Hargreaves Lansdown is the UK’s leading ‘investment supermarket’ for private investors, with around 1.1m customers. It has a wide range of active and passive funds and direct shares, and plenty of information, guides, and a magazine to help you understand the investment landscape. It also has a good app to help you keep an eye on your portfolio.

AJ Bell is a smart and simple looking platform, managing around £55 billion for 240k customers. Charging is pretty straightforward and low cost. We really like the charts and the bitesize bits of information around investments, and there’s plenty of guidance for first-time investors.

Easy-to-use platform well-established, with around 300k accounts and £30bn of assets. In particular their tiered pricing structure offers some interesting options for those who trade a lot. Having recently purchased another platform business – The Share Centre – it has more scale, and there are plenty of features to help you with your investments.

Clean and easy-to-use site with wide fund range, having recently purchased Selftrade, a broker. Plenty of experience with trading tech as they handle 70% of FTSE-100 share dealing schemes. Lots of interesting data from Morningstar to support investments, as well as guides and insights.

Recently launched in the UK market, as the name implies this is about diving in-and-out of positions without it costing you anything to trade. You get a narrower range because of it: just UK and US stocks, investment trusts and ETFs, and hundreds of options rather than the thousands you get with the other brokers.

One the first movers in digital wealth management in the UK, it is also the largest with about 75k customers. Questionnaires help you understand the level of risk you’re willing to take, and then offer an appropriate risk-adjusted portfolio which will invest into an allocated range of underlying asset classes and markets through low-cost ETFs.

Based in Canada and founded in 2014, this is an established platform with a smooth and very clean investment experience. We particularly like the data visuals such as the sliding risk scale that demonstrate how differing levels of risk alter underlying asset allocation. The human element is also available, as is increasing levels of advice as you deposit larger amounts.

Launched in 2012, this is one of the more established players with around 40,000 customers and plenty of backing from big investors. Its website is clean and easy to use and the costs are competitive, with plenty of nice data visuals.

This class of robo comes under the header of ‘round-ups’, whereby its app automatically rounds-up any purchases you make and uses the extra to invests in its portfolios i.e. if a coffee costs you £2.40, when you pay you will be charged £3 and the app will squirrel 60p away and invest it in your chosen risk portfolio. Good way of nurturing an ‘investing habit’.

A strong, established platform based out of Cardiff, with plenty of information about investing and how they go about creating and maintaining their portfolios, and ethical investment options to tap into the modern mind. Costs are also pretty low, and there’s people to chat to for support if need be.