Interactive Investor review: How does it compare to rivals?

In our Interactive Investor review, you can find out whether the investment platform is right for you.

Interactive Investor offers general investing accounts, stocks and shares Isas and Sipps and allows investors to choose shares, bonds, funds, investment trusts and ETFs, including ready-made portfolios that do the work for you.

It launched in 1995 and is now owned by the investment management group Aberdeen. It's become a popular choice for do-it-yourself investors: Interactive Investor has more than 450,000 customers and manages £70 billion of assets.

Interactive Investor's selling point is its flat-fee subscription model, standing out from competitors that charge account fees as a percentage of your investments. It also offers a wealth of help and guidance for investors.

We review Interactive Investor's fees, delve into the features offered by the platform, and put its customer service to the test.

Special deal alert: Interactive Investor is running a cashback offer* throughout June that could give you up to £2,000 when you open a new Sipp or transfer one in.

> Read our full round-up of the best investment platforms

> Learn more about Interactive Investor and open an account*

You can open these accounts with Interactive Investor:

• Isa
• General investment account
• Sipp
• Junior stocks and shares Isa
• Cash savings account (provided by Flagstone, not linked to a regular Interactive Investor account)

Why you can trust us

This is Money has been covering investing and personal finance since 1999. Read more about how our editorial independence helps make our readers’ lives richer.

About our writer: Sam is This is Money's Money and Consumer Guides writer. He has more than 12 years of experience covering financial products. He started his writing career at an investment management company, where he wrote about its stocks and shares Isa and Sipp and covered investments and market news. He’s been a writer and editor at the Financial Ombudsman Service and was a senior writer in the consumer team at NerdWallet, covering best-buy personal loans.

I used Interactive Investor to open a Sipp and spent several hours testing its features for this review.

I’ve tested how easy the platform is to use on both desktop and its mobile app. I’ve searched for and bought investments, looked at the range of educational content on offer and been in touch with Interactive Investor’s customer service team.

My final assessment takes Interactive Investor’s fees into account and determines whether it’s a good overall option for the type of investor it's targeting.

> Read our full round-up of the best Sipp providers

Here are Interactive Investor's account fees, along with the tier each level falls into:

Interactive Investor's flat monthly fee starts at £4.99 for general investment accounts or Isas up to £50,000, this is higher if you add a Sipp as well, fees then step up for pots above £50,000 and £75,000.

Interactive Investor also has a ‘Super Investor’ tier, which is £19.99 a month for an Isa or general account. This is targeted at more active investors, coming with four free online trades a month and a reduced charge for international share dealing. It costs an extra £10 a month to add a pension to this tier.

You can add a junior Isa to your plan on the Investor and Super Investor tiers. It's possible to add as many junior Isas as you have children.

This is Money's view of Interactive Investor’s account fees

Interactive Investor’s subscription model is unique among the traditional investing platforms, which usually charge a fee as a percentage of the value of your investments.

We believe its flat-fee structure is generally more straightforward than a percentage and helps you keep costs down. You just need to check the value of your pot and the type of account to see your annual fee. Unfortunately, this is more complicated than it was, due to the various tiers.

Importantly once the value of your investments reaches a certain threshold, Interactive Investor’s fees can work out cheaper than other big traditional investment platform providers, as most rivals charge percentage fees.

Let’s look at an example:

Even though we like Interactive Investor’s subscription model, there are situations where it will be beaten on account fees, particularly if you have a smaller pot and want to open both an Isa and a pension.

For instance, here are example annual account fees for various sized pots invested in both an Isa and a Sipp with the different providers:

It’s imperative to do your own calculations when thinking about where to put your money. Compare fees by considering the size of your pot, account type, what you want to invest in and how often you want to trade.

Other important Interactive Investor fees

In our view Interactive Investor's trading fees are competitive, but investors in funds should watch out for the £3.99 dealing charge. Some other platforms offer this for free. We like free regular monthly investing, but foreign exchange fees are higher than other platforms - watch out for this if buying US or European stocks.

Trading fees

• UK and US shares, funds, ETFs, bonds and gilts: £3.99
• Other international shares: £9.99 or £5.99 for 'Super Investors'
• Dividend reinvestment: £0.99
• Regular monthly investing: No charge

Foreign exchange fees

• Between £0 and £24,999.99: 1.50 per cent
• Between £25,000 and £49,999.99: 1.25 per cent
• Between £50,000 and £99,999.99: 1.00 per cent
• Between £100,000 and £599,999.99: 0.50 per cent
• For £600,000 or more: 0.25 per cent

Interactive Investor offers a full range of investments, including:

You can choose from a huge range of more than 40,000 stocks, more than 3,000 funds and more than 1,000 ETFs.

This is on par with other traditional investment platforms, so Interactive Investor gives you more than enough choice to build a portfolio suited to your investment style, risk tolerance and overall financial goals.

If you want managed options, Interactive Investor doesn’t build and offer its own ready-made portfolios unlike other platforms.

Instead it markets ‘Quick-start Funds’ that are portfolios built by investment management companies Royal London and Vanguard.

Interactive Investor’s customer service team is generally available from Monday to Friday between 7.45am and 5.30pm.

The lack of weekend availability means it falls short of AJ Bell, Fidelity and Hargreaves Lansdown, which are all available on Saturdays.

You can access Interactive Investor’s help and support in a number of ways. The platform first points you towards its Help Centre, which answers many common questions, including how to add money to your account and how to pay your monthly fee.

It’s also possible to get in touch with Interactive Investor by phone, which is best for more pressing questions about your account.

And while it doesn’t list a customer service email address, you can message the team from your online account securely – a service which I tested.

How did Interactive Investor's customer service perform?

An interesting feature offered by Interactive Investor is the ability to add cash by way of an instant bank payment.

The platform touts this as a way of bypassing the need to use your debit card or make slower traditional bank transfers. After linking your bank account, you can select it from the list of payment options to make an instant transfer.

Having multiple options to add cash to your account quickly is great for investors.

But I was having trouble linking my bank account using the QR code generated by the desktop version of the platform, so I messaged Interactive Investor from my online profile to ask for help.

I asked them whether it was a known issue and if there’s an alternative solution.

Interactive Investor’s chat functionality isn’t live – you get a notification after you send the message saying it may take the team up to five working days to reply.

But I received a reply in less than three hours, which I found to be very helpful.

The customer service representative told me they would forward the problem to the IT team. In the meantime, they detailed the ways I could make an alternative payment to my account. I was grateful to have all this information in the reply, rather than being fobbed off to a page on the Help Centre.

Another member of the This is Money team is a long-term Interactive Investor customer and has had to call them with questions about holdings, the timing of deals, tax-year end related issues and transferring investments to a spouse. He reports that the customer service team are helpful and knowledgeable and rates it as good.

You can use Interactive Investor’s platform on desktop and on mobile by downloading its app. I tested:

• On desktop: setting up a regular investment
• On mobile app: searching for and making a new investment

Setting up a regular investment on desktop

I found it straightforward to add a regular investment to a fund of my choice from my account on desktop.

When you click ‘portfolio’ from the menu, you’ll see a link for ‘free regular investing’ that takes you to a page to set up and manage regular investments.

You must have cash in your account for regular investments to go through.

I added cash to my account using a debit card and set up a monthly direct debit from my bank account. These were both straightforward and explained well with help text.

Interactive Investor requests direct debits on the 12th of each month and executes regular investment instructions on the first Wednesday of each month. This means cash will sit in your account for around three weeks before it’s invested.

While it’s straightforward to set up, Interactive Investor’s regular investing service is less flexible than the ones offered by other investment platforms. For example, this may not work for your pay date.

Platforms including Bestinvest, Fidelity and Hargreaves Lansdown give you the option of setting up regular investments directly to an investment of your choice, skipping the requirement to have cash in your account first.

Fidelity also gives investors much more choice around the frequency of regular savings – monthly, quarterly, every six months or annually – and you can choose one of four dates throughout the month for the payment to be collected.

Searching for and making an investment on mobile

Interactive Investor’s mobile app is straightforward to navigate. After you sign in, you’ll see a menu at the bottom of your account that directs you to take different actions, for example viewing your portfolio, making a trade or checking the cash in your account (‘wallet’).

When you click ‘trade’ you’ll go to a screen that allows you to search for investments.

To search for an investment, you need to know where you want to invest. The ‘research’ tab allows you to get inspiration from the latest articles and videos from Interactive Investor’s experts.

However, I couldn’t find Interactive Investor’s top investment picks – the Super 60 – in the ‘research’ tab of its mobile app.

Instead, I had to navigate back to its website on desktop to see the Super 60. I could navigate to the Super 60 easily from my account on desktop, so the mobile app could integrate this information better.

The ‘trade’ tab does allow you to see popular markets including the FTSE 100, FTSE 250 and the Nasdaq and the companies that comprise those markets.

I found a stock in the FTSE 100 I’d had my eye on. From there it was fast to add cash to my account using the instant bank connection and then make a trade. Interactive Investor charges £3.99 for share dealing for UK and US shares, but this is generally the cheapest of the traditional investment platforms, with a couple of caveats – see more in our comparison to the right.

What other features does Interactive Investor offer?

If you like social trading features, Interactive Investor has a separate mobile app called ‘ii Community’. This stands out as an uncommon feature among traditional investment platforms.

Here Interactive Investor is following in the footsteps of newer players like eToro and Trading 212, which have social features baked into their platforms. eToro bills itself as a ‘social trading network’ rather than a straightforward investment platform.

On Interactive Investor’s community app, you can:

• join groups
• follow particular investments, members or groups
• add comments and reactions to posts in your feed
• take part in polls

While the downside is that it’s a separate app, the community appears lively with a popular group for ‘novice investors’ having more than 500 members.

Interactive Investor has a wealth of investment research available for DIY investors including:

• Super 60: Interactive Investor’s list of its top investment picks
• ACE 40: a list of top picks for sustainable investments
• Winter Portfolios: a list of stocks that rise each winter, backed by past performance data

This type of research is comparable with the information offered by other investment platforms, such as Hargreaves Lansdown’s Wealth Shortlist and Bestinvest’s Best Funds List.

Interactive Investor has also partnered with the independent financial research provider, Morningstar, to plug equities research into the platform.

This is useful – for example, I can see from my account that Morningstar has rated the stock I bought for this review as four stars, which means it’s undervalued.

There are detailed tables you can access based on Morningstar’s data too. These include lists of undervalued and overvalued shares, regional outlook reports and US sector outlook reports.

A Portfolio X-ray tool lets you drill down into your holdings and performance, although this sort of detail can quickly become complicated.

Interactive Investor has a news feed with content written by its experts to help investors stay up to date with the markets.

While Interactive Investor's research is good, less experienced investors may find it difficult to know where to start. It's easy to feel swamped by star ratings, tables and graphs.

Interactive Investor does have a range of informative guides, podcasts and videos that explain key concepts such as ETF investing and managing investment risk.

These are clearly signposted from the desktop version of its website, under the ‘learn’ tab from the menu. However, they aren't well integrated into your online account, so investors may find them tricky to navigate to.

Interactive Investor’s flat-fee structure is what makes the investment platform stand out.

If you’re only just starting to build your portfolio, there may be lower-cost options available. But once your pot reaches a certain size, Interactive Investor’s flat fee comes into its own.

It means you’re charged the same whether the value of your investments are £100,000 or £1million, so it’s worth considering how much you could save under this structure.

The cheapest platform isn’t always the best for you – it all depends on what type of investor you are. For example, if you want to invest in funds or will be making several trades a year, you might want to choose a platform that offers free fund dealing (such as Hargreaves Lansdown) or one that offers free trading credits (such as Charles Stanley Direct).

But in our view Interactive Investor is a great all-round platform, especially for the cost-conscious investor. It’s competitive in terms of fees yet still offers very good customer service and investment research.

While its broader educational content doesn’t particularly stand out, its ‘ii Community’ app is worth looking at. It cribs from newer players such as eToro and Trading 212 and offers investors further value.

> Learn more about Interactive Investor and open an account*