finanzen.net ZERO vs Scalable Capital — which broker is better?

Pros

• EUR 0.00 order commission on shares, ETFs, funds, certificates and warrants, with no custody fee, no third-party cost surcharge and no venue fee
• Savings plans in shares, ETFs and funds cost EUR 0.00 from EUR 1.00 per instalment and carry no minimum-quantity surcharge
• Best-rated app in the German neobroker field - roughly 4.7 out of 5 across about 26,000 German App Store ratings - with limit, stop, stop-limit, trailing stop-loss and OCO orders
• Trading is embedded in finanzen.net, Germany's largest retail finance portal, so quotes, news and instrument data sit beside the order ticket at no extra cost
• Extended hours: securities from 07:30 to 23:00 on weekdays and 14:00 to 19:00 on Saturdays, crypto 24/7
• Real spot crypto in the same account - 59 coins held by BaFin-supervised Tangany GmbH in Germany, plus more than 50 crypto ETPs including staking products
• Junior account on identical terms with no running costs, and Swiss share trading is supported
• Full German tax handling through Baader Bank: automatic Abgeltungsteuer, Freistellungsauftrag, loss offsetting and annual tax documents

Cons

• One trading venue only. Every order goes to gettex, so you cannot compare quotes, and outside Xetra core hours (09:00-17:30) the spread is the entire cost of your trade with nothing to benchmark it against
• No telephone support of any kind - the only channel is a ticket system inside the login, which Finanztip also flags as the reason ZERO scores mid-table on service
• The Fair Use Policy explicitly reserves the right to terminate clients for automated or high-frequency trading, latency arbitrage, 'economically pointless' transactions, or simply never funding the account
• Crypto costs 1.0% of order value in commission (0.5% brokerage plus 0.5% settlement) on top of the spread, and coins can be neither deposited nor withdrawn - the wallet is a closed system
• Three-company structure: finanzen.net zero GmbH is only a tied agent with no licence, DonauCapital Wertpapier GmbH carries the liability, and Baader Bank holds the assets. It is legal and disclosed, but there is no single accountable balance sheet
• No individual bonds, no joint or second accounts, no business accounts, no demo account, and uninvested cash pays 0.00% p.a.

Pros

• Free savings-plan executions from EUR 1 with fractional amounts, across more than 2,700 ETFs, 4,500 shares and 3,800 funds - the deepest catalogue in Europe.
• PRIME+ at EUR 4.99 a month makes trading a fixed cost rather than a variable one; commission-free orders from EUR 250 on EIX break even at roughly five trades a month. Purchases of PRIME ETFs (Amundi, iShares, Vanguard, Xtrackers) from EUR 250 on EIX are free on the FREE Broker as well, so they do not count towards that.
• Holds its own full ECB banking licence since September 2025 and custodies client securities itself, with cash covered to EUR 100,000 and PRIME+ balances spread across partner banks for wider statutory coverage.
• 2.60% p.a. on the Scalable Overnight cash account, paid monthly - on unlimited cash, with or without PRIME+.
• More than 3,800 mutual funds tradable without the front-end load, which is unusual at a flat-fee broker and useful for anyone holding legacy fund positions.
• German residents get Abgeltungsteuer, solidarity surcharge and church tax withheld and remitted automatically, with annual tax certificates issued.
• Broker, cash account, robo-advisor (Scalable Wealth) and a securities-backed credit line all sit behind one login, which is a genuine consolidation argument.

Cons

• Since 1 September 2026 gettex orders cost up to EUR 1.99 on every plan, up from EUR 0.99, which wiped out the PRIME+ commission-free advantage that made the subscription compelling on that venue.
• Only three trading venues - EIX, gettex and Xetra - with no direct access to US or other foreign exchanges, so you buy foreign shares through a German quote rather than on their home market.
• On EIX, Scalable is the single market maker on the venue it routes you to by default, which is the same broker-as-counterparty conflict the post-PFOF industry inherited.
• Euro-only accounts with no multi-currency balances and no itemised FX charge, so the true cost of a foreign share purchase is not visible on the contract note.
• No telephone support: chat and email only, with slow replies and delayed tax documents the most common complaint in user reviews.
• Fractional trading works in savings plans but not in ordinary lump-sum orders, and there is no demo account.