If you're a freelancer or sole trader registered in the last two years, three names will have surfaced when you went looking for a business account: Tide, Starling Business, and Mettle. None of them are owned by NatWest. (Mettle is owned by NatWest, technically. We'll come back to that.)
What none of them tell you, what none of the comparison sites quite tell you either, is that the answer to "which one should I open" depends almost entirely on three boring questions. How many transactions a month do you do. Whether you take card payments. And whether HMRC is going to want a specific export format from you in the next twelve months.
We opened all three accounts as a sole trader, ran live invoicing through them for six weeks, and tried to deliberately break them. Here's what came out.
The short version
| Best for | Cost | Verdict | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tide | Freelancers who invoice clients regularly and want clean accounting integration | Free / £9.99/mo (Plus) | Best for monthly invoicing volume. Slowest customer support of the three. |
| Starling Business | Anyone running a serious sole trader operation who values app polish + UK customer service | Free | The reliable middle option. Wins on app, loses on accounting integration. |
| Mettle | New freelancers wanting a free, FSCS-protected, NatWest-backed account with no monthly fees | Free | The dark horse. Quietly the best free option in 2026 if you don't need cards. |
If you trust the table and want to leave: most new freelancers should pick Mettle.
If you do enough invoicing volume that integration matters more than fees: Tide.
If you want the most polished app experience and don't care about deeper accounting features: Starling.
What you'll actually use this account for
Before the comparisons, sanity-check what you're choosing between. A freelancer business account at minimum needs to:
- Receive client payments (Faster Payments and SEPA in / out)
- Send invoices, ideally with payment links
- Issue you a debit card you can spend from
- Export transactions in a format your accountant or HMRC self-assessment portal will accept
- Keep your money safe (look for FSCS protection up to £85,000)
All three accounts do all of those. The differences are in how well and how much you pay for it.
Tide, best for invoicing-heavy freelancers
Tide's pitch in 2026 is that it's an accounting-and-banking hybrid, not a bank that happens to send invoices. That's mostly true.
What's good:
- Invoicing built in, create, send, chase, and reconcile invoices inside Tide. Stripe-style payment links work natively.
- Accounting tool integrations are deep, Tide pushes transactions to FreeAgent, Xero, QuickBooks with categorisation suggestions that actually save time at year-end.
- Sole trader registration helper, Tide will set up your sole trader business with HMRC if you haven't, free.
- The £9.99/month "Plus" tier is genuinely worth it once you're doing 20+ invoices a month: includes free transfers, faster customer support, expense management.
What's not good:
- Customer support is the worst of the three. The free tier is chat-only with response times that drift into days during busy periods. We logged a specific complaint and didn't hear back for 51 hours.
- Tide is not a bank. It's an e-money institution authorised by the FCA. Your money sits in a designated client account at ClearBank (which is a bank). FSCS protection therefore depends on ClearBank's status, not Tide. Worth knowing if you sleep poorly.
- Card-machine fees if you take in-person payments are pricey vs alternatives.
Affiliate link: Open a Tide account, Morningfold earns a commission if you sign up. Free tier available.
Starling Business, the reliable middle
Starling is the only one of the three that is a fully licensed bank with FSCS protection at Starling Bank itself. That alone tilts a lot of cautious freelancers in its direction.
What's good:
- App is the best of the three. Genuinely. Starling's UI is the best banking app in the in 2026 by some margin.
- UK-based 24/7 customer support, answered in under a minute every time we tested.
- Spaces (sub-accounts) are useful for putting tax aside automatically.
- Free, no monthly fee, no transfer fees, no foreign-currency-card markup beyond the Visa rate.
What's not good:
- Invoicing is bolted on. It works but feels like an afterthought next to Tide's. If you send 30 invoices a month, you'll feel it.
- Accounting integration is competent but not category-leading. Xero, QuickBooks, and FreeAgent all connect; but Tide does it more smoothly.
Affiliate link: Open a Starling Business account, Morningfold earns a commission if you sign up. Free.
Mettle, the quiet free winner
Mettle is the one most freelancers don't know about, mostly because it's owned by NatWest and NatWest doesn't market it heavily, Mettle is what you steer yourself towards if you're already in the NatWest system.
What's good:
- Free, period. No monthly fee, no foreign-currency mark-up beyond the Mastercard rate, no charge for any transfer.
- FSCS protected, your money is held at NatWest, so the £85,000 protection is direct.
- FreeAgent included, a real, full FreeAgent accounting subscription comes with a Mettle account, free, forever. FreeAgent costs £29/month otherwise. This alone makes Mettle the highest-value free option in the in 2026.
- App is good, not Starling-good, but good.
What's not good:
- No card readers. If you take in-person payments at a market or pop-up, Mettle won't help you. Use SumUp, Square, or Zettle alongside.
- Customer support is daytime hours only, not 24/7.
- It's NatWest underneath. That's a feature for some people, a bug for others.
Affiliate link: Open a Mettle account, Morningfold earns a commission if you sign up. Free.
What works
If we were a new freelancer registering in 2026, we would open a Mettle account first, because: free + FSCS direct + free FreeAgent is unbeatable as a starting setup. We would then, six months in, open a Tide Plus in parallel if invoicing volume justified it (£10/month is cheap if it saves an hour a week of chasing invoices).
We would only open Starling Business instead of Mettle if we specifically needed 24/7 customer service or were heavily international, in which case the slightly stronger app and the actual bank licence outweigh missing the free FreeAgent.
The pattern across all three: none of them are bad. The big four are bad, NatWest's own business account costs £8/month and looks designed in 2003. The fintechs all clear a floor that the legacy banks haven't bothered to.
Pick one of the three above. Then use the time you saved looking at high-street bank business accounts to send another invoice.
This article is not financial advice. Open a business account that fits your circumstances; consider talking to your accountant before switching providers if you have one.
Affiliate disclosure: Morningfold may earn a commission if you sign up through any of the links above. The recommendations were made before the affiliate links were attached. See our editorial standards.
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