The most useful thing to know before comparing feature lists: these two products are not aimed at the same child. Greenlight is built for households managing kids’ money; Step is built for teenagers building their own financial track record. The records — CFPB filings, FDIC certificates, dated pricing snapshots — make the split obvious line by line.
Greenlight vs Step: what the official records show
These two answer different questions. Greenlight is a parental-control system with a card attached: category spending limits, real-time alerts, instant lock, chores and allowance automation, priced at $5.99/month for up to five kids on the Core plan — a fee schedule that has been on file with the CFPB since 2018. Step is a no-fee teen banking app whose differentiator is the secured Step Visa Card: it builds credit history before the user turns 18, something Greenlight does not attempt.
The fee math over a school year
Greenlight Core costs $71.88 over twelve months, flat, whatever the number of kids up to five. Step costs $0 at the base tier — its savings rewards and higher cashback sit behind the premium Step Black tier, per the official site snapshot in our records. For a single teen, Step’s $0 is hard to argue with; for three kids aged 8-14, Greenlight’s per-family pricing changes the calculation.
Where your money actually sits
Neither company is a bank. Greenlight deposits sit at Community Federal Savings Bank (FDIC certificate 57129, Woodhaven NY); Step deposits at Evolve Bank & Trust (certificate 1299, West Memphis AR). Both certificates are active in FDIC BankFind as of our latest verification, and both fiches on this site track any change to that status — the single most important line for a parent to re-check once a year.
What the complaint files add
Our latest pull of the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database shows 37 complaints filed against Greenlight Financial Technology and none under Step Mobile, Inc. Both are low counts for companies of this size — a useful sanity check rather than a differentiator here, and a reminder of what this comparison is not: neither product carries the kind of complaint volume that changes a decision (see our Cash App vs Step comparison for what that looks like).
The switch point in practice
Families rarely choose one forever. The common pattern in this pairing is Greenlight from 8-13 — while category limits, chores and allowance automation do real work — then Step from 13-14 onward, when credit building starts to matter more than spend controls and the $0 price fits a teen’s first part-time income. Both fiches track the fee schedules and FDIC records continuously, so the re-check at switch time takes minutes, not another research weekend.