finanzen.net ZERO vs Smartbroker+ — 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value in commission (0.5% brokerage plus 0.5% settlement) on top of the spread, and coins can be neither deposited nor withdrawn - the wallet is a closed system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

• EUR 0.00 order commission on gettex for shares, bonds, ETFs, ETPs and funds from EUR 500 of order value, and EUR 1.00 below that
• 29 exchange venues plus eight OTC issuer desks - all German exchanges and eighteen foreign ones, so most securities can be bought on their home market in the home currency
• Genuinely broad range: roughly 40,000 shares, 40,000 bonds, 2,500 ETFs, 18,000 funds at net asset value and 4.6 million derivatives
• More than 10,800 savings plans on shares, ETFs, ETCs, funds and crypto ETPs, all free, from EUR 1.00 up to EUR 5,000 per instalment, at monthly to half-yearly intervals
• Zinskonto pays 2.25% p.a. variable up to EUR 100,000 and 2.00% from EUR 100,000 to EUR 1m, indexed to the ECB deposit facility rate
• VIP tiers trigger automatically at 45, 1,500 and 6,000 trades a quarter, cutting Tradegate and L&S to EUR 1-2 and including the EUR 29.90-a-month trading API
• Baader Bank as custodian means the full German tax service: automatic Abgeltungsteuer and church tax, Freistellungsauftrag, loss offsetting, Vorabpauschale, US withholding relief and Swiss tax vouchers
• Free custody, free sub-accounts, free foreign-currency accounts, free deposits and withdrawals, no inactivity fee

Cons

• The zero-commission promise applies to exactly one venue above one order size; Xetra costs EUR 4 plus 0.01%, Nasdaq EUR 4 plus 0.02% with a USD 8 minimum, and a small foreign order can easily cost EUR 12-15
• Crypto at 0.90% of market value plus the venue mark-up is expensive against German rivals charging a fraction of that for equivalent spot exposure
• The October 2023 migration from DAB to Baader Bank produced weeks of malfunctions and unreachable support; Finanztip pulled its recommendation until October 2024 and legacy DAB accounts that never moved now pay about EUR 9 per German exchange order
• Support is German-language business hours only, and the published fee list includes some hostile line items - EUR 100 for a copy of a recorded call, EUR 100 an hour for an address trace
• Onboarding is app-only and requires iOS 16 or Android 10 or newer; there is no browser-only route in
• The published Konditionen page and the July 2026 price list disagree on at least one venue charge (Stockholm: 0.03% versus 0.10%), which is not what you want from a fee schedule