Best Trading Platforms in the UK - Results after my testing

Can I Build a Long-Term Portfolio on IG?

Yes. I hold 14 UK and US equities in my IG ISA, including a couple of S&P 500 trackers (we’ve written a full guide on how to invest in the S&P 500 from the UK if that’s your focus). Dividends are paid tax-free, there’s no platform fee eating into returns, and the share-dealing fee drops to zero if I make three trades in a month. For a buy-and-hold ISA investor making a handful of trades per quarter, the annual cost on a £20,000 portfolio is essentially zero. That puts IG ahead of Hargreaves Lansdown, AJ Bell, and most of the platforms that dominate the best investment platforms rankings, on cost alone.

How Complex Is IG for Someone Who’s Never Traded?

It’s not simple. When Adam first opened his IG account, it took him three days to find where the ISA settings were buried in the app. The onboarding funnels you toward CFDs by default. You have to specifically navigate to “share dealing” to buy real equities. If you’re primarily using your phone to invest, it’s worth comparing IG against the options on our best investment apps list. IG Academy has decent educational content, but the platform itself assumes you already know what you’re doing.

What Was My Experience With IG’s Customer Support?

I called IG’s UK line at 2:14pm on 17 January 2026. Connected in 3 minutes 40 seconds. I asked about transferring a SIPP from another provider. The agent was knowledgeable, didn’t rush the call, and followed up by email within the hour. That’s the best support experience I’ve had from any platform on this list.

Feedback About IG From the TIC Community

IG carries a 4.6 out of 5 community rating from 5 verified reviews, three of which are 5 stars. Platform & Tools is the standout category at a perfect 5.0, with Mobile App at 4.4 and Fees & Spreads at 4.0. The lower scores sit in Customer Service and Ease of Use, both at 3.6, the only sub-3.7 marks across the three brokers we surveyed for community feedback. The most recent reviewer, UncleDommo, wrote: “I have been using IG for years and always been very happy with how the platform performs. It has the widest market access of all the platforms I used and great liquidity for smaller cap companies.” That tracks with our own testing: deep on platform, less obvious to navigate. View the full IG community page.

What Does It Cost to Trade on Pepperstone?

I use the Razor account because at the volumes I trade, the £2.25 per side commission with near-zero spreads works out considerably cheaper than the Standard’s commission-free structure with its ~1 pip markup. The crossover point is roughly £50,000 in notional position size: below that, Standard is simpler and slightly cheaper. Above it, Razor saves you money on every single trade. For a full breakdown, I’ve written a dedicated Razor vs Standard comparison.

No platform fee. No inactivity fee. No deposit or withdrawal charges. That fee structure is clean, one of the simplest in the industry.

Where Does Pepperstone Fall Short?

You can’t buy shares. You can’t open an ISA. There’s no investment portfolio feature, no fractional shares, no dividend income. If you’re building long-term wealth, Pepperstone isn’t the tool for that. It’s a trading engine, not an investment platform. I pair it with IG for the investing side. If your search brought you here because you want to buy and hold shares, skip to the IG or Capital.com sections.

How Did Pepperstone Handle My Withdrawal?

I withdrew £1,500 to my Barclays account on 6 December 2025. The money arrived in two working days. Pepperstone sent a confirmation email within 15 minutes. No fees deducted. The process was straightforward, but I’d note that first withdrawals take longer because of additional verification checks required under FCA anti-money-laundering rules.

Is Spread Betting Actually Tax-Free?

Under current HMRC rules, spread betting profits are exempt from both Capital Gains Tax and Stamp Duty. That’s a real advantage for active traders, but it only applies if HMRC considers you a speculator, not someone deriving their primary income from trading. If you’re trading full-time and spread betting represents your main earnings, take professional tax advice on this. The exemption isn’t as unconditional as most broker websites imply. We cover the full picture in our best spread betting platforms guide.

What Can’t I Do on Spreadex?

You can’t buy shares. You can’t open an ISA. Global market access is limited. If you want to trade Japanese equities or emerging market forex pairs, this isn’t the platform. The charting tools are basic. There’s no TradingView integration, no algorithmic trading, no API access. If any of those matter to you, look at Pepperstone or CMC instead. Spreadex is a focused tool for a specific job, and it does that job well.

Feedback About Spreadex From the TIC Community

Spreadex sits at 4.8 out of 5 across 5 verified community reviews, the highest score of any broker on this comparison. Four out of five reviewers gave the maximum 5 stars. Customer Service leads the sub-scores at 4.8, mirroring our own experience on the UK support line, with Fees & Spreads at 4.0. Platform & Tools is the lowest at 3.4, the only sub-3.5 category across the three brokers we surveyed. TIC Tom's 5-star review summarised it as “Really good overall, UI could do with a little work”, which is precisely the trade-off Spreadex makes: clean UK service, basic platform. View the full Spreadex community page.

What Makes Capital.com’s Interface Stand Apart?

Most platforms force you to choose between simplicity and depth. Capital.com manages to avoid that trade-off. The dashboard surfaces market movers, watchlists, and portfolio performance without burying anything behind three sub-menus. The market insights are useful: they flagged unusual volume on two FTSE 250 stocks I was watching before I noticed it myself. The mobile app mirrors the web experience closely, which sounds obvious but isn’t. Spreadex and CMC both have noticeable feature gaps between desktop and mobile. Capital.com doesn’t.

How Does Capital.com Handle Investing Alongside Trading?

This is what pushes it to the top of the list. You can buy real shares and ETFs with zero commission (*other fees apply), hold them in a Stocks & Shares ISA, and manage CFD positions from the same platform. IG does something similar, but the interface is more cluttered because it’s been built up over decades. Capital.com’s investing and trading sides feel like they were designed together from the start. For someone who wants to build a long-term portfolio in an ISA while also trading index CFDs occasionally, this is the cleanest setup I’ve tested. If your investing needs extend to a SIPP, you’ll need to look at IG or Saxo instead. Capital.com doesn’t offer one.

What’s the Catch?

The share range is smaller than IG’s 15,000+ instruments or Interactive Brokers’ global coverage. If you need access to obscure small-cap Japanese equities or listed options, Capital.com isn’t the platform for that. The brand is also younger than IG (founded 1974) or Saxo (founded 1992): Capital.com launched in 2016, though it holds full FCA authorisation (FRN 793714) and client funds are FSCS-protected up to £85,000. For the vast majority of UK traders and investors buying mainstream equities, indices, and ETFs, those limitations won’t matter.

TIC view, Adam Woodhead, Co-founder: Capital.com is the only platform on this comparison where I keep both my CFD account and a Stocks and Shares ISA on the same login. The market-insights feed flagged unusual volume on two FTSE 250 stocks I was watching last November before I caught it on my own scanner. IG's research stack does the same thing, but Capital.com puts it next to the trade ticket rather than two menus deep.

Feedback About Capital.com From the TIC Community

Capital.com holds a 4.6 out of 5 community rating from 5 verified reviews on the TIC platform, with the most recent posted within the last few days. Three reviewers gave the maximum 5 stars; the remaining two gave 4. The standout sub-scores are Ease of Use and Mobile App, both at 4.8, with Platform & Tools at 4.6 and Customer Service at 4.4. Fees & Spreads score 4.2, the lowest of the five categories, suggesting reviewers see the broker's pricing as competitive but not class-leading. View the full Capital.com community page.

What’s the Difference Between CMC Markets and CMC Invest?

This catches people out. CMC Markets is the trading platform: CFDs and spread bets. CMC Invest is the share-dealing and ISA platform. They’re technically separate products under the same brand, with different fee structures and different account logins. If you want to buy actual shares in an ISA, you need CMC Invest specifically. The CFD account won’t let you do that. I’ve spoken to three people who opened a CMC Markets account thinking they could buy shares in an ISA, only to discover they’d signed up for the wrong product. CMC doesn’t make this distinction clear enough on their homepage.

Why Wouldn’t I Just Use TradingView Instead?

Fair question. TradingView is superb, and you can use it with Pepperstone. The difference is that CMC’s charting is natively integrated with their execution engine. There’s no latency between what the chart shows and what the broker fills. On TradingView via a third-party broker, I’ve occasionally noticed a slight delay between the charted price and the execution price. On CMC’s native platform, I haven’t. If charting and execution sitting in the same environment matters to your strategy, CMC has the edge.

What Makes Saxo’s Research Worth the Premium?

Saxo’s in-house research team produces daily market commentary, quarterly outlooks, and instrument-specific analysis that’s a cut above what most retail platforms offer. The SaxoTraderGO platform integrates this research directly into the trading workflow: you can read an analyst note on a FTSE 100 constituent and place a trade from the same screen. The depth of third-party research partnerships (including Morningstar ratings on funds and ETFs) means you’re getting institutional-quality data without needing a Bloomberg terminal. For someone managing a £50,000+ portfolio across multiple asset classes, this level of research support justifies the custody fee.

How Does Saxo Compare to IG for Long-Term Investing?

Both offer ISAs, SIPPs, and real share ownership. IG wins on cost for smaller portfolios: no custody fee and commission-free dealing with three or more trades per month. Saxo wins on breadth: 70,000+ instruments versus IG’s 15,000+, plus access to bonds, listed options, and futures that IG doesn’t offer in its share-dealing account. If you’re a UK investor buying FTSE 100 stocks and a handful of ETFs in an ISA, IG is the better value. If you want to build a globally diversified portfolio that includes Danish government bonds, Japanese small-caps, and commodity futures alongside your UK equities, Saxo is the only platform on this list that can do all of it.

Who Shouldn’t Use Saxo?

If you’re investing under £10,000, the custody fee will drag on your returns disproportionately. If you only trade UK and US equities, you’re paying a premium for global access you won’t use. And if you’re a complete beginner, the platform density will slow you down. Capital.com would be a better starting point. Saxo is excellent at what it does, but it’s not trying to be everything to everyone, and the pricing reflects that. See our guide to beginner-friendly UK share dealing platforms.