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.