Because its free...

My Credit Sesame sore last month was 804. This month, it is 791. Two lenders pulled my credit for mortgage refi's and my Experian score was 788 a week ago. I expected that my Credit Sesame (Experian) score is pretty close since I had two extra inquiries last month.

Since we normally can't get Experian FICO's as a consumer, that is the main reason I go with Credit Sesame. And it is free. Credit Sesame is close enough in accuracy. Since there are so many flavors of FICO's (mortgage enhanced, auto enhanced, credit card enhanced, etc), I consider Credit Sesame close enough.

My Credit Karma is low compared to real FICO's. Maybe 20-30 pts low. Still, I factor that in when I pull Credit Karma. And that is free too.

IMO Sesame is a bit more realistic than Karma. I've had both for a few years and Karma just seems to have these massive swings in my score(both positive and negative) for no real reason. Karma seems to more accurately track the movement in my score with my actual pulls. Nonetheless I figure I will continue to use whatever tools are available to me but not put 100% of my faith in them.

+1 They should only be used a a general number. If something looks out of line pay and get a Credit Report.

I can't seem to find my pulls on Credit Sesame, or this option does not exist on CS?

Me Experian score is about 20 points lower than the score posted on Credit Sesame.

Has anyone received their July update?? Or is my account the only one stuck in a black hole with no update since June 4 :( I've emailed CS twice and still nothing has been fixed.

Yeah, i got my update on the 2nd as always. But CS has been known to be glitchy. There is no way to see pulls on CS, right? They make you buy it?

My FICO score falls in between my Credit Karma and Credit Sesame scores

With CS being the highest one, right?

Exactly. They don't show hard inquiries or really much of any detail about your credit report.

Other thoughts: Credit Sesame can be wildly inaccurate on revolving credit payments...often continuing to show monthly payments on cards updated with zero balances for a 2-3 months or so. The interest rates default to 30%, since they don't pick up that info from Experian, and which also conveniently gives them the opportunity to pitch credit card sign up links for balance transfers and such to "help" your credit. Nice try, anyway. :)

Other thing glitchy is the revolving credit usage. If I don't have a balance report on at least one credit card account, CS gives me a negative notation under credit analysis and says I have no "open credit accounts." Very odd.

The CS/Experian scoring model is reasonably close to tracking FICO. My spouse and I have both stay in the 810-840 range and have hit a score of 840, which they've said is the official max score on the scoring model they use. We also stay in the 810-850 range on FICO, depending on the scoring model (FICO 98, 04, or 08) and how many new credit accounts showing in the most recent 6 months.

Speaking of FICO 08, I think it has become ridiculously easy to hit 850 now, thanks to how lenient the scoring model is, especially on new accounts. It's now almost as easy as hitting 990 on the Vantage Score 2.0 (which is ridiculously easy). Basically, with roughly 19 years account history, 6+ years average age of accounts, and no new accounts or new inquiries in the past year, you can score a perfect FICO 08 850. I've seen several instances of this the past few months, whereas in prior generic FICO models, you never say a perfect 850 score, which supposedly wasn't even possible to reach on the generic FICO models (instead topping out at 818, 839, 844 on FICO 04 for EQ/TU/EX respectively). And virtually no one ever hit those max scores either.

My actual Fico score is lower than my CK and CS score.. CK fluctuates every time I sneeze.. CS doesn't move that much.. it took forever to start generating a score for me..

I find both CK and CS to be great ways to see credit activity, regardless of what scores they come up with.