Acorns and Robinhood are both, on the very surface, investment-related apps that could help you learn a little bit more about finance and even make a little money by investing in equities or crypto.
While the similarities between these two innovative apps don’t end there, they take almost polar opposite approaches toward how they go about it—to the point that their core features aren’t even available on the other platform.
This guide is going to hold the microscope over both Robinhood and Acorns, and show you who they’re best for, what you can do on the two apps, how much it costs to use them, and how safe they are.
Once you’re through reading this, you will be in a position to decide which of the two you’d rather try if not both, and how exactly you can extract the most value from these two investing apps.
What is Acorns?
Acorns, founded in 2012 by Walter and Jeff Cruttenden, is an investment app that simplifies finance while promoting passive investment.
The feature that it’s primarily known for is called Round Ups, where app users can round up their daily expenditures to the nearest dollar by investing the spare change from each of these bills.
This novel concept ensured that Acorns hit the ground running when it launched, and the platform has added plenty of features since.
It remains true to the initial goal of simplifying and democratizing investing, and opens up a surprising variety of possibilities and investment options all tied to daily savings and expenditure.
What is Robinhood?
Robinhood is a popular trading app and US-based broker-dealer, and is widely considered one of the pioneers of zero-commission trading.
Subject to plenty of publicity both good and bad in recent years, Robinhood is almost always at the forefront of the conversation when it comes to retail traders.
Much like Acorns, Robinhood also claimed the goal of democratizing access to the stock market, although their approach couldn’t be any different—while Acorns is all about investing spare change, Robinhood is all slick UI and gamification, for a time resembling a mobile gaming app in terms of feedback on trades a user would make.
Robinhood gives you the ability to buy stocks and cryptocurrencies, and even trade advanced financial products like options without jumping through the same sort of hoops that a lot of traditional brokers impose.
With this app you’ll be up and trading in no time, but it’s on you to arm yourself with the information and skill you’ll need to navigate the markets safely.
Investing with Acorns and Robinhood
So, how exactly do Acorns’ and Robinhood’s core features work?
Acorns Round Ups
Acorns has a flagship feature called Round Ups which invests your spare change for you. This is a surprisingly powerful feature, and all you need to do is think about your daily expenses.
$7.20 for a cup of coffee? $78.65 for fuel? $23.45 for a handful of groceries? Well, when you round each of those purchases up, you’ll see how things add up—and in this case, just those three hypothetical bills give you a difference of $1.70. Acorns will take this difference and invest it once an aggregate of $5 is built up.
If $1.70 saved in one day doesn’t sound like it could become a big investment, think again. Acorns does this every single day, meaning you’re looking at close to $50 per month in this example alone.
That’s not a bad sum, especially for someone who’s got many years of investing ahead of them, and when you do the math across this sort of long time frame and factor in potential appreciation, the numbers will tell a very compelling story.
The money goes into a diversified mix of stocks and bonds or ETFs depending on what you choose as your investment goals, although custom portfolios are possible too if you’re on the right subscription tier—this simply means that you can pick and choose stocks and ETFs and add them to the diversified options that Acorns gives you.
Acorns investment options
Beyond the signature Round Up feature, Acorns offers investors several other options when it comes to wealth-building. For one, they have several diversified portfolios you can put money into, and these are built and managed by professionals at firms like Vanguard and BlackRock.
Alongside the Round Ups or Acorns investment portfolios, you’ll also be able to start an automated retirement account on the platform. Saving and investment is managed on your behalf, and you’ll also be able to claim thousands in bonus investments when you shop with brands that ink deals with Acorns.
In fact, a Gold Acorns subscription (more on that later) powers up the retirement account option even further, with the platform providing a 3% IRA match on new contributions to the account.
In all, there are five different Acorns Core portfolios and four Acorns ESG portfolios, each built by experts. Each portfolio is composed of ETFs that provide broad exposure to stocks, bonds, and even Bitcoin.
Acorns also offer retirement accounts called Acorns Later, where you can set up an IRA portfolio to meet your long-term goals. It’s all automated once you’ve set things up, and you can choose between a Traditional, Roth, or SEP IRA. You can start one of these accounts with just $5 to get the ball rolling.
Financial literacy and investment for kids with Acorns Early
Acorns is all about long-term investment, and it’s only natural that the next generation enters the picture when that’s the time frame that you’re looking at.
Acorns is more proactive than almost any other investing app in this regard thanks to Acorns Early, a smart money app and debit card that helps kids learn about money and investing.
Acorns Early can be tailored to the age of your kids, with chores, allowances, and interactive learning courses available for younger kids and options like expenditure tracking, budgeting, and saving being aimed at older children.
Parental controls apply the whole way, giving you an overview of what your kids are spending on, and the debit card can instantly be blocked if it’s lost or stolen.
Aside from the options that help kids develop financial literacy, Acorns Early can be straight-up convenient when it comes to allowances or rewarding them with a little spending money—no more worrying about cash in birthday cards from grandma either, since family and friends can send money straight to your kids’ cards with Relatives accounts and Giftlinks.
You can also invest on your kids’ behalf with Acorns Early Invest, where you can start with $5 and start investing at any interval you wish.
All you need to start this type of account is your child’s name, birthday, and SSN to set up automatic recurring contributions, and the account itself is a UTMA/UGMA (Uniform Transfer to Minors/Uniform Gift to Minors) and can be used in various ways down the line as long as it directly benefits the child.
You can also share a link with family or friends in case they want to make a contribution toward your child’s future.
When exactly your child can access the funds depends on your jurisdiction and usually is between 18-25, and funds in Early Invest are placed into the Acorns Aggressive Portfolio.
Trading stocks and ETFs on Robinhood
Stock trading is the reason why most of Robinhood’s users sign up in the first place, and the platform offers access to a good number of US stocks as well as ETFs with zero commissions.
As a Robinhood user, you’re going to be picking stocks and building your portfolio however you want to, and it’s extremely easy to do once you’ve signed up.
Beyond the fact that you don’t need to worry about paying commissions on any trades or stock purchases that you make, one of Robinhood’s big benefits is the fact that it allows you to purchase fractional shares.
This is a huge boon for retail investors, since it allows adding exposure to some pretty expensive stocks into small starter portfolios.
Dollar cost averaging (DCA) is an investing style that’s often recommended, and it’s possible to execute much more easily when you can pick up fractions of shares. If fractionals weren’t an option, then it’d only really be possible to DCA into penny stocks since, by and large, blue chips would be off the table.
Trading options on Robinhood
Not every trading platform makes it easy to trade options, and you’re certainly not going to get a sight of them on an app like Acorns.
Even brokers who do offer options will limit access to this complex derivative, and for good reason—it’s very, very easy to lose money with options. And it’s even easier to lose money when trading advanced options on margin.
Robinhood, for better or for worse, doesn’t put as many roadblocks in the way, instead encouraging newer investors to experiment with options.
All you need to do is hit the search bar for the name of the stock or ETF, then choose to Trade Options. Then it’s just a matter of choosing a strike and expiration, no questions asked.
Robinhood’s cryptocurrencies
Robinhood has always been ahead of the game in certain areas, and cryptocurrencies is one of them since they’re a lot deeper into crypto than just about any other broker on the US market.
In fact, Robinhood also accepts customers in geographies like the EU for crypto trading, while equities are limited to just US residents.
Trading crypto on Robinhood is easy, and the platform executes your orders as limits collared to 1% for buys and 5%, giving you an element of protection from the sudden swings of the crypto market’s infamous volatility.
However, custodying crypto can be an issue as Robinhood traditionally has not allowed users to transfer their crypto assets off the platform—to the extent that the Department of Justice also got involved, with Robinhood having to settle with the California AG to the tune of $3.9 million for violating California Commodities Law and agreeing to allow customers to withdraw crypto from the platform going forward.
As the saying in the crypto community goes, “not your keys, not your crypto”. Any platform that refuses to let you transfer your crypto into your own wallet is met with suspicion.
How much do Acorns and Robinhood cost?
What are Acorns pricing options?
Acorns utilized a tiered subscription model that you’re probably familiar with from any number of other services that you use, and they’re not going to be one of the most expensive given that only the top plan clears double digits.
Acorns Gold, which even offers a free month when you first sign up, is the closest option to a standard brokerage given that it unlocks the option to add individual stocks to your portfolio.
It also provides a 3% IRA match on new contributions with Acorns Later, and gives you an Acorns Early account (valued at $5 per month if taken separately) including the kids investment account with a 1% match—all in all, an excellent choice for long-term investing with the next generation in mind.
Acorns Gold also provides a $10,000 life insurance policy for eligible customers and provides a no-cost will (valued at $259) to help you plan for your family’s future.
Acorns Silver, meanwhile, provides a 1% IRA match on new contributions to your Acorns Later account rather than the 3% from gold but 0% from Bronze. Silver also powers up your banking options if you do choose to manage your money with Acorns, unlocking Mighty Oak Banking.
This service, developed in partnership with Dwayne Johnson a.k.a. The Rock, gives you an emergency fund with 4.05% APY as well as 2.57% APY on Checking along with a sweet Limited Edition tungsten debit card.
Acorns Bronze gives you plenty of financial education with a selection of courses as well as videos for investors of all levels, but Silver and Gold go the extra mile with live Q&As with investing experts.
Zero commissions, but does Robinhood have fees?
Robinhood doesn’t charge its users any sort of commission when it comes to the trades that they make, which makes all sorts of trading styles viable.
Micro investing is especially easy to pull off given that you don’t need to worry about the dollar value of each trade—some brokers charge a flat fee, for example, so that puts you under pressure to make sizable enough trades that the fee becomes negligible.
With Robinhood, it’s after the trading’s done that the fees start coming in. Users would be wise to ensure that they’re set to receive electronic delivery of all paperwork since just about any sort of mail carries a fee, from $2 for paper statements to $20 or $50 for overnight mail depending on whether it’s domestic or international.
You’ll also have to cough up a rather steep $100 if you want to transfer your assets to another platform. This isn’t something too many users consider, especially in the honeymoon period of first getting approved for and trading on the app, but there are a lot of reasons to change venue.
Robinhood’s analysis and charting doesn’t quite hold water compared to what competitors like Webull provide, and you’ll also need to head to a more established alternative like Fidelity if you want to DRS your shares since Robinhood doesn’t allow it.
How does Robinhood make money?
Robinhood isn’t a charity, and it isn’t an organization that exists thanks to grants and donations. So, can it exist off the back of a few fees levied on things like paper statements, given that it doesn’t charge users commissions, or is there another source of revenue?
Well, you may have noticed by this point that we’ve referred to people who use the Robinhood platform not as customers, but users.
That’s because Robinhood’s users are in fact the company’s product, and its actual customers are Wall Street firms like Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial, falling under the category of “market makers”.
Almost all of Robinhood’s meaningful revenues are transaction-based, with transaction-based revenues from options accounting for close to half of the total transaction-based revenue figure.
So, what does that mean, exactly?
Well, Robinhood’s customers take advantage of a practice called Payment For Order Flow, which was pioneered by Bernie Madoff and is banned in the EU, to ensure that Robinhood is well compensated for sending trade orders to their venues for execution.
The market makers can then profit from the spread, and while there are regulations meant to ensure that traders get the best possible execution on their orders, London Business School researchers compared the practice to exchanging currency at an airport—no fee or commission, but terrible spreads.
Robinhood was in fact the broker that disrupted the market in 2013 by leveraging PFOF in order to offer customers a “free” trading app—and they’re still at it, as evidenced by the above snapshot of their revenues and this extract from their February ‘25 10-K:
Market makers saw fit to hand them a whopping $1.6 billion in 2024 for routing user orders their way—which means said market makers earned a whole lot more than that by profiting off the spread on those same orders.
Robinhood users may not have to pay fees, but the implication here is that they might be paying quite a bit more for their actual trades than they ought to.
In 2020, the SEC charged Robinhood for misleading users by executing orders at prices inferior to those of other brokers, citing user losses of over $34 million even after factoring in the fact that Robinhood doesn’t charge commissions. These charges were settled by Robinhood for $65 million.
Are Acorns and Robinhood safe?
One of the first things to note, under the aegis of safety, is that while Acorns mentions a product called Mighty Oak Banking and the trademarked Mighty Oak debit card while also offering all-digital banking services, it isn’t actually a bank.
All of the Acorns debit cards and banking services are issued and provided by Lincoln Savings Bank or NBKC Bank (stylized nbkc bank), both of which are members of the FDIC and therefore guarantee certain account protections.
Acorns offers its investment advisory services via Acorns Advisors, which is registered with the SEC, and brokerage services go under Acorns Securities, which is a SEC-registered broker-dealer and member of FINRA and SIPC.
As such, cash in your Acorns accounts are protected to industry standards, and the same goes for Robinhood which is a FINRA/SIPC member and registered broker-dealer via Robinhood Financial.
SIPC protections cover customers to the tune of up to $500,000, covering users of both apps on the securities front, while Acorns digital banking customers are additionally protected by FDIC insurance of checking accounts up to $250,000.
Acorns have a relatively clean track record when it comes to safety, although in August 2021 users did report receiving emails saying that their accounts were locked due to unusual activity.
The company later responded to this issue online, saying on social media that these emails were sent in error and that all user accounts remained secure.
Then in 2022, Acorns confirmed that it had been subject to a data breach, with the company adding that an unauthorized party gained access to sensitive consumer data on the Acorns network—including names, DOBs, SSNs, financial account numbers, and other information. Notification about this data breach was sent out to all affected users in August 2022.
Robinhood, meanwhile, were hit by a significant data breach in late 2021 thanks to a social engineering attack which resulted in the exposure of email addresses of 5 million users and full names of 2 million users.
Over three years following this breach, two brokerage units of Robinhood agreed to pay $45 million to settle an SEC investigation into the matter—and this is just the latest in a lengthening record of litigation.
The most serious of these incidents was the suicide of 20-year old college student Alex Kearns, who incorrectly believed he had accumulated a negative cash balance of around $730,000 on the app. According to his family, Kearns had made repeated attempts to contact Robinhood representatives to clarify the matter, to no avail.
Robinhood were fined $57 million by FINRA and ordered to pay $12.6 million in compensation to users who had been misled or fed false information by the app, a complaint whose scope included Kearns’ tragic death.
Who is Acorns best for?
Acorns is best for people who aren’t very well versed in finance or investing but would like to take positive steps in both upping their financial literacy and starting to put money away for a rainy day more smartly than in a basic savings account.
Its core Round Ups feature is an innovative way to both teach the value of savings and actually go about investing in a manner that doesn’t break the budget, and that’s important in several ways today—consumerism is at the very core of modern life and very few people are even halfway able to teach financial responsibility, so Acorns fulfils and important role.
Acorns also excels when it comes to cash-backs because there’s acknowledgement that it’s impossible to actually cut spending entirely, and the integration of its banking functions with the different investment options (including kids and retirement accounts) make actually managing your money very easy.
Who is Robinhood best for?
Robinhood were the pioneers of zero-commission trading and have undeniably played a role in democratizing the world of investing, and they’re still one of the best options for US residents wanting to try their hand at stock trading on the go.
The app is slick and its UI is rewarding even though some of the platform’s trademark gamification elements have been turned down a notch or two. The fact that there were once literal bells and whistles when you made a trade does tell a story, though, and the central takeaway is that Robinhood incentivises trading—the company itself depends on users buying and selling advanced instruments like options as often as possible.
As such, Robinhood is probably best for newer traders wanting to see what buying and selling equities and options feels like, although for anything more serious than a flutter in the washroom or on the subway, there are better stock trading apps out there.
Acorns vs. Robinhood at a glance
Main similarities between Acorns and Robinhood
- Beginner focus:
Both Acorns and Robinhood are tailored toward novice investors or traders, and their respective user bases aren’t considered especially sophisticated.
Alternatives to Robinhood such as Webull provide more charting options for advanced traders, and traditional powerhouses like Fidelity can match the low fees but win with their track record and array of features.
That being said, Acorns could also be very suitable to more financially literate users who like Acorns’ Round Ups and enjoy allowing the platform to automate what they otherwise would need to do manually. - Slick UI:
Acorns and Robinhood are both extremely easy to use and are designed as mobile-first platforms, with all features accessible with a minimum of fuss.
This ties into their position as beginner-friendly apps, with all core features being very convenient to get to and utilize. - Monthly subscription:
Acorns operates as a monthly subscription service and, while Robinhood is nominally a free app, it does offer the $5 Robinhood Gold subscription that gives you extra analysis and news as well as higher interest rates for cash in your account.
Biggest differences between Acorns and Robinhood
- Revenue model:
Despite the fact that Robinhood Gold brings in a little cash every month, it is a long way from being the main source of revenue as with Acorns.
Robinhood’s bread and butter is PFOF, and its customers are market makers who pay for the routing of Robinhood users’ trades. - Active vs. passive investment:
Acorns is all about passive, hands-off investing, and collects little chunks of cash at a time before investing on your behalf.
Robinhood, on the other hand, encourages users to be active traders, wheeling and dealing on the markets using profitable (to them) instruments like crypto and options. - Safety record:
Acorns has a relatively clean bill of health with just one real breach of note, while Robinhood has an extensive history not just of breaches but also litigation and controversy that potential users should be aware of.
Get the most out of Acorns and Robinhood with Whop
We’ve billed both Acorns and Robinhood as appropriate apps for different styles of investing (active and passive) for beginners to the world of finance, and zero financial or trading knowledge is required to download either of them and explore what’s possible.
However, financial literacy has never been more important, and learning how things work can help you get the best out of either app—from picking the right sort of goals, horizons, and ETFs on Acorns, to staying safe in the high-risk world of options and crypto on Robinhood.
Acorns provides plenty of learning resources to get started with, but Whop is where you can really give yourself a leg up. It’s not just videos and a few trading tips we’re talking about here—Whop is home to the internet’s foremost trading groups, and you’ll find communities dedicated to different styles of trading, such as day trading, as well as groups homing in on different trading instruments to develop and disseminate their expertise.
We think checking out the top options trading communities is absolutely essential if you’re even thinking about downloading Robinhood, given just how complex it is, and a course, workshop, or mentorship as found on Whop could be the difference between making some money or losing your shirt.
Whether you want to give yourself the best possible chance of reaching your financial goals, learn about the modern markets, or simply try your hand at making a little money through investing or trading, Whop’s definitely got you covered.
