Kraken vs IG — 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

• Around 17,000 tradable markets in a single account — shares, indices, FX, commodities, bonds, ETFs, turbo warrants and crypto CFDs, subject to regional restrictions
• Six top-tier licences — FCA (FRN 195355), BaFin, FINMA, ASIC (AFSL 515106), MAS and JFSA — plus a mid-tier DFSA licence in Dubai; the FINMA licence among those six is a full Swiss banking licence at IG Bank S.A., which puts Swiss cash under esisuisse protection
• Zero commission on UK and international shares, and the GBP 24 quarterly custody fee was scrapped outright in January 2026 rather than merely waived for active traders
• Platform stack that scales with the trader: web and mobile for most, ProRealTime for charting and backtesting, L2 Dealer for full order-book DMA, plus MT4, TradingView and documented REST/streaming APIs
• US-listed options from USD 1.00 per contract to open with nothing to close, and futures at USD 1.00 per contract per side (USD 0.75 on micros) — rare for a European retail broker
• No inactivity fee at all, where most rivals start charging after three to twelve dormant months, and no minimum deposit on any account
• Weekend dealing on the FTSE 100 and Wall Street, plus published client-sentiment data showing how IG's own book is positioned

Cons

• The 0.8% currency conversion mark-up on foreign-currency CFD and spread bet trades is where much of the real cost hides — on a USD position round-trip it comfortably exceeds the spread
• EUR/USD at roughly 0.9 pips is mid-table; raw-spread brokers quote 0.1–0.3 pips plus a small commission and work out cheaper for anyone trading FX frequently
• The 0.49% share dealing conversion rate is a discretionary discount rather than a contractual one — IG has committed to it only until 4 September 2026 and can raise it afterwards
• No fractional shares on IG's own platform, which creates real cash drag when drip-feeding small sums into high-priced US stocks
• Pricing genuinely differs by entity and account type — UK GBP share dealing, multi-currency share dealing, IG Europe and IG Bank all run separate schedules, and the published tables are hard to reconcile
• Crypto CFDs are unavailable to UK retail clients under the FCA ban, so the headline market count overstates what a UK resident can actually trade