Kraken vs Interactive Brokers — 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

• 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