Brokerage platforms compared: commissions, order types, approval

The five axes, and why these five

Every comparison on this site runs on the same five columns: the commission charged per options contract, the number of distinct order types the platform accepts, the options approval tier structure, whether fractional shares are supported, and the level of market data included. They were chosen because each one is a published fact with a single correct answer at a given date, and because each one changes what you can actually do rather than how the app feels.

Deliberately absent: any rating, any "best for beginners" label, and any assessment of the user interface. The first two require a judgment about your priorities. The third is real but not mechanical, and it dates faster than anything else in the industry.

Order-type counts are the most underrated column

Two platforms can both charge zero commission and differ enormously in what they let you instruct. A platform that accepts only market and limit orders cannot express "sell if it falls through this level, but never below that one". Stop, stop-limit, trailing stop, bracket and conditional orders are the vocabulary of risk control, and the size of that vocabulary is a hard constraint on how a position can be managed. It is also entirely invisible in a fee comparison.

Approval tiers decide what is even available

Options approval is a broker-side permission system, not a market rule. Tiers typically start with covered calls and cash-secured puts, then add long calls and puts, then spreads, then uncovered positions. The names and numbering differ between platforms, which is why the compare tool records the tier structure rather than a single number. A reader who has understood the mechanics of a bear call spread and finds it unavailable is looking at an approval question, not a market one, the contract itself is covered in the options section.

Fractional shares are a bookkeeping arrangement

A fraction of a share is not a market instrument. Exchanges trade whole shares, so a platform offering fractional dealing is buying whole shares for its own account and allocating slices of them to customers on its internal books. That works, and it is how a reader with fifty dollars can hold part of an expensive share, but it has mechanical consequences worth knowing in advance. Fractions usually cannot be transferred to another broker, so moving an account tends to force a sale of the fractional remainder. Fractional orders are often batched and executed at set times rather than sent immediately, and a limit order may not be available on them at all. Voting rights and the treatment of corporate actions are handled by the broker rather than by the registrar. None of this is hidden; all of it lives in the customer agreement rather than in the marketing, which is why the compare tool records fractional support as a yes or no and each platform page says what that yes actually involves.

Where your order goes after you send it

A retail order does not usually travel straight to an exchange. Many platforms route to wholesalers who execute against their own inventory, and some are compensated for that routing. The mechanism has consequences worth knowing: the price you receive is measured against the national best bid and offer, and the routing arrangement is disclosed in regulatory filings rather than in the app. The comparison pages state each platform's routing arrangement as a fact and stop there, because whether it costs you anything is a genuinely contested empirical question. What happens to the order after that point, whether the fill, the tier or the settlement, is the subject of the execution section.