Best investment platforms (UK)

More info on our categories

Advanced

These are suited to experienced investors and traders. They’ve got all the bells and whistles when it comes to regular trading with a trading experience to enhance and support a range of trading styles. They also come with low fees and a wide range of investment options.

Beginner

These investment platforms are suited to those new to investing, but still want to manage their own investments, rather than leaving it to the experts. The platforms are easy to use, have low minimum deposits and great resources to learn.

Managed by experts

These platforms are ideal for those who want hands-off investing, and simply leaving it to the experts who know what they’re doing. You might be new to investing, or highly experienced but not want to manage your own investments.

Stocks & Shares ISA

These are investment platforms where you can invest tax-free within a Stocks and Shares ISA – that’s where you can invest up to £20,000 per tax year (April 6th to April 5th the following year), and every you make is tax-free. More info on Stocks and Shares ISAs below.

Pension

This are platforms with a self-invested personal pension (SIPP), where you can make your own investment decisions within a pension account – benefiting from tax-free contributions, and no tax to pay as your money grows. More info on pensions below.

Lifetime ISA

These are platforms with a Lifetime ISA (LISA), which is an account to help you save for your first home, or later in life. You’ll get a 25% bonus from the government on your contributions, and all your gains will be tax-free. More info on LISAs below.

GIA

These platforms are ideal for those wanting a no-frills investment and trading account (no tax-free benefits), often called a General Investment Account, or GIA. There’s no limit to how much you can invest and trade, and are a popular option to invest alongside an ISA, or by itself.

ETFs

These platforms are some of the best to invest in exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which are groups of investments managed by experts, making investing easier and cheaper, and super popular worldwide. The platforms have low fees and a wide range of ETF options.

Mobile app

These platforms have great mobile apps for trading on the go, or even at home. They have a wide range of features, are easy to use, and provide all the same investment options, low fees and benefits as trading on the web or computer. 

To determine the best investment platforms, here’s our key criteria:

• Platform experience
• Range of investments
• Fees
• Customer service
• Track record and reliability
• Customer reviews

There’s a lot of investment platforms out there, trust us, we’ve tried a lot! But we’re only showing you the best – ones were happy to recommend, and use ourselves here at Nuts About Money.

By the way, we’ve also reviewed the best investment apps and the best trading platforms if you’re interested. And the best crypto exchanges (UK) for crypto.

What’s an investment platform?

Not quite sure what an investment platform is? No problem It’s simply a website, or an app on your phone where you can buy and sell investments.

These investments are often company shares (often also called stocks), which means you own a tiny portion of a company. And also funds (the most common type is exchange-traded funds, or ETFs), which are groups of shares from different companies pooled together.

Funds are great because you don’t have to buy the shares of every individual company that suits the investment you want, you can just buy a share of the fund.

For instance, if you just wanted to invest in green energy companies, you could find an ETF that has pooled together businesses in the green energy industry. Or, if you want to buy the biggest companies in the UK, you could buy something called an index fund – here’s how to invest in index funds (UK).

Our criteria for reviewing investment platforms

Investment platforms vary quite wildy, and all have different fees, and different range of investment options, and even different types of account options (such as offering a Stocks & Shares ISA – where all your gains are tax-free).

We’ve researched them all for you, and put together the best investment platforms above, so you don’t need to. And all of our criteria to determine the best is above too!

Interested in learning more? Here’s our full review methodology and how we test.

By the way, you don’t just have to use one investment platform – you can use as many as you like! You could have a Stocks & Shares ISA with an expert-managed platform, and a General Investment Account (GIA) with a self-managed platform to make your own investments (a GIA is just your standard account with no tax benefits).

What’s the best investment platform for investing?

Well, that depends on what you mean by investing. Investing has 2 main categories, long-term investing (where you buy and hold onto investments for a very long time, often decades), and stock trading (where you buy and sell frequently, sometimes days, sometimes months).

And within those categories you can have expert-managed investment platforms and self-managed investment platforms.

Expert-managed platforms

With expert-managed platforms, you simply sign up, add cash, select which investment option you’d like, which can be something like an ethical ISA option, or a regular investment option, and decide the level of risk you’re comfortable with, from low to high – which means how much you are willing to well, risk, for more money in the future.

From there, the experts take care of everything. You just put your feet up and watch your money grow over the long-term.

Self-managed platforms

With self-managed platforms, it’s up to you to decide what your investments are, which stocks and shares you want to buy (small ownership stakes of companies), or which investment funds (called ETFs) you want to buy (groups of different company shares). So you need to know what you’re doing!

We don’t recommend self-managed platforms for just anyone, you’ll need at least some knowledge in investing, and the confidence to make decisions yourself. 

Often, you would start with an expert-managed platform and then add on a self-managed platform to make your investment strategy a bit more personalised, such as adding specific stocks and shares that you think are good investments.

What’s the best robo-investing platform?

A robo-investor, robo-advisor, or robo-investment platform, simply means an investment app or platform that's managed by expert investors, but uses technology to help you access investments, there’s not actually any robots! 

There’s actually people behind the scenes looking after your money, and they’re experts at it too. It’s just the same as what we call expert-managed investment platforms.

The ‘robo’ part comes from the fact the platform uses technology to manage your investments, such as an app to track how your investments are performing, or selecting which investment strategy you’d like, such as ethical investments only.

What’s the best investment platform for a beginner?

Ready to get stuck into investing but not quite sure where to start? The best investing platform to start with is an expert-managed platform – that’s one where the experts are actually making the investments for you, they’ll aim to grow your money safely over a long period of time.

Once you’re comfortable investing your money, you could branch out a bit to self-managed platforms, and begin buying stocks & shares, and funds that suit your investment style and investment goals (which is often just long term investing or short term profit).

If you’re looking to learn more about investing, here’s our guide to investing for beginners (UK).

What’s the best investment platform for experienced investors?

If you’re a bit more experienced, you’ll probably be looking to make your own investments and build your own investment portfolio, rather than have an expert manage them for you. Although we still recommend letting the experts handle most of your investments – they’re good at it.

Your best option is to use a DIY investment platform alongside an expert-managed platform, or by itself. The best ones are in our tables above. You’re looking for a platform with a wide range of investment options, including stocks and shares and investment funds, and of course low fees. And the investment accounts to suit you (often a Stocks & Shares ISA and personal pension).

What’s the best platform for dividend investing?

More interested in generating an income than increasing your wealth? Well, dividends do just that. They give the owners of companies (the shareholders) a share of the profits (if they decide to pay out to shareholders). And this is sometimes called dividend investing.

Dividends are normally paid every 3 months, but it’s entirely up to the company and can be every 6 months or once a year. Or, they can decide not to pay any dividends for a while – it all depends on how well the company is performing in terms of generating a profit.

The best platform to purchase companies or funds that focus on dividends is actually a self-managed investment platform – where you decide which investments to make, and so you can choose investments that pay a dividend.

What’s a Stocks & Shares ISA?

A Stocks and Shares ISA (individual savings account), is an account most investment platforms offer, where you can invest up to £20,000 per year (called your ISA allowance), and everything you make within that account is completely tax-free, forever! 

The tax you would have normally paid is Capital Gains Tax – and you’d pay it if you made a profit of over £3,000 per year from all of your investments outside of a Stocks & Shares ISA. 

You should expect to pay tax at a rate of 10% Capital Gains Tax if you’re a basic rate taxpayer (20% tax on your income, and earning less than £50,270), and 20% Capital Gains Tax, if you’re a higher rate (40%) or additional rate (45%) taxpayer (earning over £50,270 per year).

What’s an investment portfolio?

An investment portfolio is simply all of your money in investments. So, that’s all your stocks and shares and all your investments in funds – you could even include property investments if you like too.

Sometimes an investment platform will call the money you have on their platform your portfolio, but really you should think of all your investments in general, wherever they might be across different online trading platforms.

What’s the difference between investing and trading?

Investing is generally thought of over a much longer timeframe, potentially decades. You typically invest in an asset (normally a business), which you think will grow in value over time, not necessarily grow in value tomorrow or over the next few weeks (in fact it may even go down in value in the short term).

Although they are often used interchangeably, trading is where you have a much shorter time frame, and will buy an asset (again such as shares), but intend to sell them as soon as the price hits your price target – which can be just a few minutes later, or it could be days or weeks, but you’re not typically holding them for years. You’d also normally have a price in mind where you’d get out of the trade if the price goes against you (called a stop-loss).

And with trading, you can also be the price goes down (short), if you’re using an online trading platform, that is. With investing you are typically just anticipating the price will rise in value over time.

With trading you might generally use a general investment account, and with investing, you might have the majority of your investments inside a Stocks & Share ISA.

And then one last thing, you’ll probably be buying more exchange-traded funds (ETFs) with your investment account, and specific stocks with your trading account (as stock prices are more volatile and have bigger potential for price changes).

What’s a stock market?

A stock market is where investments are bought and sold – investments such as shares in companies (often called stocks), and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). And sometimes some other types of investments.

There’s typically one or a few of them in each country, so in the UK, we have the London Stock Exchange (LSE), and in the US, they have the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations), plus some smaller local ones.

The Japanese stock exchange (or stock market) is quite famous too, called The Tokyo Stock Exchange.

You don’t necessarily need to worry about these exchanges, trading platforms will connect to the exchanges and make transactions for you, they are effectively a stock broker, and act on behalf of all their clients. All you need to do is decide which trades you want to make!

What can I invest in?

Investing comes in many forms, but the most common ways are to buy a portion of a company directly (shares), lend your money to a company or the Government (bonds), or put your money into a fund that would buy shares and bonds itself (most common).

Stocks & shares

You can get involved in a business's growth and success by buying part of the business itself, called a share. These shares are traded all over the world on stock exchanges, and their value will go up and down depending on the performance of the company. Some large companies will also pay out part of the company's profits to all those who hold shares (shareholders), which are called dividends.

Bonds

You can effectively loan your money to a company or government and receive interest payments on the amount loaned. You do this by buying bonds. The bond will also have a date they mature, which is when the loan amount will be repaid. Not all companies issue bonds.

Funds

Funds are groups of investments, such as shares and bonds, and you buy a share of the fund itself. They can be managed by a person, known as a fund manager, or track selected companies, such as the biggest 100 companies in the UK (FTSE100). 

Most popular funds trade on stock exchanges, known as Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs), just like company shares, and can be bought and sold whenever you like.

What’s ethical investing?

Ethical investing is where you invest in (buy shares, or buy funds), companies that have a positive impact on the world, or at least don’t harm the world – and by that we mean the environment and the people in it.

So, it’s businesses in industries like green energy and electric vehicles, or companies that aren’t destroying the world such as those burning fossil fuels or destroying the Amazon rainforest.

There’s a framework to determine if a company is ethical or not, called ESG, which is:

Environmental: combating pollution, climate change, water usage, and deforestation. ‍

Social: great treatment of employees, good health and safety, diversity, and helping local communities.‍

Governance: corruption, inequality and bribery – and steps that are taken to avoid this.

It’s really easy to invest ethically, good expert-managed platforms will offer you this choice when you sign up. Learn even more about ethical investing with our guide to ethical ISAs.

What’s the Financial Services Compensation Scheme?

The Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) is effectively insurance for you, should anything go wrong with the company holding your cash.

It’s completely free, and you don’t need to sign up to anything, it’s set up by the government to protect customers not just on UK trading platforms, but with any financial institution holding customers money – even things like mortgages.

As long as the company has been approved and is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), then you’d normally be covered.

You’re covered up to £85,000 per company, and basically if the company goes out of business and doesn’t give you your money back, the FSCS will.

What are trading fees and account fees?

Unfortunately, investing isn’t free. It comes at a cost – there’s a lot of things going on behind the scenes for platforms in the UK to make trades for you.

However, that doesn’t mean it’s super expensive. It used to be, when it was all face-to-face or over the phone with a stock broker. But now using an online trading platform makes it much cheaper.

In fact, more modern trading apps are commission-free. That means you don’t pay any trading fees to buy or sell investments, you’ll just be paying a fee for your account – and sometimes not even that.

And because it’s now cheaper for an online trading platform to make transactions for their clients, there doesn’t tend to be any minimum investment fees (or minimum deposit), or any withdrawal fees. Result! You can trade online with as little as £1 on some trading apps if you want to.

Let’s quickly go back to account fees, these are sometimes called platform fees, and they’ll either be a fixed monthly fee (such as £9.99 per month), and you can then make trades sometimes with a fee and sometimes without, depending on the platform. Or, there'll be an annual fee based on the amount of investments within your account, which can range from 0% to 1%.

It really depends on if you want to trade or invest, and generally if you’re investing then you’ll pay a percentage of your investments, and trading you’ll pay trading fees plus an account fee.

Share dealing fees

The trading fee we mentioned is often called a share dealing fee. And this is simply the fee to buy and sell stocks and shares, and is charged per transaction. It can range from free (with commission-free platforms) to as much as £11.95 with more traditional stock brokers such as Hargreaves Lansdown.

Currency conversion fees

A currency conversion fee, or currency exchange fee, is often how free investment platforms make their money. Although every investment platform will charge them.

It’s a fee to buy stocks and shares in a different currency to yours (so Pounds, GBP). For instance, if you want to buy US stocks, they’re in US Dollars, and so in order to buy them, the stock broker needs to convert your Pounds into Dollars, and in doing so, they’ll charge a fee.

Types of investing accounts

General Investment Account (GIA)

This is your standard investing account, available with every investment app or platform out there. 

They’re great alongside an ISA (for tax-free saving and investing), or just by themselves, depending on your investing strategy.

There’s no limits on how much you can invest, and you can have as many accounts as you like with lots of different investment platforms.

Whatever you make in profit is taxable, and you might have to pay Capital Gains Tax on it. But don’t let that put you off, remember you’re only taxed on your profits!

Not everything you make is taxable either, you’ve got an allowance of £3,000 of profit before you have to pay any tax. That’s in total across all your investments.

And you’ll only pay tax if you have ‘realised’ profits, which is selling investments back to Pounds (GBP) within the tax year (April 6th to April 5th the following year).

The tax rate you’ll pay will depend on how much income you make per year, such as the salary from your job. If you earn less than £50,270, and your profits would still keep you under that amount, expect to pay 10% Capital Gains Tax. Anything above £50,270, expect to pay 20% Capital Gains Tax.

Stocks & Shares ISAs

A Stocks & Shares ISA (Individual Savings Account), is an account where you can invest up to a massive £20,000 per tax year (April 6th to April 5th the following year), and everything you make within the account is completely tax-free!

You can have as many Stocks and Shares ISAs as you like, and Cash ISAs (for saving cash), as long as you don’t add more than £20,000 per year in total across all of your accounts.

There’s also different types of Stocks & Shares ISAs:

Stocks & Shares Lifetime ISA

If you're saving for your first home, you can invest up to £4,000 per year and get a 25% bonus from the government on what you put in! However, you must be under 40 to open one, and you can only use it for your first home – if you don’t, you’ll have to wait until your 60 to access the money. Learn more with our Lifetime ISA guide.

Stocks & Shares Junior ISA

If you’ve got kids, you can save up to £9,000 per year for each child, all in their name, so it doesn’t affect your own £20,000 allowance. And they’ll get access to the money when they’re 18. A great idea to save for their future. Learn more with our Junior ISA guide.

Personal pensions

Opening a personal pension is one of the best things you can do for your retirement, and saving into and investing into a personal pension is a great option alongside a pension from work (if you have one).

Pensions on investment platforms are called self-invested personal pensions (SIPPs), and it simply means you can make your own investment decisions.

With a personal pension, you’ll get a massive 25% bonus from the government on everything you put in (up to a limit), and if you’re a higher rate tax payer (earning over £50,270 per year), or an additional rate taxpayer (earning over £125,140), you can claim your pension contributions at those rates, so 40% or 45%. That’s a big deal! Technically, this is called tax relief.

The limits on what you can get the bonus for, or claim tax back for (so basically the limit on what you can pay into your personal pension), are:

• 100% of your income per year, or
• A maximum of £60,000 paid in per year

However, there are some drawbacks: (remember it’s for your retirement)

• You can’t withdraw any money until you reach 55 years old (57 from 2028).
• You might have to pay income tax when you start taking money from it – it counts as regular income, just like a salary, although 25% is always tax-free.

If you think a personal pension is for you, you can learn a lot more with our guide to self-invested personal pensions, and the best SIPP providers.

Investing in cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies can be a great investment. In fact, they’ve already been one of the greatest investments of all time – for those who got in early of course.

Now it’s a lot harder, but the space is so new there are opportunities everywhere – unfortunately, along with bad investments too (but as you learn, you’ll be able to better identify these).

It’s becoming a common part of a lot of investment portfolios, thanks to its potential impact in the future, so don’t be too sceptical or afraid to invest (as long as you understand the risks), and there’s a lot to learn, but that’s why we think it’s a great investment – the technology is simply incredible and world changing.

It’s a complicated technology to understand, and we won’t go through it here – you can read more about the technology (called blockchain) and both the biggest two cryptocurrencies in our guides to how to buy bitcoin and how to buy ethereum, or head over to our best crypto exchanges.

The best investment platforms

There we have it, a general overview of everything to do with the best investing platforms – easier than you thought right?

There’s lots of investment platforms out there and we’ve listed our top picks above.

By the way, great choice deciding to invest – your future self will thank you (potentially a lot), if you stick to a long-term investment strategy, or strategy that suits you.

Just remember there’s never a get rich quick scheme. Happy investing!

Note from IG: Spread bets and CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 69% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading spread bets and CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you understand how spread bets and CFDs work, and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.