Comparing the Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card vs the Capital One Spark Cash Select

There’s a lot of business credit cards out there. Speaking from experience, some are more difficult than others to handle.

If you’re trying to not spend too much time thinking about what card to use on your day-to-day spend and want to avoid an annual fee, there’s generally two standout options: Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card and the Capital One Spark Cash Select.

Both cards have two very important characteristics:

• They have no annual fee
• They earn a flat 1.5% per $1 on all purchases regardless of the spending category

These are great cards for small business owners because of their simplicity. However, the natural question arises: how do they compare and is there a definitive winner between the two?

What Is The Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card?

This was one of my first business credit cards and for good reason: it’s a no annual fee credit card with an easy to use earning structure and bonus:

• Earn $750 bonus cash back after you spend $6,000 on purchases in the first 3 months
• Earn 1.5% cash back on all purchases
• 0% introductory APR for 12 months on purchases

This is such a great business card because it’s a pretty no-brainer to have. With a 0% introductory APR, you can save a lot on interest payments.

Not to mention the 1.5% cashback is earned on all purchases. So you can use it at office stories, Costco, In-n-out, etc and get rewards for all your spend. That’s not to say that this is the best return you can get, but it’s certainly the simplest.

One of the important things about the Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card is that opening it does not count against your 5/24. Business cards like the Unlimited only show up on your personal credit report if you are extremely delinquent on payments.

What is the Capital One Spark Cash Select?

The Capital One Spark Cash Select is essentially Capital One’s equivalent of the Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card. In essence, it has very similar core features:

• Earn a one-time $500 cash bonus once you spend $4,500 on purchases within the first 3 months
• Earn unlimited 1.5% cash back for your business on every purchase
• Plus, earn unlimited 5% cash back on hotels and rental cars booked through Capital One travel

One of the more unfortunate things about this card is that it does report to personal credit bureaus, so opening a business card here will actually impact your 5/24 count.

How Can You Turn Cashback Earnings To Points/Miles?

A powerful feature of both cards is the ability to turn their cashback earnings into points/miles.

Chase Ultimate Rewards®

For example, with the Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card, the cashback you earn is accumulated as Chase Ultimate Rewards® points. Every $1 in cashback is equal to 100 points. And with the right credit card pairings, you can transfer those points to Chase’s awesome transfer partners.

I have the Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card alongside a Chase Sapphire Reserve®. This combination allows me to convert the cashback I earn on this card into Chase points, which then means I can transfer them to valuable transfer partners. Here are some of my favorite Chase transfer partners:

• World of Hyatt: You can essentially net a 1.5–2 cent per point (CPP) valuation here. Some of my favorite bookings have been the Grand Hyatt Fukuoka, which only cost 12,000 points per night (vs $300/night) and being one of my historic favorite ever hotel stays
• United Airlines: While United has a lower general CPP of ~1.3, it’s still really useful to have a solid domestic airline in your back pocket. You can score some really high value last minute flight redemptions with United
• Aeroplan: I love transferring my Chase points to Aeroplan because of the types of redemptions you can get. I’ve used the Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card cashback to book a business class flight from San Francisco to Singapore for just 87,500 points (equivalent to $875 in cashback)—this type of flight typically goes for $5,000+ one way

If you have a Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card, Chase Sapphire Reserve®, or Ink Business Preferred® Credit Card, you can turn your cashback into transferable points to score some high value redemptions.

Capital One Miles

To turn the cashback you’ve earned into miles, you need to simultaneously hold one of the following cards:

• Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card
• Capital One Venture X Business
• Capital One Venture Rewards
• Capital One VentureOne
• Capital One Spark Miles For Business

With either one of these cards in hand, you can now convert your cashback to miles by logging into your Capital One account and navigating to the “View Rewards” section near your card name in the top left corner of the card account screen.

You can then go to the Move Rewards section and shift your cashback around.

It usually makes far more sense to convert your cashback into miles because you can do a lot more with miles. Unfortunately, Capital One miles can be a bit harder to use for the uninitiated: the big downside is that Capital One doesn’t have any major US airline transfer partners, so a lot of the high value redemptions have to be scored via partner airlines.

Here are my favorite Capital One transfer partners:

• Air Canada Aeroplan: similar to Chase, Aeroplan is one of the highest value transfer partners around. They boast an extremely strong transfer program, with excellent redemption rates for business class seats on top airlines. We’re using Capital One miles to book a 2 cents per point economy seat for a short haul flight in China—7,500 miles via Aeroplan instead of paying $200
• Cathay Pacific Asia Miles: although availability for Cathay’s top seats via partner redemptions has mostly disappeared, there’s actually a surprisingly high amount of business/first class availability when booking direct with Cathay. My friends booked Cathay business from Hong Kong all the way to Boston for right around 100,000 Capital One miles, which is simply an incredible redemption

While Capital One doesn’t have the strongest domestic transfer partners, there’s still quite a bit you can do with your miles.

Which Card Is Better? The Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card Or The Capital One Spark Cash Select?

I think the Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card is definitively the better card.

If we remove the 1.5% cashback on all purchases out of the equation (both cards have this), the Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card shines immediately for two big reasons:

• A 0% introductory APR for 12 months, meaning you can carry a balance (make sure you pay the minimum balance) without needing to pay it off immediately and thus can accumulate some interest. For example, with a $5,000 credit limit and a 4% HYSA, if you choose to max out your credit limit and leverage the 0% introductory APR for 12 months, you’ll earn $200 in no frills interest. Not bad.
• The welcome bonus is larger. Sure, you might need to spend $1,500 more in the first 3 months compared to the Capital One Spark Cash Select, but who doesn’t like a larger new cardmember offer?

You might counterpoint that travel booked via the Capital One Spark Cash Select earns 5% via the Capital One travel portal. I don’t think that’s super relevant nor powerful because the Select doesn’t carry very strong travel insurance—I’d rather use a card specialized for travel here. I’m also not a big fan of booking via travel portals as it is.

If we get further into the weeds, one of the biggest things that stands out to me is that Chase’s points/transfer program is significantly more “beginner friendly.” Why? They have access to:

• Hyatt
• United Airlines
• Southwest

With these three programs, you can generally lock in 1.2–1.5 cents per point pretty easily, meaning your Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card is in theory earning around 2% or higher cashback on your day to day spend.

However, Capital One’s program is nowhere near as easy to use because of the lack of domestic transfer partners. For someone like me, I view both programs as somewhat equal since I feel very comfortable with more complex partner redemptions. But, Chase’s Hyatt partnership is incredibly powerful and needs to be considered here.

Thus, the Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card wins pretty strongly against the Capital One Spark Cash Select and is part of the reason why I have the Unlimited in my wallet. Not to mention that the Capital One Spark Cash Select counts against your 5/24 status, which is a pretty significant boon for a business card.

The math is pretty clear and simple on why the Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card wins out here: it just provides a lot more value up front than the Capital One Spark Cash Select and has a longer tail of value with its more beginner friendly Chase transfer program.

So, Should You Get An Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card?

If you value simplicity in your business spend and want a high value card that can give you access to one of the best transferable points programs out there, then the Ink Business Unlimited® Credit Card is most certainly the right card for you.

Again, that cashback you earn can eventually be converted into true transferable points with the right partner card. In my eyes, I view that $750 in cashback as basically 75,000 points, which are worth a lot to me. For Hyatt, you can easily get more than $1,000+ in value from simple hotel redemptions.

The Unlimited feels like a no brainer, especially compared to some of the other $0 annual fee business cards in the market offering a flat cashback earn rate.