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The best investment app for beginners is Beach, it's an easy to use app allowing you to save and invest sensibly with investments managed by experts. If you’re looking to make your own investments (managed by you), Lightyear is great and InvestEngine is a great low cost option but you can only invest in ETFs (explained below).
Keen to invest your hard earned money? Great idea. Investing can be a real game changer for your financial future if done sensibly. Your money can seriously grow over time with the right long-term investment strategy.
The best way to invest for the long-term is to simply let the experts handle everything for you. They know what they’re doing and will grow your money over time using the right investment strategies.
Here's the best investment apps for beginners – which are investment platforms (a place to invest) managed by the experts. And, if you are keen to make your own investments, we’ll cover the best self-managed investment apps too.
If you’re new to investing, Beach is easy to use and great for both general investing and pensions.
Great app
A great and easy to use investing app. Add money from your bank or transfer your existing ISA, with the investments handled by experts. There’s a pension pot too.
The customer service is excellent, and has email and phone support based in the UK.
Beach is an easy to use investing app (and easy to set up), just add money and the experts handle everything. It’s all managed on your phone with a great app, and you can see your total savings whenever you like.
You’ll get an easy access pot (access money in around a week), which can be an ISA where all the money you make is tax-free (save up to £20,000 per tax year), and a standard account for those saving in addition to this (or who don’t want an ISA), where there’s no contribution limits (but also no tax-free benefits).
The investments are managed by experts from the largest investment company in the world (BlackRock). And they consider things like reducing climate change, meaning your savings could make the world a little better in future too.
There’s also an optional pension pot to save for retirement, so you can keep all your savings in one place, and if you’ve got lost or old pensions, Beach can also find them and move them over too.
Fees: a simple annual fee of up to 0.98% (minimum £4.99 per month).
Minimum deposit: £25
Customer service: excellent
Pros:
Cons:
Moneyfarm is a great option for saving and investing (both ISAs and pensions). It's easy to use and their experts can help you with any questions or guidance you need.
They have one of the top performing investment records, and great socially responsible investing options too. Plus, you can save cash and get a high interest rate.
The fees are low, and reduce as you save more. Plus, the customer service is outstanding.
Pros
Cons
If you’re new to investing, Beach is easy to use and great for both general investing and pensions.
If you’re new to investing, Beach is easy to use and great for both general investing and pensions.
Deposit £50, get 10 free trades
Lightyear is a great, low cost investing and stock trading platform. There’s a good range of investment options (over 3,000 stocks and ETFs), you can store multiple currencies, and the app itself is modern and super slick.
ETFs are completely free, and stocks are £1/$1/€1 per order.
There's also very low currency conversion fees of 0.35%, or you can hold the currency itself, and avoid this fee.
Company accounts: you can also invest as a business (e.g. limited company), and benefit from all the same low fees and great experience. Just select 'business' in the top of their website after you click through.
Up to £100 welcome bonus
InvestEngine is a super low cost investment platform allowing you to save and invest within a pension and an ISA, and with a great range of investment options.
There's no fees for an account, and no commission to buy and sell investments. And there’s a wide range of investment options, with over 700 investment fund options (ETFs only).
It's more than just low cost though, it’s pretty easy to use, there’s some great features to help you invest, and the customer service is excellent.
If you’re new to investing, Beach is easy to use and great for both general investing and pensions.
Get £50 added to your pension
PensionBee is our recommended provider – they’ve thought of everything.
Their 5 star rated app (and website) makes it easy to set up and use. You can open a brand new pension, or transfer your existing pensions across (they’ll handle all the paperwork).
Simply pick from an easy to understand range of pension plans, and that’s it, the experts manage everything from there.
It’s low cost, with one simple annual fee. The customer service is excellent, and you’ll get a dedicated account manager for any questions you might have.
And, when the time comes to retire, withdrawing from your pension is easy too.
You can also use them if you're self-employed or a company director.
Great app
A great and easy to use pension. Add money from your bank or combine old pensions into one, (they’ll find lost pensions too).
The customer service is excellent, and has email and phone support based in the UK.
Beach is an easy to use pension app (and easy to set up), where you just add money and the experts handle everything. It’s all managed on your phone with a great app, and you can see your total pension pot whenever you like.
If you’ve got lost or old pensions, Beach can also find them and move them over too, so you can keep all your retirement savings in one place, and never have to worry about losing them in future.
You’ll get an automatic 25% bonus on the money you add to your pension pot from your bank account (tax relief from the government), which refunds 20% tax on your income, and if you pay 40% or 45% tax, you’ll typically be able to claim the extra back too.
The pension plan (investments) are managed by experts, who are the largest investment company in the world (BlackRock). And they consider things like reducing climate change, meaning your savings could make the world a little better in future too.
You can also save and invest alongside your pension with an easy access pot (access money in around a week), designed for general savings, with the investments managed sensibly by experts too. And money made can be tax-free within an ISA.
Fees: a simple annual fee of up to 0.98% (minimum £4.99 per month).
Minimum deposit: £25
Customer service: excellent
Pros:
Cons:
To find the best investment apps for beginners, we looked at a range of criteria:
There's now a lot of good investment apps out there, but we’ve narrowed it down to the best – ones we use ourselves here at Nuts About Money. You can’t go wrong – as long as you use their experts to manage your money, or a sensible investment strategy for your own investments.
An expert-managed investment app is a place to invest your money. You’ll simply add your money, and use an app to manage your money, and track your investment portfolio (where your money is invested).
Behind the scenes, there’s experts managing your money and devising the right investment strategies to achieve your goals – whether that’s saving for retirement, saving for a big purchase, or anything else. They’ll also be constantly monitoring and adjusting the investments to make sure they’re on track.
To see our top picks scroll up or click top picks for expert-managed investment apps.
Note: sometimes experts looking after your money is also called wealth management.
These are sometimes called trading apps, or trading platforms. These investing apps are where instead of experts managing your money, you’ll make your own investment decisions (buy and sell investments).
They’re more suited to experienced investors. However, if you’re looking to learn about trading and investing, our best self-managed investment apps have some great resources to help you get started.
Anyway, with a self-managed investment platform, you’ll pick from a huge range of investment options, such as individual stocks and shares, funds and more (we’ll cover types of investments below). It’s all up to you.
It’s best to use an investment strategy to decide which investments to make, and build a diversified portfolio – that’s where you have a range of different investments to reduce your overall risk and grow your money over time.
As a reminder, scroll up or click top self-managed investment apps to see our recommendations.
Here’s where to learn more about investing for beginners.
Not quite sure what investing is? To put simply, investing is using your money to (hopefully) make more money – growing your money over time.
There’s lots of different ways to invest (we’ll list the main types below), but with an expert-managed account you don’t need to worry too much about where exactly your money is invested, the experts will handle everything, you simply pick from a small range of investment options that suit you. For instance, socially responsible investing (e.g. no fossil fuel companies).
Let’s dive into that a bit more. Expert-managed investment apps offer a range of simple investment options that suit different types of people. They’re often categorised into risk levels (don’t let the word risk put you off), from low risk to higher risk.
With higher risk, the aim is to grow your money as much as possible (sensibly), and there’s normally more ups-and-downs along the way – but over the long-term this should make you more money. And with lower risk options, there’s less ups-and-downs, but your money is likely to grow slower.
There’s quite a few different types of things you can invest in, all suited to different types of investment strategies. Here’s the main types:
These are where you own part of a company (a business) – you own a ‘share’ of the company. These can go up and down in value, normally depending on how well the company performs. They can also pay out their profits to shareholders, which is called dividends.
Exchange-traded funds (ETFs), are groups of investments (such as stocks and shares) all pooled together into a single investment – making it much easier to buy and sell (you don't have to buy them individually). For instance, a collection of green energy companies, or electric vehicle companies.
These groups of investments are called investment funds, or mutual funds, and are traded on stock exchanges (a place to buy and sell investments), and therefore called exchange-traded funds. And they’re super popular!
These are where governments and large corporations essentially borrow money from you in return for interest. These are often thought of as lower risk investments.
This is often commercial property, such as shops and offices, that pay rent – which provides an income to the investors.
With a lot of investment apps, you’ll have the option to invest in a Stocks and Shares ISA. This is an investment account where everything you make is completely tax-free, forever!
You won’t have to worry about Capital Gains Tax, Income Tax or Dividend Tax. They’re all taxes that you might have to pay if you invested outside of an ISA.
If you did have to pay Capital Gains Tax, you’d pay it on any profit you make over £3,000 (when you sell your investments). And you’d pay 18% of your profits if you were a basic rate taxpayer (earning less than £50,270 per year from your salary), and 24% if you were a higher rate taxpayer (earning more than £50,270 per year).
You can save or invest up to £20,000 per tax year (April 6th to April 5th the following year), called your ISA allowance.
Nuts About Money tip: See how much you could save with our Stocks and Shares ISA calculator and compare all the top Stocks and Shares ISAs.
If you have used up your ISA allowance or prefer not to open an ISA, you can invest within a General Investment Account (GIA).
There's no limit to the amount you can add to a GIA but they don’t have any tax-free benefits.
This is one of your best options to save for your retirement – a personal pension.
When you save and invest with a personal pension, you’ll get a massive 25% bonus on everything you pay in. Yep, we’re not joking! This is from the government and paid automatically straight into your pension pot.
And if you’re a higher rate taxpayer (40%), or an additional rate taxpayer (45%), you can claim some of this back too (on your Self Assessment tax return).
A personal pension is a type of private pension, that’s a pension in your name, and you decide how much you pay in, and when to withdraw it (as long as you’re over 55). The other type of private pension is a workplace pension, which you’ll likely have if you’re employed, and it’s all set up by your employer.
There’s also the State Pension, which is the government pension – and you’ll get this at the State Pension age (currently 66), if you’ve paid enough National Insurance contributions in your working career (at least 10 years, but 35 years to get the full amount).
Saving for retirement with a personal pension is a great way to boost your retirement income, it’s unlikely the State Pension, even together with a workplace pension is going to build a big enough pension pot to have a comfortable retirement.
If you want to learn more, here’s how much you’ll need in your pension pot to retire.
You’ll be able to save up to £60,000 per tax year, or as much as your income (e.g. your salary), whichever is lower. And, you can have as many personal pensions as you like.
When you do start withdrawing your pension, the first 25% will be completely tax-free, and you can take this as a tax-free lump sum if you like. How much tax you’ll pay on the remaining 75% depends on your income at the time.
To find out how much you'll receive in retirement use our pension calculator.
You can also save for your kids’ future (if you have them), with a Junior ISA. This is where you open an investing account in your kids name, and save completely tax-free. They’ll be able to access the money when they turn 18.
You can save up to £9,000 per year, and this is completely separate from your own £20,000 ISA allowance.
If you’re just starting investing and haven’t got any savings yet, don’t worry. You can start from just £25 with Beach¹ (investments managed by experts) and £1 with Lightyear¹ (no expert help).
With the other investing apps, you’ll usually need a minimum investment of around £500. Unless you’re using an investing app specific for pensions, such as PensionBee¹ – where you can get started with as little as you like.
You might be thinking investment apps must be really expensive if they’re handling everything for you and some even provide investment advice. Well actually no! They’re much cheaper than financial advisors (human advisors who look after your money).
For expert-managed investment apps, you’ll pay a simple annual management fee, which is a percentage of your total investment, and this can range from around 0.25% to 1%.
You’ll then pay fees on the investments themselves (the investment funds), and this can range from 0.05% to 0.4%+. And sometimes there are small trading fees involved when the experts buy and sell investments.
All of these fees together is what you’ll pay, and our suggestions above are very good value and have low fees overall. Expect to pay around 1% per year, and this can sometimes reduce when you save more.
Overall, self-managed investment platforms are generally cheaper than expert-managed apps, as you’re not getting expert advice or experts handling your investments. However that doesn’t mean expert-managed apps are not great value.
With some self-managed platforms, you’ll pay an annual management fee for the platform to hold your investments, which can be from 0.25% to 0.45% (normally only if you hold mutual funds), and you pay pay a trading fee, or share dealing fee, to buy and sell investments This can range from no fee (commission-free) to as much as £11.95 per trade.
The top investment apps we’ve listed above are all low cost, in fact, eToro¹ is completely commission-free and has no account fees at all. You’ll often only pay a fee to convert your money to another currency when buying investments not in the UK (called a currency-conversion fee).
Yep! All investment apps in the UK have to be registered and approved by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). They’re the guys who make sure your money and investments are safe.
You can check if an investment app has been authorised by the FCA by checking the FCA register. All the ones we’ve listed above are FCA authorised.
It also means your money is protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), which gives you protection of up to £85,000 should anything happen to the investment app, such as going out of business (unlikely).
However, your money and investments are actually held with a large bank, rather than with the investment app, and all in your name, and they can only be returned to you.
And that's it! Hopefully it makes a bit more sense now. We hope you’re convinced that investing for your future in a safe and sensible way can really benefit your financial future.
We recommend using an expert-managed investment app, for our top picks scroll up or click top expert-managed investment app. Why not just let the experts grow your money over time? It’s much easier.
That’s it! All the best investing.
We’d love to hear from you, and it will help others too.
Edward Savage is a leading expert on money, with a background of 8 years working in financial services in London, has a business, accounting and finance degree, runs an investing community, and teaches people about money. He writes about all aspects of personal finance, including pensions, investing, mortgages and insurance.
This article was written, reviewed and fact checked by the expert team at Nuts About Money. You’re in safe hands. Learn more.
We're experts in all things investing, with many years of combined experience writing and talking about investing and trading. Some of our team were top financial advisors. We understand and love helping people learn more about both short term trading and investing for the long term – investing can be a great way to grow your money over time.
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If you’re new to investing, Beach is easy to use and great for both general investing and pensions.