The Best UPI Apps in India

The Bottom Line

After testing 19 major UPI apps, we recommend the Bajaj Finserv and Paytm apps. These two apps provide all the must-have features including a physical card and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) option, which can make them a comprehensive payment solution for you.

The Bajaj Finserv app offers the best combination of features and rewards among all the apps we tested while the Paytm UPI app offers the best terms for the BNPL service.

Both apps are used by millions of users and have among the highest scores in user reviews.

The Google Pay UPI app was a strong runner up for us with its clean and simple UI and a great autopay & subscription management feature that can save you a fair bit of time and money. However, it is missing some key features like the option to get a  physical card or use a BNPL service.

Everything we recommend

Who this is for

Nearly everyone uses an UPI app in India now and all the apps offer very similar basic functionality like P2P and bill payments with a very similar interface.

However the best UPI apps can save you hundreds or even thousands of rupees a year in rewards as well as provide additional convenience that saves you time.

Read on if those savings appeal to you.

How we selected

The NPCI website lists more than 30 UPI apps that are available in India. Of these, we shortlisted 18 for further testing, based on a number of factors such as number of users, user rating etc.

In this review we did not consider UPI apps from banks (e.g. SBI YONO) that require you to have an account with the bank since those apps are not available to every one. In general, though, we  found that the banks’ UPI apps had less features and lower user ratings than the independent apps we tested and picked.

Table 1: Banks’ UPI Apps are less popular

We also focused only on the experience for consumers with the UPI apps. Many of these apps also have features that would be useful for business owners. We did not consider those features when testing the apps.

We compared the shortlisted apps on a number of criteria including the quality of user interface, the availability of basic functionality like Peer-to-Peer (P2P) payments and bill payments, and convenient features like travel bookings, offering physical cards and BNPL, tracking savings and managing subscriptions.

We treated availability of basic functions like bill payment as critical factors and eliminated apps that did not offer this option (primarily WhatsApp). Factors like active userbase and user ratings were used largely to shortlist the apps but did not play a large role in our selection.

We slightly favoured apps that connect you to a broader ecosystem (e.g. Amazon, Google, PayTm) as that can provide convenience or additional rewards. However we did not feel that being part of such an ecosystem was making a huge difference to users today.

We found that all apps had nearly identical user interface for the core payments functionality. There were some small differences in the ease of use and speed but this ended up not impacting our selection much.

The major differences between the apps were in the additional functionality they offer and their rewards programs. Many apps bundle a very large number of features in to these apps but often that seems to be with the aim of cross-selling their other products and is not particularly useful for the users.

We have largely ignored these features in our evaluation e.g. credit card sign-up, some selected investment options etc.

We focused instead of features that we felt are actually useful to the customer in some way. For example, the ability to track and manage subscriptions (i.e. repetitive payments) in a convenient manner can save you the hassle of creating the payment every time. It can also help you identify subscriptions you are no longer using and save you some money.

Most of the major UPI apps offer a rewards program for using their apps to make payments. We looked at these programs in detail to estimate how much money you could save every month by using these apps.

We preferred apps that offered clear and regular rewards for a wide range of common transactions.

For instance the rewards offered by PayTm are chance based rather than certain, and we discounted those quite a bit. TataNeu offers a lot of rewards but only if you shop with Tata’s partners, which we felt would not be something that everyone would want to do. Again, we discounted these rewards heavily.

We preferred cash or cash-like rewards for common transactions like electricity bill payments. Because of the identical features and user interface on many top UPI apps, the rewards programs were one of the major criteria in our evaluation.

Table 2: Estimated Rewards offered by UPI Apps

(in ₹ per month)

Our Pick – Bajaj Finserv UPI App

The Bajaj Finserv UPI App offers the most full-featured UPI app. Apart from the basic P2P and bill payment functionality, you have the option of getting a physical card to make payments where UPI option is not available.

We also loved the integrated budgeting tool although it remains quite basic for now. You can also make all types of travel bookings (bus, train, flights) on the app, which can also be useful sometimes.

The app has a well integrated BNPL feature, if you need it in a pinch, although it only works if you are shopping on the app and with the partner merchants. Unlike PayTm, it also does not offer any interest free instalment option here and has a relatively low credit limit for these transactions.

As with many other UPI apps, the Bajaj UPI app also includes the option to invest your money in mutual funds, gold etc. The app also has some shopping options. However we did not give much weight to these two functions. This is because the options available on the app under those categories are relatively limited.

We did not feel these apps could become the primary platforms for either your investment or your shopping. You may occasionally find a good deal on these apps but otherwise there isn’t much there.

We also like the fact that the Bajaj app offered one of the better reward schemes for utility (electricity, gas, broadband, DTH) bill payments and mobile recharges. We estimate you could easily get ₹150 a month (₹25-50 per transaction) in cashback moving your bill payments to the app.

Utility bill payments are a core use for UPI apps but most other apps we tested usually had lower rewards for these payments.

The Bajaj UPI app also offers coupons, discount voucher and other promotions like many other apps, which may help you save more money. We did not feel that the Bajaj app was very different from others on this point though.

Our Pick: Paytm UPI App for best BNPL offering

The Paytm UPI App also offer nearly all the same features as the Bajaj UPI app – P2P and bill payments, physical card, travel bookings, and BNPL.

In fact, it has more customers, better customer reviews and user interface vs. the Bajaj app. It also stands out for offering up to ₹60,000 in BNPL limit and an interest free first month with Paytm Postpaid. This feature can be used on any platform, not just on the Paytm app, which is a plus.

However we did not like the more complex rewards scheme that Paytm offers although theoretically you could earn more rewards on Paytm than any other UPI app. Most of the rewards are awarded in the form of scratch cards rather than guaranteed cashback.

They also have a Cashback Point system but we found it rather hard to earn the points and did not find any attractive options available to redeem the points. If that is not a problem for you, Paytm may be a better UPI app for you than Bajaj.

Paytm has been trying to be a superapp for a lot longer than any other app in India. As a result it offers much more functionality, although again we are not sure that this additional functionality (e.g. shopping and investments) is good enough for most people to switch to the app.

Also Great: Google Pay

Google Pay is the most popular UPI app in India. While part of that is because it is installed by default on all android phones in India (which is a vast majority of all phones), the Google Pay app does do a good job of providing the core functionality of a UPI app – P2P and bill payments.

It also offers a few features that enhance the core payments functionality in a unique way and can really save you some money. We really loved the subscription management feature that simplifies the chore of handling repetitive payments.

It can also save you money over time by helping you keep track of all your subscriptions and making it easier to identify the ones you no longer use. The app also lets you track your spending from month to month, which is useful.

We felt Google Pay actually offered a better user experience than other apps because it does not try to do too much and instead focused on getting the basics right. This also makes the app easier for the less tech-savvy users. The app also integrates well with the rest of the Google ecosystem like YouTube, Google Play Store etc.

However, Google Pay was not our pick because it does not offer you the option of getting a physical card, does not have a BNPL service and had a relatively weaker reward program.

The Competition

A number of other UPI apps do a good job of providing the basic functionality and some of them stacked up well vs. our picks.

PhonePe UPI app is one of the most popular apps with more than 300 million downloads. However it was missing key features like the option to use a physical card or BNPL and also did not have useful functions like subscription management etc.

They also have a relatively weaker rewards program on our estimates. Despite its popularity we did not see a reason to prefer it over our picks.

Freecharge UPI app isn’t as popular as our picks but is one of the few apps to offer both a physical card and a BNPL option. Curiously it does not offer a travel booking option, which seems to be an easy add-on offered by many other players.

It’s a solid contender but we felt both our picks were just a little better on most criteria from user interface to total rewards.

Mobikwik UPI app is very popular but they don’t offer a physical card and are missing the budgeting / subscription management features that we liked with our picks. Mobikwik does have one of the better cashback programs among the apps we considered and their BNPL service also offers the maximum limit of ₹60,000 per customer.

Fave UPI app offers the best coupon program of any UPI app in our opinion. You can buy discounted gift cards of any value for major merchants like Zomato, Swiggy and BigBasket. Since there is no cap of the value of these gift cards, its possible to save a fair bit by using them. Overall, the app is missing some key features found in other UPI apps and is more useful as a coupon app than as an all-in-one payments interface.

BHIM UPI app offers all the basic functionality plus travel bookings. However, where it really shines is in supporting local languages in the interface. With its native support for 20 Indian languages, it may be the only viable option for the large portion of population that is not comfortable with English.

Others Some other UPI apps also have very smooth and simple UIs but we did not pick them due to different limitations. For example CRED is only available to people with high credit ratings while Slash and Slice UPI apps only offer the basic payments functionality.

However while these apps have relatively few users, those users seem to love the apps as all three score well on user reviews, especially CRED. Slash also has an easy way to split payments between a number of users and a subscription management system.