AvaTrade vs Plus500 — which broker is better?

Pros

• Nine regulated entities, from Ireland and Cyprus to Japan, South Africa and Kenya, with the EU book run from Ireland under Central Bank of Ireland reference C53877 and Investor Compensation Company cover of 90% of losses up to EUR 20,000.
• Fixed spreads from 0.9 pips on EUR/USD mean the cost per trade does not blow out during news — a real advantage over variable-spread rivals when liquidity thins.
• AvaOptions gives retail clients vanilla FX calls and puts with a payoff-diagram strategy builder; almost no other broker of this size exposes real optionality to non-professional clients.
• Three copy-trading routes — in-house AvaSocial plus DupliTrade and ZuluTrade — rather than a single walled garden of signal providers.
• USD 100 minimum deposit, no deposit or withdrawal charges from AvaTrade, and account opening in roughly ten minutes with verification typically inside a business day.
• AvaTradeGO includes AvaProtect, a paid feature that reimburses a losing position inside a chosen window — a legitimately useful training wheel for position sizing.
• 24/5 support in more than a dozen languages across phone, email and live chat, with consistently fast chat pickup in independent contact testing.

Cons

• Dormancy is punitive: USD 50 charged quarterly after just three consecutive months without a trade, plus a USD 100 annual administration fee after twelve months. Most competitors wait six to twenty-four months.
• No real shares or ETFs. Equity exposure is CFD-only at roughly 0.13% of notional, which means no ownership, no voting and financing costs on anything held overnight.
• AvaTrade quotes as a market maker and is the counterparty to your trade — a structural conflict that agency, raw-spread models do not carry.
• No UK FCA authorisation, so UK clients are onboarded by an EU or offshore entity and fall outside FSCS protection.
• Fixed spreads are expensive in calm conditions: 0.9 pips on EUR/USD is modestly above the roughly 0.8 pips all-in cost of a good raw-spread-plus-commission account.
• The demo account expires after 21 days, which is too short to forward-test a swing strategy properly.

Pros

• The mobile app is the best in this comparison set — fast, clear, well-designed, and consistently among the top-rated trading apps in both stores, backed by a Trustpilot average around 4.2 from nearly 20,000 reviews
• Zero commission on every CFD instrument: no per-trade charge, no deposit fee and no withdrawal fee from Plus500's side
• Licensed by FCA (FRN 509909), ASIC (AFSL 417727), MAS (CMS100648-1), CIRO in Canada and CFTC/NFA in the US, with Plus500 Ltd listed on the London Stock Exchange and publishing audited accounts
• Account opening genuinely takes 10–30 minutes with electronic ID verification, and the USD 100 minimum makes it accessible
• Widest funding menu of the three brokers here — cards, SEPA and bank transfer, PayPal, Skrill, Apple Pay and Google Pay
• Swap-free accounts available for Sharia-compliant trading, priced transparently at USD 2–30 per day scaled by position size
• Free guaranteed stop orders on many instruments, charged only through a wider spread rather than a separate premium

Cons

• The inactivity fee of up to USD 10 per month triggers after just three months of not logging in — not three months without trading. Three months of dormancy is normal, healthy behaviour, and charging for it is indefensible
• No MetaTrader 4 or 5, no cTrader, no TradingView integration and no API, so algorithmic traders, EA users and anyone with an existing charting workflow are locked out entirely
• Plus500 publishes no spread table. Costs are visible only inside the platform, which makes independent cost comparison against IG or CMC effectively impossible before you fund an account
• Research is close to non-existent — an economic calendar, basic sentiment data and price alerts, with no analyst coverage, no screeners and no third-party news feed of substance
• Around 2,800 CFD instruments against 12,029 at CMC and 17,000 at IG, with no bonds, no funds, no spread betting and no exchange-traded options for CFD clients
• Disclosed regulatory history: a 2012 FCA fine of GBP 205,128 for inaccurate transaction reporting, a 2015 FCA-ordered freeze of UK accounts pending AML review, and a EUR 550,000 settlement with Belgium's FSMA in 2017