial literacy education through fun games and activities
Simple parent-to-child money transfers
Charitable donation options

Both apps are great for helping build a successful financial future for your children.

Who is Acorns Early best for?

For simple kids' debit cards and allowance payments, Acorns Early is a solid choice, especially if you only have one child. Here are two types of families we'd also recommend it for.

Families mostly focused on educational resources

Acorns Early's gamified educational games are a strength of the platform. And even though Greenlight offers great educational resources, too, we slightly prefer Acorns Early's toolkit here because we can see the games being more fun for kids. The games and courses, called Money Missions, are age-appropriate and engaging.

Current or potential Acorns users

As mentioned, the Acorns Early kids' debit card and money management features are all rolled into the Acorns Gold subscription. If you already invest with Acorns at a lower tier, it might be worth upgrading to the Gold plan to take advantage of the complimentary Acorns Early access.

But the price difference is $9 if you upgrade from Acorns Bronze ($3 per month) to Acorns Gold ($12 per month), so you'd only save a dollar in that scenario, assuming you didn't use any of the extra features that come with the higher plan tier besides the kids' banking platform.

Who is Greenlight best for?

Greenlight has more strengths overall, so we'd recommend it to more families (especially those with kids under the age of six, Acorns Early's minimum). Consider Greenlight over Acorns Early if any of these descriptions sound like you.

Families looking for the most bang for their buck

In general, if you're interested in added features, choose Greenlight, as it offers investing, identity theft protection, and options to add interest to your child's account.

Neither Acorns Early nor Greenlight is free, but Greenlight wins in terms of pricing overall.

	Cost
Acorns Early	$5/month for one child; $10 for up to four children
Greenlight	$5.99/month to $24.98/month for up to five children

Greenlight also has four tiers of membership that offer increasing levels of features and services. If you only want the basic debit cards and you have at least two children, you'll save money with Greenlight. And if you're looking for added benefits, here's more on how Greenlight's pricing works (all plans work for up to five kids).

Core: $5.99/month for debit cards, financial literacy games, and up to 2% on savings from Greenlight

Max: $9.98/month for Core features; up to 3% on savings; 1% cash back on purchases; access to Investing for kids; and protection for phones, purchases, and identity theft

Infinity: $14.98/month for Max features; up to 5% on savings; driving reports and alerts, crash detection, family location sharing, and SOS alerts
Family Shield: $24.98/month for Infinity features, up to 6% on savings; financial account monitoring with alerts for suspicious activity, up to $100,000 in fraud coverage for deceptive transfers, and up to $1 million in identity theft protection.

Overall, you get more for less money with Greenlight. But if you're not concerned with having the most features and mainly need a platform to give your child or teen space to practice spending and to pay an allowance, you should find that Acorns Early should do the trick.

Larger families

Family size is a factor in choosing a children's debit card. You can get debit cards for up to four children for $10 a month with Acorns Early, or you can get debit cards for up to five children for as little as $5.99 a month with Greenlight. If you're a parent to more than five, you might need to open a separate account with either.

Technically, you'll save a little bit by choosing Acorns Early if you only have one child. But for families with multiple children, Greenlight is the better value.

Families that want to invest

Acorns Early doesn't offer any investing options for kids built into its platform, while Greenlight does. I wish I'd started learning how investing works when I was ten years old (I definitely don't recommend waiting until your thirties to do so).

Greenlight enables parents to approve every trade before their child makes it, and the account is SIPC-insured. SIPC insurance doesn't cover investment losses, but it can protect you if the company fails.

Families that want safety features

Again, Greenlight simply does more than Acorns Early: you can access identity theft and phone protection with the Max, Infinity, or Family Shield plan. It's definitely a nice feature to have and might make you feel more justified in paying a higher monthly price.

Access to payment apps

Greenlight debit cards are compatible with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay, enabling more convenient payment options. Your child must be 13 or older to use Apple Pay or Google Pay with Acorns Early.

With Acorns Early, your child (aged 13 and older) may use Apple Pay, but Google Pay is not enabled. If Apple Pay is the only one of its type that your family uses, this may be perfectly fine.

Other alternatives to consider

Another option we suggest is to check with your bank to see whether it offers joint accounts for minors. You might be able to open a basic joint checking account with your teen. Many of the best banks offer these accounts at no charge and will issue your child a debit card. You can then use the bank's app to monitor your child's account, without paying a fee.

FAQs

Which is better, Acorns Early or Greenlight?

This depends on your family's size and how many services you'd like. Acorns Early can work well for a family with one child to learn basic money management with access to a debit card. Greenlight, on the other hand, is less expensive for larger families and offers a more robust range of services, including investing and interest on savings with certain plans.

Does Acorns Early offer ATM access?

Yes, it's possible to access an ATM with an Acorns Early debit card with no fee for domestic and international transactions. However, you might have to pay ATM fees with the ATM owner.

Is Greenlight a credit card?

No, Greenlight is not a credit card. Instead, it's a prepaid debit card that parents can add money to with the goal of helping kids learn about money management.

What are some alternatives to Greenlight and Acorns Early?

There are different alternatives to Acorns Early and Greenlight. Here are some options:

FamZoo: FamZoo offers families the opportunity to manage finances together with debit cards for kids and monthly fees as low as $2.50 when you pay for 24 months in advance and up to $5.99 a month for a month-to-month subscription.
Current: If you have teens, you can get a prepaid debit card from Current that allows you to set notifications and spending limits and track your child's purchases. Read our full Current review for more information.
BusyKid: You can also use BusyKid to get debit cards for kids and pay them for chores. It's just $4 a month ($48 a year) for a family of up to five kids.

These are excellent and cost-effective alternatives. You can also check whether your bank offers joint checking accounts with minors. This may not cost anything, and you can monitor your child's spending by logging into the joint account or checking your banking app.

Bottom line

Both Acorns Early and Greenlight are excellent platforms that offer kids real-world experience in using a debit card to manage their money. In an increasingly cashless world, those skills will serve them well. I like both of the services, but you should think about what you're looking to gain from the platform before selecting one.

Greenlight is a better value overall since you get up to five debit cards for $5.99 per month, whereas Acorns Early charges $5 per child and $10 for up to four children. And if you'd like your child to earn interest on savings, cash back on purchases, and have access to investing, Greenlight is the way to go.