Capital.com vs OANDA — 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

• Regulated by six tier-1 authorities - CFTC/NFA, FCA (542574), CIRO, ASIC (AFSL 412981), MAS and the JFSA - a licence footprint almost nobody in retail FX matches
• Trading since 1996, with client money segregated and FSCS cover up to GBP 85,000 for UK clients and CIPF cover up to CAD 1,000,000 in Canada
• No minimum deposit at all - you can open and fund a live account with any amount you choose
• The mobile app is the strongest in this comparison set: full order management, alerts and charting rather than a cut-down position viewer
• Research rated 5 out of 5 by ForexBrokers.com - MarketPulse commentary, Autochartist integration, news feeds and podcasts, all in-house rather than bought in
• Share CFD commission of 0.06 percent of notional per side with no minimum, which is cheap on small tickets where per-order minimums usually bite
• Open REST and streaming API through Algo Labs, with no punitive volume threshold attached
• Available to US, Canadian and Japanese residents, who cannot open accounts at most global CFD brokers

Cons

• The default spread-only account is expensive: EUR/USD has been measured at 1.4 to 1.7 pips against roughly 0.8 pips all-in at raw-spread competitors
• Core pricing closes most of that gap but is reported to require a USD 10,000 balance, so the cheap tariff is not available to the clients who need it most
• A 1.0 percent currency conversion mark-up applies whenever the instrument currency differs from your account currency - the largest hidden cost in this review
• Inactivity fee of up to USD 20 a month - GBP 20 at the UK entity - after twelve months without an open or active position, though up to three months are refundable once you trade again
• No options, no futures and no mutual funds; outside the EU no share ownership either (the EU entity, OANDA TMS Brokers S.A., offers real shares and ETFs, held by a custodian in an omnibus account in OANDA TMS's name) - and the product list varies so much by entity that US clients get forex and spot crypto only
• Support is 24/5 rather than 24/7, with narrower language coverage than the Australian competitors