Lodavo vs Borrowell: Your Credit Score and Your Savings

Over 4 million Canadians check their credit score with Borrowell. Far fewer could tell you what they saved last month, and that gap is most of what Lodavo vs Borrowell comes down to. Borrowell is a free Toronto app that shows you your Equifax score and report every week. Lodavo is a free savings app that rewards you for saving, with free tickets in a weekly draw for cash prizes. One is about what you borrow. The other is about what you keep.

What’s the difference between Lodavo and Borrowell?

Borrowell reads your credit file. Lodavo reads your savings. Borrowell pulls your Equifax score and report each week so you can follow your credit and fix what’s dragging it down. Lodavo connects to the bank account you save in and gives you free tickets in a weekly draw for cash prizes. Different data, different job.

Neither one is a bank account, so neither one changes where your savings sit. What you’re choosing between is help with the borrowing or help with the saving.

Borrowell answers a question about the past. How have you handled credit, and what will a lender see? Lodavo is aimed at the next few months. What are you putting aside, and what do you get for it? People who need one of those answers often need the other at the same time.

How Borrowell works

Borrowell gives you your Equifax credit score and full credit report for free, updated weekly, with alerts when something on the file changes. Checking through Borrowell is a soft inquiry, so it doesn’t affect your score. It’s free because Borrowell earns a referral fee when one of its product recommendations leads somewhere.

What the free account covers

The free tier is what most people mean when they say Borrowell. You get your Equifax score and report (opens in a new tab) refreshed every week, calculated on the Equifax Risk Score 2.0 model, and Borrowell says over 4 million Canadians use it. Signing up needs neither a SIN nor a credit card. There’s an AI credit coach called Molly for questions, plus tips tied to whatever’s actually on your file. If you’ve never read your own credit report, this is a genuinely useful free thing to have.

The paid credit-building tools

Two add-ons cost money, and both are aimed at a thin or damaged file. Rent Advantage (opens in a new tab) reports your rent payments to Equifax without needing your landlord’s approval, at $10 a month, or $8 bundled with reporting past payments. Credit Builder (opens in a new tab) starts at $5 biweekly and opens a tradeline that reports to Equifax as a 48-month installment loan at 0% APR. It isn’t a cash loan. What you get for the money is the payment history. Prices are Borrowell’s own, as of August 2026.

How it stays free

Borrowell matches you with credit cards, loans and other products from more than 75 partners, and earns a fee when you take one out. That’s the normal model for a free credit-score app in Canada, and Borrowell discloses it. Worth knowing what a match is, though: a shortlist drawn from a paid partner panel, not neutral advice. The score and the report cost you nothing either way.

How Lodavo works

Lodavo is Canada’s first prize-linked savings app, and it’s free. Every $25 you keep saved earns you a free ticket in that week’s draw. There’s nothing to open and nothing to fund, because it runs on the account you already save in, at whichever Canadian bank that happens to be.

What earns you tickets

The link runs through Plaid (opens in a new tab), which reaches over 99% of Canadian deposit accounts (opens in a new tab), so whichever bank or credit union you use is almost certainly on the list. Your tickets then follow what you save, week to week. Only deposit accounts count, so a chequing account, a savings account, or a TFSA held as a deposit. You can link several. A self-directed investment account isn’t tracked yet.

The draw

There’s a draw every week, and the top prize is $10,000. Someone wins at least $100 in it regardless, so no week goes by without a payout. None of it costs money. The provably fair page shows how each draw is generated and verified, and the contest rules carry the odds and who’s eligible.

Does saving money improve your credit score?

No. Your savings balance isn’t on your credit report, so putting money aside won’t move your score on its own. A Canadian credit report is a record of borrowing: the cards, loans and lines of credit you hold, whether you pay them on time, collections, and which lenders have looked. Your chequing and savings balances aren’t in it.

The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (opens in a new tab) publishes the full contents, and it’s credit all the way down. That’s why Borrowell can’t tell you anything about your savings, and Lodavo can’t tell you anything about your score. We’ve covered the same boundary from the other direction in does gambling affect your credit score: what you spend doesn’t appear there either.

Saving does still matter to a lender, through a different document. A mortgage underwriter asks for bank statements, and a few honest months of a balance going up is exactly what they want to find on them. It just won’t show up in the number Borrowell gives you.

Can you use Lodavo and Borrowell together?

Yes, and there’s nothing to reconcile between them. Both are free, both work alongside whatever bank you use, and they connect to different places: Borrowell to your Equifax file, Lodavo to your deposit account. Neither one holds a dollar of your money, and both are free, so there’s no real reason to pick between them.

Say you’re a couple of years out from wanting a mortgage. Borrowell tells you where your score sits and what’s holding it back, which gives you time to fix it. Lodavo covers the other half of that application, the down payment, and gives you a reason to keep at it while the score recovers. Our guide to saving for a house down payment in Canada has the arithmetic on how long that takes.

That pairing is the common one, but it isn’t the only one. Newcomers building a first Canadian credit history and an emergency fund at the same time need both. So does anyone who’s just cleared a debt and is trying to turn the monthly payment into savings instead.

When Borrowell is the better choice

If what worries you is what a lender sees, Borrowell is the app and Lodavo has nothing to offer you. Pick Borrowell if:

• You’re applying for a mortgage, a car loan or a card in the next year and want to know your score before the lender does.
• You want to read your full report and check it for errors, which is the most useful thing most people never do.
• You want an alert when something changes on your file, which is how you catch fraud early.
• Your credit history is thin or damaged and you’d pay about $10 a month for rent reporting or a builder tradeline to fix it.
• You’re comparing cards or loans and want a shortlist matched to your profile rather than a generic best-of list.

Lodavo does none of that. It doesn’t read your credit file, doesn’t report anything to Equifax or TransUnion, and can’t tell you why your score dropped 20 points last month. Borrowell turns up again in our roundup of the best money apps in Canada, beside the other apps Canadians actually use.

When Lodavo is the better fit

Lodavo is the better fit when the hard part is putting the money aside in the first place. Pick Lodavo if:

• Even a small week of saving puts you in the draw, and the top prize is $10,000.
• You’d rather not switch banks or move money around. Lodavo works with virtually any Canadian bank or credit union you already use.
• You want it free, with no tier to upgrade to and no card to carry.
• Your credit is already fine, and the savings are the part that keeps stalling.
• You like that a winner is paid out every single week, and that how the draw runs is published rather than described.

Nobody has trouble understanding why saving is a good idea. The trouble is that nothing happens when you do it, week after week, until the number gets big enough to feel like something. A free ticket in Sunday’s draw means the week ends with something to check. Beside the accounts that do hold your money, best savings apps in Canada shows where Lodavo fits.

Check your score with one app, build the savings with the other. Lodavo is free on the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) or the Google Play Store (opens in a new tab), and every $25 you save earns a ticket in this week’s draw.

Terms and conditions apply. No purchase necessary (alternate method of entry available). Skill-testing question required. Open to legal residents of Canada who are the age of majority. Odds depend on the number of eligible entries received. Full rules and odds at our contest rules.