CrestCast vs Plum

Plum does not call itself one, and it has no feature it calls a budget. Its own description is that it connects to your bank account, analyses your transactions, works out each day what can be put aside without affecting your daily life, and moves that amount into your Plum account. That is an automated saver. A Spend Tracker sits beside it, sorting what you spent into categories and comparing this month with previous months. The forward-looking feature is Plum Plan, which takes a goal, in the page's own example the age you want to stop working, and puts a number and a timeline on it. On the test this site uses, what you spent versus what you can spend and still get where you are going, Plum is a spending tracker attached to a saver.

A spending tracker reads your bank feed and tells you where the money went: categories, this month against last, a report you look at after the fact. A budgeting app tells you what you can spend now without missing something later, which means it has to know what is coming: the fix ending in March, the car finance finishing in 2028, one salary dropping for a year. A budget is a plan for money you have not spent yet, so it cannot be built from money you already have. CrestCast builds that plan ten years out, day by day, and works back to this month. Plum reads what you spent and decides what to set aside from it.

No, and the reason follows from the split rather than excusing it. Plum needs a bank connection because everything it does starts from your transactions: it reads them to find what you can spare. CrestCast is not reading what you spent. The figures a forward budget runs on are not in a statement: the pay rise you have been promised, the nursery fees that start in September, the house you mean to buy in two years. So you type the plan, which takes an evening the first time, or hand it a CSV your bank exported and let it pick out the payments that repeat. No credential is shared, and the model holds exactly what you decided.

Everything on the saving and investing side. Plum connects to your accounts through Open Banking, calculates what you can spare and moves it for you, rounds purchases up to the nearest pound and saves the difference, runs weekly, payday and challenge deposits, categorises your spending into a tracker with month-on-month comparison, and lets you invest from the same app. Plum Plan projects an outcome against the age you want to stop working. CrestCast does none of that: it moves no money, holds no money, and does not do retirement planning. If the job is saving without having to think about it, Plum is the better choice.

Checked on 16/09/2026 against Plum's own subscriptions page: a UK user signing up now sees Basic free, then Plus at £3.99 a month, Boost at £7.99 and Max at £14.99, monthly only, with the first month of a paid tier free. Anyone who joined before 07/07/2025 stays on the four classic plans, Basic free, Pro £2.99, Ultra £4.99 and Premium £9.99, which Plum's help centre says it still offers. The Spend Tracker shows every category on Boost and Max and the top two on Basic and Plus, and four of the saving rules need a paid tier. CrestCast is £79.99 a year for the whole household, which works out at £6.67 a month: 30 days free, then 14 days after the first payment to change your mind, 44 days in all before any money is spent for good.

Yes, and they fit well: Plum to move the spare money into savings without deciding each time, CrestCast to decide how much spare there should be and where it goes once the current account has what it needs. Nothing needs integrating and no data passes between them. The forward budget improves the saver too, because a minimum to hold in the current account is exactly the figure Plum's algorithm is trying to guess.