Bitpanda vs Smartbroker+ — which broker is better?

Pros

• Tax on Real Securities is handled by Bitpanda for customers based in Austria and Germany — the single most valuable feature for a DACH investor
• Real share ownership: more than 7,500 stocks and 2,500 ETFs and ETCs at a fixed EUR 1 per trade, executed on the Quotrix exchange with dividends, splits and corporate actions passed through
• Four separate Austrian and German licences — MiCAR CASP with the FMA and with BaFin, a WAG 2018 investment-firm licence, and an e-money institution with PSD2 permissions
• Securities business is covered by the Austrian investor compensation scheme (AeW), which pays 90% of an eligible claim up to EUR 20,000
• Free EUR SEPA deposits and withdrawals, and ten fiat currencies supported including CHF, PLN, CZK and HUF
• Bitpanda Fusion gives a published fee ladder from 0.25% to 0.02%, aggregated liquidity from 12+ venues, over 2,000 pairs and native TradingView charting on the same balance
• One of the highest-rated investing apps in the DACH region — 4.70 from roughly 55,000 German App Store ratings
• Precious metals with no storage or custody fee, VAT-free, physically stored and insured, with gold at a 0.5% buy premium

Cons

• The standard broker product hides its cost in the price: Bitpanda quotes a 0.99% premium on Bitcoin but admits the per-trade fee spans 0.00% to 2.49%, so you cannot predict what a given order will cost before opening the summary screen
• Silver and platinum carry a 2.5% buy premium and a 2% sell premium — a 4.5% round trip before any price movement
• Cheap crypto trading requires knowing that Fusion exists and switching to it; the default surface is the expensive one
• Privately held with no stock-market listing and no banking licence, so there is far less public financial disclosure than at Nasdaq-listed Coinbase
• The Austrian FMA fined Bitpanda GmbH EUR 70,000 in 2026 for breaching MiCAR Articles 7 and 8 on whitepaper and marketing-communication duties — the regulator’s first MiCAR sanction, and a disclosure obligation rather than a client-money failure
• No forex, no listed options, no exchange-traded futures and no bond market — leveraged exposure comes only from margin trading and leverage tokens
• Margin trading on stocks at up to 20x, with four-hourly borrowing fees and documented negative-equity repayment rules, is an aggressive product to place inside an app aimed largely at beginners

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