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Pick a Monero wallet

Every wallet trades off something. Mobile = convenient but always-online. Desktop = full-node-capable but tied to one machine. Hardware = cold storage but slow to spend. The right answer depends on whether you're buying $50 of XMR for a single use or sitting on a stake. Here's the decision tree.

Quick decision tree

  • Single-use, small amount? → Cake or Monerujo on mobile. Bootstraps in under a minute.
  • Daily driver, multi-account? → Feather on desktop. Has Tor built-in, PGP-signed releases.
  • Cold storage of larger stake? → Hardware wallet (Ledger Nano S+/X, Trezor Safe 5) + Monero GUI as the host. Sign offline.
  • Want a remote node so your wallet doesn't sync the whole chain? → Any of the above can point at a public remote node. See /nodes for vetted options.

What to actually look for

  • Open source. Source available + reproducible builds. The official Monero GUI/CLI is the gold standard.
  • Tor option built-in. Cake, Monerujo, and Feather all route to a remote node over Tor without you having to set up a SOCKS proxy.
  • Subaddress support. Modern wallets create a fresh subaddress per incoming transaction by default — keeps the public-facing receive address unlinkable across trades.
  • Multisig if you're holding for someone else. 2-of-3 between you / a trusted party / a recovery key keeps a single phone loss from being a single point of failure.

What to avoid

  • Custodial wallets. If a "wallet" is run by a third party (browser-only, web-app, no seed download), you don't own the keys.
  • Forks of Monero GUI without a real maintainer. If the last commit is 18 months ago, assume it's abandoned and won't get fork-protection updates.
  • Anything that asks for email or phone on first launch. XMR wallets need none of that.

A-grade picks

  • Cake Wallet → /wallets/cake-wallet

    Mobile-first, fastest setup. Built-in Tor, supports BTC/LTC/XMR in one shell.

  • Monerujo → /wallets/monerujo

    Android-only XMR wallet with PayJoin-style features.

  • Feather → /wallets/feather

    Desktop power-user wallet. Tor by default, PGP-signed releases.

  • Monero GUI → /wallets/monero-gui

    Official client — slowest to sync but the canonical reference.

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