Kiplinger Readers' Choice Awards 2025: Peer-to-Peer Apps

a picture of Kiplinger Readers choice winners for peer-to-peer apps

(Image credit: Future)

published 27 May 2025

Contributions from
Lisa Gerstner

About the Kiplinger Readers’ Choice Awards 2025
The Kiplinger Readers’ Choice Awards aim to recognize and celebrate the best products and services in the personal finance arena. We asked you, our Kiplinger community, to help us name the products and services you think have delivered excellent value in the past year.

The survey results, which we’re sharing here in our second annual Readers’ Choice Awards, offer valuable insight into which providers shine when it comes to your everyday interactions and experiences with them. Our Awards recognize excellence in everything from credit cards, banks and brokers to insurers, tax software and financial apps. For each category, we’ve listed an overall winner that earned the highest score. We’ve also highlighted other products and services that earned above-average scores for various criteria we asked readers to assess.

By voting, our community has helped us form our guide to the very best financial products. These are the products and companies that you think stand out from the crowd.

Kiplinger Readers' Choice Awards: Peer-to-Peer Apps

Peer-to-peer payment apps allow you to digitally send and receive money with friends and family from your smartphone. We asked readers to evaluate their preferred payment app’s ease of use, their overall satisfaction with it and how likely they are to recommend it to others.

OVERALL WINNER: Apple Cash

Outstanding for:

Subscribe to Kiplinger’s Personal Finance

Be a smarter, better informed investor.

Save up to 74%

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/hwgJ7osrMtUWhk5koeVme7-200-80.png

Sign up for Kiplinger’s Free E-Newsletters

Profit and prosper with the best of expert advice on investing, taxes, retirement, personal finance and more - straight to your e-mail.

Profit and prosper with the best of expert advice - straight to your e-mail.

Ease of use
Most recommended
Overall satisfaction

Apple Cash topped the charts this year as readers’ favorite peer-to-peer payment tool, earning above-average scores for all three surveyed criteria. To use Apple Cash for a peer-to-peer payment, tap the Apple Pay icon in an iPhone’s Messages app, enter the amount, and authenticate using Face ID, Touch ID, or your passcode.

“Overall, my experience is positive,” says one reader. There are no fees for transferring money out of your Apple Cash balance if you select a standard transfer, which takes one to three days.

For an instant transfer, a 1.5% fee applies, with a minimum of 25 cents and there's a maximum charge of $15 per transaction.

Zelle

Outstanding for:

Ease of use
Most recommended
Overall satisfaction

Zelle also earned high marks all around. The service no longer has a standalone app, but if your financial institution offers Zelle, you can use it through your banking app to easily make transfers from one checking account to another.

“I prefer Zelle because it’s direct,” says one reader. “I love using Zelle,” says another. “Zelle is very straightforward and easy to use. Plus, it is really fast in sending and receiving funds.” Typically, Zelle transfers are instant and require no transfer fees.

Venmo

Outstanding for:

Most recommended

Readers who use Venmo noted its popularity among their friends and family members. The app has about 90 million users, according to parent company PayPal.

Venmo offers two options for transferring money from your Venmo balance to your bank account: instantly for a fee of 1.75% of the transfer amount (with a minimum of 25 cents and a maximum of $25), or a standard transfer, which comes with no fee but takes one to three business days.

Kiplinger Readers' Choice Awards 2025 Awards Categories

Emma Patch joined Kiplinger in 2020. She previously interned for Kiplinger's Retirement Report and before that, for a boutique investment firm in New York City. She served as editor-at-large and features editor for Middlebury College's student newspaper, The Campus. She specializes in travel, student debt and a number of other personal finance topics. Born in London, Emma grew up in Connecticut and now lives in Washington, D.C.

With contributions from