This week I learned of two new websites offering free credit reports or scores without making you sign up for a free trial, so I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to review everyone’s available options when it comes time to learn your credit rating. The three credit bureaus are Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.

As required by law, if you want to obtain a free copy of your credit report, you need to go to the official sponsored site, annualcreditreport.com. Users need to make sure they go to this official site, and not other sites that try to get you to sign up for credit monitoring or other programs just to see your reports and scores.

You are allowed to pull your report from each credit bureau once per year (not calendar year, actual year from your last free pull). Keep in mind you will only receive a free report and not your scores. If you wish to obtain scores, you can purchase them from the bureaus.

I personally recommend spacing out your free credit reports so you can monitor them all year. I typically try to space ours out every four months to make sure I keep tabs on our files all year long.

Keep in mind there are also other circumstances where you can get a free copy of your report such as if you were denied credit or other various issues.

Now lets say you have already exhausted your credit reports for the year, and do not want to pay each of the bureaus for the pleasure to see them again. There are a couple of options available from various third parties. CreditKarma, CreditSesame, and Quizzle.

I have been a member of CreditKarma for at least a year, and can speak of their site from first hand experience. After registering for the site, and verifying your identity, you will have access to your score all year long for FREE with nothing to sign up for or trial periods. The CreditKarma site utilizes the TransUnion system for calculating your score. You are allowed to update your score once per day if you wish, which can be a nice way to monitor how a change to your file will impact your score.

In exchange for your credit scores, CreditKarma, and the other two sites, use your credit profile to offer you products to help and reduce any debt you may have on file. They do all of this while still not performing a hard pull on your credit file; therefore, there should not be an impact to your credit scores by using these sites.

An example of the types of offers you may see include evaluating your mortgage, and searching for other products you may want to consider to lower your monthly payment. The sites only get paid IF you close on a loan or signup for an offer shown on their site. Meanwhile, they give you free access to your score, as well as offer you various explanations, graphs, and analysis for improving your credit score.

The two new sites I learned about this week were CreditSesame and Quizzle. CreditSesame and Quizzle both utilize your Experian credit file.

The CreditSesame site looks to be a little different than CreditKarma, in that they update your score once per month. Still for the average consumer, that should be more than adequate. CreditSesame also does not provide an actual credit report, only your score.

The Quizzle site (which is part of the Quicken’s Loan company) appears to be different than both the aforementioned sites. Quizzle will allow you two copies of your credit report each year (every six months) for free. Any additional requests will incur a $9 fee, which still is cheaper than purchasing them directly from the credit bureaus. The site will also give you access to your Quizzle score (again every six months), which is similar to the Experian calculation.

So while all three sites operate on different business models, they are quite similar at the same time. I have not had a chance yet to open up a CreditSesame or Quizzle account yet, but when I get credit curious in the future, I will likely utilize these great, free services.