CMC Markets vs Interactive Brokers — which broker is better?

Pros

• Next Generation is one of the strongest charting suites bundled with a retail CFD account —115+ indicators, 70 chart patterns, 12 chart types and pattern-recognition scanners, at no extra cost
• 0% commission on UK and European share CFDs (Greece the sole exception at 0.45%), against IG's spread-plus-conversion model
• EUR/USD averages around 0.7 pips on the standard account, and FX Active delivers from 0.0 pips for USD/GBP 2.50 per side per 100,000 notional
• No minimum deposit at all — CMC only suggests around GBP 100 to cover margin, which makes it genuinely testable with small money
• Three FCA licences (173730, 170627, 948126) plus ASIC AFSL 238054, BaFin and MAS, with FSCS cover of GBP 85,000 and client money segregated at NatWest, Barclays and Lloyds under annual PwC audit
• Cash-settled OTC options, available as a spread bet or through the CFD account, carry no commission and no holding or financing charge — the whole cost is in the spread
• 12,029 instruments on Next Generation, all of which are also tradable from TradingView charts
• Ten account base currencies including NOK, SEK, PLN and SGD, which removes conversion drag for Nordic and Asian clients

Cons

• None of CMC's derivatives is exchange-traded: the options it quotes are OTC and cash-settled, and there are no cleared futures at all, so CMC is the counterparty on every derivative contract and no clearing house stands behind it
• The 0.7% FX conversion charge on realised profit, loss and costs is high; IG applies 0.8% on the equivalent CFD trades
• Inactivity fee of GBP 10 per month starts after just 12 months without trading activity
• ASIC required CMC to remediate Australian retail clients in 2023 over CFDs offered above the product intervention leverage limits, and an Australian class action over 2011–2021 marketing remains outstanding
• MT4 carries only about 220 instruments against 12,029 on Next Generation, so algo traders who need MT4 lose most of the product range
• CMC does not publish a fixed index spread table, which makes cost comparison against brokers that do quote fixed minimums harder than it should be

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 160 market destinations in 36 countries from a single multi-currency account, with 28 settlement 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 21 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 is only available to US clients via a separate arrangement; EEA clients get futures and exchange-traded products instead