Pepperstone vs CMC Markets: I Funded Both and Traded the Same Week

How I Compared Them

This is not two fact sheets laid side by side. I funded a Pepperstone Razor account and a CMC Markets account and traded them in the same week from a wired connection in Suffolk, placing the same trades where I could and logging the spreads, commissions and fills I actually got. The figures here come from that testing, run as part of my wider broker programme across the first quarter of 2026.

Both brokers clear the first hurdle that matters: they are authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, Pepperstone under FRN 684312 and CMC Markets under FRN 173730, both with FSCS protection. CMC is also the older house, listed and trading since 1989, where Pepperstone launched in 2010. So this is not a safety contest. It is a question of which one fits how you trade.

Where Pepperstone Wins

Two things, and they are the two I care about most as an active trader: what a trade costs, and how cleanly it fills.

How much cheaper is Pepperstone on forex, really?

On the majors, clearly cheaper for an active trader. Pepperstone’s Razor account quoted EUR/USD at a 0.1-pip raw spread and charged £2.25 per side, so £4.50 for a round turn. CMC is commission-free but prices it into the spread, and I recorded EUR/USD at 0.7 pips, with GBP/USD at 1.0 pip against Pepperstone’s 0.42. CMC’s no-commission model looks simpler on paper, and for occasional trading the difference is small, but once you are trading often the wider spread costs more than Pepperstone’s spread-plus-commission. The simplicity is real; the saving is not.

Does the execution gap matter?

It depends how you trade. My median fill was 47ms on Pepperstone against 95ms on CMC, so Pepperstone is roughly twice as fast. If you scalp or trade around news, that gap is the difference between the price you saw and the price you got, and it matters. If you place a few considered trades a week, you will barely notice it. Pepperstone also gives you cTrader, which CMC does not, and for fast forex execution cTrader is the tool I reach for.

Where CMC Markets Wins

I went in expecting to prefer Pepperstone, and on cost I did. But CMC beat it convincingly on two fronts, and I would be doing you a disservice to gloss over them.

How much bigger is its market range?

Not close. CMC carries around 12,000 markets to Pepperstone’s 1,350, and you can see it in the product library above, which counts close to 11,900 instruments. That is the difference between a focused forex and indices broker and one where you can trade thousands of individual shares, a deep bench of indices, commodities and more from a single account. If your trading ranges beyond the majors, CMC simply gives you more to work with.

Is the Next Generation platform better?

As a single, polished, do-everything platform, yes. CMC’s Next Generation scored 5.0 on platform in my testing against Pepperstone’s 4.7, and it earns it: the charting, the Pattern Scanner, the built-in Reuters news and the research are a notch above, which is why CMC also edged the research score, 4.5 to 4.0. Pepperstone’s answer is choice rather than a single flagship, MT4, MT5, cTrader and TradingView, so you bring the platform you prefer. Both are valid, but if you want one excellent platform out of the box, CMC’s is the better one.

The Numbers Side by Side

Everything I recorded across the week, in one place. The bold cells are where each broker wins.

So Which One Is Right for You?

If cost and forex come first

Choose Pepperstone. The raw spread plus commission undercuts CMC on the majors for active trading, the fills are twice as fast, and cTrader gives you a proper execution platform. This is the account I trade forex on.

If you want range and one platform for everything

Choose CMC Markets. When you want to trade thousands of shares, a wide bench of indices and commodities, and have the research and Pattern Scanner built in, the breadth and the Next Generation platform are worth more than the difference in spread. For a multi-asset trader, CMC is the better home.

The One I’d Choose

After a week on both, Pepperstone is the one I keep trading on, because I am a cost-focused forex trader and that is exactly what it is built for. It scored 4.7 to CMC’s 4.5 in my testing, and on the things I optimise for, cost and execution, it is clearly ahead. I am not pretending it wins everything: if I mainly traded shares or wanted the widest possible range from one platform, I would choose CMC without hesitation, and its Next Generation platform is genuinely better than anything Pepperstone builds itself.

If you want to feel the difference yourself, the sensible move is to demo both. Pepperstone gives you £50,000 in virtual funds across all its platforms, so you can test the spreads and fills before committing. You can open a free Pepperstone demo here, and for the full cost picture read my Pepperstone forex review.

FAQs

References

1. FCA Register: Pepperstone Ltd. FRN: 684312
2. FCA Register: CMC Markets UK plc. FRN: 173730
3. The Investors Centre: how we test brokers (Q1 2026 dataset and methodology)
4. The Investors Centre: my Pepperstone forex review

To see how both rank against the field, compare the best forex brokers in the UK.