<prompt> Human: Ive had BBT for ever...It was and still is the only bank where I have a checking and savings account. I currently get .01 interest and its time I upgrade.So should I close my BBT accounts and move to Discover or Ally?  <response>: I personally use both Ally and Discover. Heres my opinion on the two:1 Ally is the better overall bank in my opinion due to having a larger mobile deposit limit 50Kday and 250Kmonth vs 10Kday and 25Kmonth. They also have a larger ACH transfer limit than Discover and dont put holds on your money at least they didnt put a hold when I transferred 50K into my Ally, yet Discover put a 5 or 10 day hold when I initially deposited 25K.In terms of features, both offer essentially the same thing as in both providing free savings and checking accounts, both limit overdrafts to one charge per day and their overdraft fees are either both 25 or ones 25 and the other is 30. Both can be setup with free overdraft protection where you can link your checking to savings and have money from the savings be pulled into checking--though be careful with this in case your debit card or account gets hacked as the hacker can pull money out of savings and defeat the purpose of having a limited balance in checking in case youre using that as a safety measure.Both also give literal free paper checks, though when I got my checks from Ally, they only gave me 20 whereas I got around 100 or 200 checks from Discover. When I went to order more from Ally, they only sent another 20 checks. Perhaps theyll give me more if I simply called and asked or if some arbitrary probation period passes, theyll automatically send more than 20 when requested online. In any case, its not a big deal but something to be aware of when switching in case you plan to make a lot of check payments relatively soon.In terms of interest, Ally currently only offers 1.45 interest in savings and either .10 or .60 interest in checking if you have under 15K or 15K and more. Whereas Discover offers 1.5 interest in savings though you can get 1.55 interest through the AAII enrollment link and no interest in checking. However, their checking does offer 1 cashback on up to 3000 in purchases per statement, though most basic cashback cards will offer at least 1 or more anyway. Though there is an instance if you pay your taxes with credit cards, where using Discovers debit card is more advantageous since you pay at least 1.87 fee if using credit, but only 2.59 if you use debit, so you can earn a bit of extra cashback during tax time.In terms of ATM availability, Ally offers a 10 ATM fee reimbursement per statement and lets you have free access to any All Point cash machine. Whereas Discover does not offer any ATM fee reimbursement, but allows access to both All Point and Money Pass machines, giving them effectively twice as many ATM and cash machines. My advice though is to visit each website and use their ATM locator as each persons situation is unique. Furthermore if you find you need to use a lot of ATMs, especially overseas, you may want to look into getting a Schwab checking account as they offer unlimited ATM fee reimbursements world wide and charge no foreign currency conversion fees, though theyll do a hard pull on your credit but there is a 100 new account promo floating online, plus theyll open a free brokerage account thats linked to your checking.In terms of support, Ive had good support with both Ally and Discover using their telephone and chat services. I even called Discover on New Years eve and got a human being who resolved quickly an issue I was having or rather she found out why I couldnt external link to a business checking account I had.Which brings me to the one major caveat of using Discover. With Discover, if you have any external bank accounts you want to link to it, you can only do it with accounts that have your name in them. As such I could not link my business checking account since it only has my fictitious name on the check. This was not a problem with Ally or Charles Schwab.In any case either bank is a fine choice, but if I had to choose only one, I prefer Ally as it was more flexible for my needs. Due to it allowing me to link accounts that dont have my name in them, plus the larger mobile deposit and ACH transfer limit, it also works as an ideal hub account which I then use to link all my other node accounts together. I like to setup ACH links in a hubnode configuration--like a computer network--where all my other financial accounts eg. 401K, IRA, secondary checkingsavings, etc are linked only with the hub account but not with each other. I setup the ACH links from the node side versus hub side so that in case any single account gets hacked, by limiting ACH access to only the hub account and not with each other, a hacker can only access whats in the hacked account and whats linked to it. And to limit loss from the hub account side, I get in the habit of keeping a small balance once Ive paid the bills and moved my money accordingly. I also used other bank accounts eg. Discover to store a portion of my emergency savings so that in case of a hack, I dont lose access to all my money in a single attack. That way I still have cash easily available to me to pay bills and stuff in case my other account is hacked and my money is in limbo while the bank does its fraud investigation.As for your existing BBT, if they dont charge any fees you may want to still keep them so you can still deposit cash or checks that exceed the mobile deposit limit. Othewise, if you wanted to deposit very large checks, you would need to physically mail them to either Ally or Discover and with large checks, I would worry about them getting lost in the mail and thus Id prefer to deposit them locally and then ACH transfer them once they cleared.As for cash, thats self explanatory but if you want an alterantive way to deposit cash without a local account, you can do so by using cash to buy money orders from the post office or Western Union or Money Gram which most drug and grocery stores offer. I believe the fee for 1000 ranges from .60 to 2 and you can then deposit the money order via mobile deposit.Otherwise if your BBT charges a fee or requires a high minimum balance, drop them and if you still need a local account, look into whatever local bank or credit union offers free checking or free checking with a low minimum balance. 