Avanza vs Interactive Brokers — which broker is better?

Pros

• Start class: 0% courtage on Stockholmsbörsen and 100% of fund fees refunded for customers who have never had SEK 50,000 in total savings at Avanza, until SEK 50,000 or more than 500 free trades in 12 months
• Mini class from 0.25% with a SEK 1 minimum on Stockholmsbörsen and First North, and a USD 1 minimum on US shares
• Avanza Bank AB is a Swedish bank supervised by Finansinspektionen, and the parent Avanza Bank Holding AB is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm as AZA
• Two Swedish schemes: the deposit guarantee covers uninvested cash up to SEK 1,150,000 per customer and institution, the investor compensation scheme covers securities up to SEK 250,000
• SEK 0 annual, management and deposit fees on every account type in the price list, ISK, kapitalförsäkring and pensions included, and no minimum deposit
• Wide range for a domestic bank: shares in the Nordics, North America and nine further European markets online, desk orders on most other exchanges, funds without courtage, ETFs, options, futures, certificates, warrants and bonds
• Avanza calculates the ISK flat-rate income and reports it to Skatteverket, and the pre-filled K4 form costs SEK 0 since January 2026
• Free real-time prices for the Nordic markets, Nasdaq and NYSE, and US trading from 11:00 to 22:30 Swedish time

Cons

• The website and app address residents of Sweden; residents abroad cannot trade European shares online, and we found no route in from Germany, Austria or Switzerland
• Automatic currency exchange costs 0.25% in each direction, 0.5% on a round trip; the manual service at 0.125% per direction does not cover funds and, according to Avanza, cannot be added to an ISK and needs an approved securities credit on the aktie- och fondkonto
• One courtage class applies to all orders on all accounts: a SEK 10,000 order costs SEK 25 in Mini but SEK 39 in Small, SEK 69 in Medium and SEK 99 in Fast Pris
• We found no demo account and no source for fractional shares; crypto exposure is limited to exchange-traded certificates, and Avanza does not sell crypto assets directly
• Support in Swedish, by phone and by secure message in the logged-in area; we found no live chat and no email address, and general opening hours were not readable on the pages we could open

Pros

• US stocks from USD 0.0035 per share on the Tiered plan, minimum USD 0.35 per order and capped at 1% of trade value
• Currency conversion at 0.20 basis points (minimum USD 2) — an order of magnitude cheaper than most European brokers' 0.25%–1.5%
• Roughly 175 market centres in 40 countries and territories from a single multi-currency account, with 29 currencies
• No inactivity fee since 2021, plus no custody fee and no platform fee
• Trader Workstation offers over 100 order types plus a mature Python/Java/REST API used widely by retail algo traders
• Nasdaq-listed parent (IBKR) with published quarterly financials and around USD 23 billion of equity capital
• Top-tier licences in the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong, with per-entity investor compensation disclosed
• Paper trading account mirrors the live platform, including the full API

Cons

• Customer support is the most common complaint: many requests go through the ticket system, and public reviews (e.g. on Trustpilot) often cite slow replies and template answers
• Trader Workstation has a genuinely steep learning curve; the first session is intimidating even for experienced traders
• The fee schedule is complicated: Fixed versus Tiered, pass-through exchange fees, and per-exchange minimums make cost prediction harder than it should be
• Real-time market data is a paid subscription per exchange, so the headline commissions understate the true monthly cost for active traders
• Account opening is longer and more document-heavy than at app-first brokers, and the website navigation is poor
• Spot crypto runs through partner firms (zerohash in the EEA, Paxos in the UK) rather than IBKR itself, and those holdings are outside the investor compensation schemes