Compare pension providers - find the best platform for you.
General options
Offer
Ideal for:
Beginners
Mid-level investors
Experts
looking for:
Expert-managed
Self-managed
platforms who want:
Hands-off investing
Standard investing
Day trading
and suitable for:
Low balances
Large balances
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Customer service: Copy goes here
Customer ratings: Depends on how often you want to change these, could have an average rating?? Overall across the different rating sites they are rated above average ??? Just a thought
Customer quotes: Customers seem to like XYZ and dislike ABC???
Pros
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Cons
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Account fee: summary copy goes here
Fund fee: goes here
Dealing fee: goes here
Currency conversion fee: goes here
Account types:
ISA
Pension
Lifetime ISA
GIA
Junior ISA
Business account
Key features:
Commission-free
UK Stocks
US Stocks
Global stocks
ETFs
Commodities
Bonds
CFDs
Leverage
Crypto
Multi-currency
Here’s what all of the above means, and a bit more about investing and investment platforms.
These investment platforms are suited to those new to investing. They’re often easier to use, and you can get set up easily. They can have great educational resources and support to help you learn more about investing.
These platforms cater to those who have at least some knowledge of investing, such as how to buy individual stocks and shares or investment funds. They’re still easy to use, and are typically suited to most people looking to make all sorts of investments, particularly medium and long term, rather than day trading.
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.
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.
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.
This is where the investments are made for you, or where your investments are managed and planned to continually grow, rather than you needing to do anything.
This is where you’ll be buying and selling the investments yourself, and buying the investments directly on the investment platform.
This is where you are making lots of investments, often daily. You might not buy the investments directly, but trade the price of an asset via CFDs or a similar option.
These are platforms where you can deposit (add) a low amount of money, and not be impacted by things like high fees. We set it at £100 or less.
For instance, if you were to deposit £100, but to make an investment it cost you £10 in fees, your money isn’t going to last for long. But, if it was a commission-free platform with no fees, you’d be able to make as many investments as you like and not have to worry about fees reducing your balance.
Investment platforms vary quite wildly, 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 all the most popular options, and put together the best investment platforms so you don’t need to.
To determine the best investment platforms, here’s our key criteria:
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! So you can try a few, and see which one you prefer best.
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.
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 everything you make is tax-free.
These 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.
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.
These are platforms where you can save for your kids (if you have them). You can save and invest up to £9,000 per tax year. They’ll get the account and money when they turn 18.
These are platforms where you can invest within a limited company (if you have one). Meaning you are investing your business’s money, rather than your own.
This is where you don’t pay a fee to buy or sell investments. Great for low balances.
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.
These are a group of investments (such as shares), but packaged together into a single investment, and often managed by experts. Each fund often has a goal or different theme.
These are investment funds, which are groups of investments packaged together into a single investment, but these are traded on a stock exchange, like shares, making it quicker and easier to buy and sell.
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.
This is for advanced traders, where you place a bet on the price of an asset in the future. In the UK, winnings are tax-free.
Foreign exchange (forex) is where you buy and sell different currencies, such as Pounds (GBP) for US Dollars (USD).
Commodities are real things, such as gold, silver, oil and grain.
Contract For Differences (CFDs) is where you trade the price of an asset rather than buying it directly. They open up advanced features for advanced traders, and often lower costs when trading regularly.
This is making an investment for more than your initial investment, for instance 10x more, which can magnify your profits (and also losses). You effectively borrow money from the platform to increase your trade size.
This is where you can buy and sell digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) such as bitcoin and ethereum.
This is where you can buy, hold and trade in multiple currencies. This can mean you reduce your currency conversion fees by investing with the relevant currency for the asset.
This is where you can copy other investors (such as professional traders).
This is where you can earn interest on your uninvested cash.
This is where you can trade with ‘play money’ first before using real money.
Not quite sure what an investment platform is? No problem. It’s simply a website, or an app on your computer or 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 (FTSE100), you could buy something called an index fund – here’s how to invest in index funds.
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.
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.
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, it 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.
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.
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, some expert-managed platforms will offer you this choice when you sign up. Learn even more about ethical investing with our guide to ethical ISAs.
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 for 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.
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 over 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 per year, like 1%, and trading you’ll pay trading fees and sometimes an account fee.
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 £12.
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.
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, there's bad crypto investments too (but as you learn, you’ll be able to better identify these).
Cryptocurrencies are 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).
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.
Edward Savage is a leading expert on money, with a background of 8 years working in financial services in London, has a business, accounting and finance degree, runs an investing community, and teaches people about money. He writes about all aspects of personal finance, including pensions, investing, mortgages and insurance.
This article was written, reviewed and fact checked by the expert team at Nuts About Money. You’re in safe hands. Learn more.
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