Review contents
Free investing! Or as close to it as possible. InvestEngine charges no fees at all if you want to manage your investments yourself, and a super low fee of 0.25% if you want their experts to handle things. It’s more than just low cost though, the app is easy to use and there’s a huge range of investment options, plus the service is great. 5 stars from us!
On the surface, InvestEngine looks like a standard investment company – somewhere you can invest hassle-free. But it’s much more than that. It’s an all-round investment platform, perfect for investors of all kinds.
You can choose to manage everything yourself, but there’s hands-off investment options too, where your investments are managed by their experts, so you can just sit back and relax.
Here’s the best bit, it’s the cheapest investment platform out there by far.
There are literally no fees if you want to manage your own investments! And if you want to use their expert managed options, the fee is only 0.25% (other expert-managed platforms typically cost 0.75%).
You still get all the bells and whistles of a good investment platform, such as a great mobile app and website to manage everything, a Stocks & Shares ISA to benefit from tax-free investing, and great customer support.
There’s just one limitation – you can only invest in exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which are groups of stocks and shares (and sometimes other assets such as commercial property and bonds – which are essentially business loans that pay interest), all wrapped up together, into a fund, and the fund itself is managed by experts.
ETFs are a great way to invest, and incredibly popular, most expert-managed investment platforms only use ETFs anyway. You just can’t buy individual stocks and shares directly, such as Google or Netflix, they’d have to be part of an ETF.
If you want to buy individual company shares, check out our best investment platforms.
There’s a huge range to choose from on InvestEngine, with over 700 ETFs, so you’ve got more than enough options!
By the way, you can get up to £100 free as a welcome bonus when you sign up with Nuts About Money. Here's where to claim the deal¹ (you can also get £200 for business accounts too, claim here¹). T&Cs apply.
It is! We wouldn’t recommend starting out with a self-managed portfolio if you are a beginner (a portfolio is what your investments are called), which is where you’re making the investment decisions yourself.
But with InvestEngine you can benefit from the cheap costs of investing using a portfolio managed by experts.
There’s no fees to set up your account, no fees to open and use a Stocks & Shares ISA (which is where you can invest tax-free).
There’s no fees to InvestEngine when investments are bought and sold. In fact, the only cost you’ll pay to InvestEngine is a 0.25% management fee.
But there are other fees included with investing, whichever platform you use (more on these below).
If you compared this with Nutmeg or Moneyfarm (here's our Nutmeg review and Moneyfarm review), both popular investment platforms for beginners, you’d be paying between 0.45 - 0.75%. And if you use a traditional investment platform like Hargreaves Lansdown, it's nearer 2% for them to manage everything for you.
The minimum investment is also only £100, compared to £500 for Nutmeg, and other popular investment apps such as Moneyfarm.
Plus, with InvestEngine, you can create a smaller separate self-managed portfolio when you feel a bit more confident, and start making your own investments too.
If you need any help about using their service or investing in general there's a great help centre too.
Get a welcome bonus of up to £100, and up to £4,000 transfer bonus with Nuts About Money. Use promo code NUTS.
This is the standard investing account, called a General Investment Account (GIA). This is where you might have to pay tax on the profit your money makes (Capital Gains Tax, Income Tax and Dividend Tax).
However, depending on your investment balance, you might not end up paying tax at all. With Capital Gains Tax, you currently have an allowance of £3,000 profit each tax year (April 5th to April 6th the following year) before you have to pay any tax. This applies in the year you sell your investments (so it doesn't add up each year).
You can also open a Stocks and Shares ISA with InvestEngine. These accounts allow you to save up to £20,000 per tax year (your ISA allowance), and everything you make is completely tax free, forever!
Note: tax rules can change in future, and are specific to your individual circumstances.
There’s also a personal pension, technically called a self-invested personal pension, or SIPP.
This is where you can invest for retirement, and benefit from all the amazing tax benefits pensions have, such as your money growing tax-free, and getting a massive 25% bonus from the Government on everything you contribute – and if you’re a higher rate taxpayer (40%) or additional rate taxpayer (45%), you can claim some tax back at those rates too (on a Self Assessment tax return).
You might pay tax when you start withdrawing your money, it all depends on your income at the time, but 25% will always be tax-free.
And, you won’t be able to withdraw any cash until you’re 55 years old (57 from 2028).
There's some great news with the InvestEngine pension too – there's actually no account fees (even for the pension). This is very rare for investment platforms (as there's lots going on behind the scenes with pensions). We'll cover fees more just below.
Nuts About Money tip: to learn more about SIPPs, here’s our guide to the best SIPPs, or visit the InvestEngine website¹.
If you have a limited company, you can open an account with InvestEngine (which isn’t that common). This means you can invest your company’s spare cash to (hopefully) make your business even more money over time.
There’s still no fees to manage it yourself, and the low-fee managed option too.
You can also get your money back quickly if you need it, and with no exit fees.
If you are interested, here's where you can open a business account¹, you'll get a welcome bonus of up to £200. T&Cs apply.
Unfortunately at the moment, you can’t open a Junior ISA (saving money for your kids), or a Lifetime ISA (saving money for your first home) with InvestEngine.
It’s simple. InvestEngine is designed to be as easy as possible for you to either manage your own investments, or get their experts to manage it for you.
You can either use their website, or phone app, choose one of the account options below, and you’re ready to go.
These are quite special. Aside from having no fees, it’s a pretty great way of building and managing your own portfolio. Once you've decided which ETFs you want to invest in (there’s over 700), you can then select the weight that each of your chosen ETFs has in your portfolio.
For instance, let’s say you have 10 ETFs you’d like to invest in, you can set 10% per ETF, and with one-click, you’re done – InvestEngine will handle purchasing the ETFs automatically.
You can set whatever weight you like too, so you can have 1% in one ETF, and 15% in another – you get the idea!
As your investments grow over time, they’ll grow at different rates (and some may not grow), which means the weight of each ETF within your portfolio will change over time too. So one great investment might start at 5% of your portfolio, but end up at 10% after say a year.
That could be an issue for some investors who want the weight of each investment within their portfolio to remain consistent (to manage risk)...
This bit’s really great – you can hit one button to ‘rebalance’ your portfolio back to your original preferred weighting. InvestEngine will buy or sell parts of your portfolio to get back to the perfect balance that you want. Pretty cool.
You can just buy and sell investments manually too.
There’s also an ‘autoinvest’ feature, which automatically invests your money into the investments you’ve chosen. So you can be completely hands-off if you want to.
If you don’t want to manage your own investments, or want an expert to manage some, or most of your money, you can choose a managed portfolio.
This is where you simply add your money, and the experts at InvestEngine handle everything. You’ll need to complete a short questionnaire so the experts can determine which investment is right for you, and that’s it.
These are investments designed for long term, often lifelong savings (for instance, you could save within your pension), and are managed by the expert InvestEngine team.
There’s 5 options to choose from, each with different levels of risk, meaning different types of underlying investments – you would simply pick the one suited towards your goals and acceptable risk level, and that’s it.
Here’s your options:
Each LifePlan has a different fee, which is included within the investment itself, and they range from 0.11% to 0.15% of your investment per year. This is alongside the 0.25% management fee (more on fees below).
The LifePlans are pretty great, once you’re set up, you don’t have to worry about making different investments, it’s all handled for you suited to the investment plan (e.g. high growth or lower growth) and change over time by the experts to align with the goals of each plan – so really, you don’t need to worry about them much (although it’s always good to check in regularly. Don’t forget there will be ups and downs along the way).
However, do bear in mind that these are investments for the long term, typically 5 years or more.
Nuts About Money tip: it’s often a good idea to set up a regular savings plan if you’re investing longer term – your money can really build up over time. Take a look at InvestEngine’s regular investing calculator to see how much you might benefit in the future.
You might have noticed we’ve mentioned the fees quite a bit. Or, the fact there are no fees! This can make a massive difference on your total savings over time.
The only fee you’ll pay to InvestEngine is 0.25% if you decide you’d like a managed portfolio. And that’s cheap. It’s the lowest fee you’ll find on any investment platform for expert-managed investing.
Nuts About Money tip: to get a good idea how much your investments might benefit from lower fees (such as with InvestEngine), check out InvestEngine’s fee calculator¹.
Typical fees for ‘digital wealth managers’ are around 0.75%, which reduce if you invest more money. For a rough guideline, expect to pay 0.35% for those with over £100,000 invested. The more popular investment platforms are Moneyfarm and Nutmeg.
And if you wanted to invest in a more traditional way, with a financial advisor handling everything for you, fees can be as much as 3-5%.
However, you will still have to pay fees that the ETFs themselves charge, which are around 0.2% depending on which ETF you buy, and these fees are paid by everyone who owns the ETF, not just InvestEngine customers.
(ETFs are held by lots of investors across the world, and used by other investment platforms as well).
And there’s also a hidden cost of buying an ETF, called a spread fee, which again everyone who invests in an ETF would pay, and this fee is the difference between the price to buy an ETF and the price to sell an ETF, and it’s often 0.07%.
So all in all, if you wanted a managed portfolio that had an ETF fee of say 0.20% (a rough average), it would look like this:
The customer support is great. You can email, or send them a message directly on the website or app.
The support hours are pretty great too, from 5:30am to 9pm on weekdays, and 8:30am to 5:30pm on the weekends.
Yep. InvestEngine is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), who are the people who make sure your money is safe, by reviewing and approving companies who look after your money.
Your money is also protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), which means if anything should happen to InvestEngine, such as going out of business (very unlikely), you’d get up to £85,000 back.
But there’s even more protection from customers too. Your money is held in a separate protected trust account. Which is completely separate to InvestEngine’s business bank accounts. This means all the money would be returned to customers if InvestEngine were to shut down.
Mobile app: you can manage everything from your phone, on both Apple and Android devices. These apps are highly rated (see above).
No exit fees: there’s no fees to close your account and use another provider, you can leave whenever you like if you choose too. InvestEngine are confident you won’t leave, so no need to charge fees unlike some investment platforms.
Minimum amount: the minimum amount you can invest is quite low – just £100 (compared to an average of around £500 with other platforms).
Withdrawals: you can make withdrawals for free at any time you like, and it’s free to do.
Business account¹: if you’re a business owner, you can invest your company’s spare cash too.
Money Market funds: you can store your money in a Money Market fund where it's used by financial companies (like banks) or things like Treasury Bills (lending money to governments in exchange for interest). The interest you get is usually a lot higher than saving rates at high street banks.
Note: although we say ‘interest’, it’s technically called ‘yield’, which means the return from an investment (and typically measured historically rather than into the future).
Here's a quick run through of the pros and cons:
InvestEngine has a great score on TrustPilot (the popular reviews website), it's an impressive 4.7 out of 5, from over 1,300 reviews.
It’s particularly impressive as companies in finance tend to have much lower scores in general as the customer service tends to be very poor.
However, with InvestEngine, lot’s of the reviews are complementing their great customer service, alongside the experience in general.
InvestEngine’s app is rated 4.8 stars in the App Store and 4.8 in Google Play store!
We like InvestEngine. A lot. When you’re investing, fees can really add up and take a chunk out of your wealth. But with InvestEngine, it’s so low cost you won’t even notice them!
It is quite literally the cheapest way to invest out there. With the self-managed portfolio option there are no management fees at all, and with a managed portfolio it’s 0.25%.
The range of investment options (ETFs) is huge, over 700 to choose from. The mobile app and website are great, and clear and transparent.
The customer service is fantastic, with real people to speak to and great opening hours.
It’s got everything going for it, the only downside is there’s not more ISA options, such as a Junior ISA and Lifetime ISA.
We love it, and a big 5 stars from us.
If you think InvestEngine is for you, get started on the InvestEngine website¹.
Yep! And it's a pretty good one. Get a welcome bonus of up to £100, and up to £4,000 transfer bonus with Nuts About Money. Use promo code NUTS.
All you need to do is use our link to claim the deal¹.
Run a business? You can also get up to a £200 bonus for opening a business account¹.
T&Cs apply.
Get a welcome bonus of up to £100, and up to £4,000 transfer bonus with Nuts About Money. Use promo code NUTS.
Get a welcome bonus of up to £100, and up to £4,000 transfer bonus with Nuts About Money. Use promo code NUTS.
Get a welcome bonus of up to £100, and up to £4,000 transfer bonus with Nuts About Money. Use promo code NUTS.
We’d love to hear from you, and it will help others too.
Christopher Dowling combines a communications degree with over 10 years experience in the financial services industry in London – with focus on educating people on a wide range of money topics in an easy to understand way. He writes about savings, investing, pensions, mortgages, insurance, banking, loans, business finance and other money topics.
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 money, with years of combined experience working in the finance industry and writing about money. We understand the ins and outs, how to get the best deals, save money, and how to communicate money in an easy to understand way (we hope you agree).
More than 20 years of combined experience researching and writing about money
Researched and reviewed a wide range of financial services companies, and have a transparent review process
We follow a strict editorial code to ensure you get the best information possible
Get a welcome bonus of up to £100, and up to £4,000 transfer bonus with Nuts About Money. Use promo code NUTS.
