If you have monthly housing payments, the Bilt Blue Card is likely the stronger long-term rewards card than the Capital One VentureOne Rewards Credit Card. However, if you don’t pay rent/mortgage or value simplicity, then the VentureOne could be an interesting card.

TLDR:

• The Bilt Blue can earn up to 1.25x points on rent and mortgage payments with no transaction fee

• Capital One VentureOne earns 1.25x miles on everything and offers a sizable welcome bonus

• Both cards transfer points to airline and hotel partners with no annual or foreign transaction fees.

• VentureOne includes a 0% intro APR for 15 months whereas the Bilt Blue has an intro APR of 10% for the first 12 billing cycles after account opening

Overview

The Bilt Blue card is particularly powerful because it unlocks rewards on your housing spend while earning 1x points on all purchases. For example, let’s say you have $1,000 in monthly rent while spending $600/mo on the card.

• If you elect to earn points via “Housing Only Rewards” you’ll earn a total of 750 points from your rent and 600 points from your spend for a total of 1,350 points

• If you elect to earn points via “Flexible Bilt Cash”, you’ll earn Bilt Cash at a rate of 4% per dollar spent outside of rent ($24 Bilt Cash). That Bilt Cash can then be turned into points when paying your monthly rent = 800 points. This makes for a total of 1,400 points

In effect, by spending $600 on the Bilt Blue, you can earn either 1,350 or 1,400 total points since you unlock points from your monthly housing by putting spend on the card. This effectively comes out to a rate of 2.25x or 2.33x points per dollar spent, respectively (which is incredible).

Alternatively, if you spend $600 on the VentureOne, you’d earn a total of 750 miles... and that’s it. Far less compared to the Bilt Blue since you can’t unlock housing payments without a transaction fee with the Capital One system.

Both cards also allow you to transfer points/miles to transfer partners. However, Bilt’s ecosystem is far stronger than Capital One’s, with top tier partners like Hyatt and Alaska Airlines.

However, the VentureOne wins out on simplicity:

• You earn 1.25x miles on everything

• 5x on hotels and rental cars booked through their travel portal

Plus it has a slightly larger bonus: if you spend $500 in the first 3 months, you earn 20,000 miles

For most people, the decision comes down to one question: do you have monthly housing or mortgage payments? If you do, the Bilt Blue card has astructural advantage that's hard to replicate.

FAQs

Do either of these cards offer a 0% intro APR?

The Capital One VentureOne offers a 0% intro APR on purchases for 15 months whereas the Bilt Blue only has an intro APR of 10% for the first 12 billing cycles after account opening.If you're planning a large purchase you'd like to pay off over time, that's a meaningful difference between the two.

Which card has better transfer partners for travel redemptions?

Bilt's transfer ecosystem absolutely destroys Capital One's.

As a proxy, Bilt almost has all of Capital One's transfer partners while having domestic US transfer partners like United, Alaska, and Southwest. On top of that, Bilt also has powerful partners like Japan Airlines (which Capital One has) and Hyatt.

Nevertheless, the strength of every program will depend on your use case of points. Generally speaking, Bilt crushes Capital One in transfer partners.

Which company has better customer service?

Capital One wins this without question. The way some people describe Bilt is that “when it works, it’s one of the best no annual fee cards out there; when it doesn’t, you might be in trouble.”

Bilt has had its fair share of issues since launching the new 2.0 cards in February.