Capital.com vs CapTrader — which broker is better?

Pros

• No commission on any CFD and no inactivity fee whatsoever — unusual in the CySEC/FCA CFD segment
• EUR/USD averages roughly 0.7 pips all-in, with spreads advertised from 0.6 pips
• Free deposits and free withdrawals, with a USD 20 minimum via card, Apple Pay or PayPal
• Roughly 5,585 tradeable symbols including 125 FX pairs and about 450 crypto CFDs
• Top-tier regulation through the FCA (793714) and ASIC (513393) alongside CySEC (319/17)
• Mobile app is genuinely at feature parity with the web platform, not a cut-down version
• Choice of proprietary platform, MT4, MT5 and native TradingView integration
• Investmate education and the built-in trading-bias detector are substantive, not marketing filler

Cons

• 0.7% currency conversion markup on every trade settled outside your base currency — the single largest hidden cost here
• Overnight funding adds roughly 4.05% per year over the benchmark rate, which makes multi-week leveraged holds expensive
• No exchange-traded options, futures, bonds or mutual funds — the product set is essentially CFDs only
• Real share dealing (Capital.com Invest) covers only about 1,000 stocks and is limited to selected European countries
• Not publicly listed and founded only in 2016, so there is less financial transparency than at an exchange-listed broker
• Crypto CFDs are unavailable to UK retail clients, and the broker does not accept clients in the US, Canada, Japan, Belgium or Hong Kong

Pros

• BaFin-supervised German investment firm (institution number 10156708) with a Düsseldorf address, German contract law and a free German hotline until 20:00
• Eurex options and futures at EUR 2.00 per contract, Mini-DAX futures at EUR 1.00 and CME Micro E-minis at USD 1.25 — competitive with anything available to German retail traders
• Access to over 160 market destinations, more than 1.2 million instruments, one million-plus bonds and 37,000 funds from a single multi-currency account
• No account fee, no custody fee, no inactivity fee, and free real accounts on TWS, CapTrader Desktop, AgenaTrader Andromeda and the TraderFox Trading-Desk
• German shares on Tradegate, gettex, Chi-X and Turquoise DE from a EUR 2.00 minimum — noticeably cheaper than the EUR 4.00 Xetra minimum for small orders
• Trustpilot rating of 4.9 from more than 800 reviews, with support consistently named as the reason
• Interactive Brokers' execution stack underneath: SmartRouting, real-time margining, more than 60 order types and a mature API

Cons

• No Abgeltungsteuer is withheld. German investors gain a compounding advantage but must declare everything themselves via Anlage KAP, and a Freistellungsauftrag is not possible — for many people that alone rules CapTrader out
• Commissions are a visible markup on Interactive Brokers' own schedule: 0.10% with a EUR 4.00 Xetra minimum against IBKR's 0.05% and EUR 1.25, and USD 0.01 per share against IBKR's USD 0.0035
• Currency conversion costs 0.3 basis points with a EUR 3.75 minimum — one and a half times what IBKR charges direct, and the minimum bites on every small conversion
• Investor compensation for EEA clients is the Irish scheme's 90% of EUR 20,000, thin against the German EUR 100,000 deposit guarantee investors are used to
• EUR 2,000 minimum deposit and per-order minimums make small, regular ETF purchases uneconomic; there are no free savings plans
• No spot crypto — only Bitcoin futures and exchange-traded products — and real-time market data is a paid monthly subscription per exchange