Kraken vs Consorsbank — which broker is better?

Pros

• Wyoming SPDI bank charter through Kraken Financial — a full-reserve institution required to hold 100% unencumbered liquid assets against customer fiat, with a Federal Reserve limited-purpose master account
• Two MiCA Crypto-Asset Service Provider authorisations plus an EMI licence from the Central Bank of Ireland, passported across all 30 EEA countries
• The first crypto-native firm to hold all three CFTC licences — DCM, DCO and FCM — through Bitnomial, plus a second FCM in Kraken Derivatives US
• SEC-registered broker-dealer (Kraken Securities LLC) and registered investment adviser (Kraken Adviser LLC)
• 831 assets and 1,432 trading pairs on the public API as of August 2026, spanning spot, margin, futures, options, forex markets and indices
• Cash deposits are free on every major rail — EUR SEPA and SEPA Instant, USD ACH and FedWire, GBP Faster Payments, CHF SIC — with fully published withdrawal fees
• Staking commission of 20% on flexible on-chain staking, well below Coinbase's 35%
• Kraken Pro, a native desktop client, a mature API and a CLI aimed at automated agents — a genuinely deep tooling stack for a crypto venue

Cons

• Entry-tier spot pricing of 0.40% maker and 0.80% taker is the most expensive base rate among major regulated venues, and you need USD 10,000 of 30-day volume before it drops below 0.40% taker
• The simple app charges 1% on instant buys, 1.5% on custom orders and a punitive flat 3% on conversions below the minimum order size
• Zero-fee buying, selling and converting in the app (up to USD 10,000 a month, not Kraken Pro trades) is behind a USD 4.99 monthly Kraken+ subscription rather than built into the base schedule
• Payward is privately held and does not publish audited financial statements; Proof of Reserves attestations are useful but are not the same thing
• The 11,000 commission-free stocks and ETFs are US-only — EEA clients get xStocks tokenised equities, which are crypto-asset products with different rights and no share ownership
• Product sprawl is real: Kraken, Kraken Pro, Kraken Desktop, Krak, NinjaTrader, Bitnomial, Breakout and xStocks sit under one brand with different entities, licences and eligibility rules per country

Pros

• All ETF savings plans run at 0% of the savings rate on more than 1,700 ETFs, permanently — the partners cover the fee, replacing the old 1.50% charge
• The deepest derivatives access of any German retail bank: Eurex options and futures with volume rebates down to EUR 2.00 per contract, plus CME, CBOT and OCC options and futures on a dedicated Margin account
• ActiveTrader professional software and the Trading API are both free, with real-time monitoring, one-click ordering and Iceberg orders on Xetra in the Pro version
• Free depot, free Verrechnungskonto, free sub-accounts and free depot transfers, with no inactivity fee
• Transparent, published FX conversion margins — Bloomberg BFIX plus USD 0.0030, GBP 0.0020, CHF 0.0030 — roughly 0.26% on the dollar (0.30% if the price page's percentage margin applies to securities trades), better than flatex's 0.35% and more transparent than comdirect, which publishes no percentage at all
• Free foreign-currency sub-accounts in eleven currencies plus EUR, so US or Swiss proceeds do not have to be converted back at a spread
• Backed by BNP Paribas S.A. under ECB, BaFin, ACPR and AMF supervision, with the voluntary BdB fund protecting private individuals up to EUR 3 million
• From the second partial execution only the percentage commission applies — base fee and venue cost drop away, which materially cuts the cost of large orders that fill in pieces

Cons

• The tiered pricing starts unremarkable and Consorsbank does not publish the volume thresholds for Silver, Gold and Platinum status on its public price pages, so a new customer cannot calculate what they will actually pay next year
• Direct foreign exchange access is priced punitively: EUR 34 for London, EUR 41 for Zurich, EUR 72 for Tokyo, EUR 121 for Singapore and EUR 136 for Wellington in venue costs per order, plus a EUR 21 USA Smart Order fee and EUR 69 for Canada
• Customer service scores 1.6 out of 5 on Trustpilot across 300 reviews, with reviewers reporting online-banking failures that blocked access to accounts and depots for weeks, and slow, unhelpful responses
• Share, certificate and ETC savings plans still cost 1.50% of the rate, so only the ETF plans are genuinely free once the twelve-month new-customer promotion expires
• ActiveTrader Pro costs up to EUR 119 a month for standard-status customers, and US derivatives market data adds EUR 5–29 a month — the professional tooling is only free once you are already trading heavily
• No CFDs, no spot forex and no spot crypto, and the Tagesgeld pays 1.00% p.a. outside promotional periods