Best Public.com Alternatives in 2026

Public gets more right than most of the apps it gets compared to. The interface is clean, it opened up bonds and treasuries to people who used to find them intimidating, and the options rebate model, where Public's site advertises $0.06 to $0.18 per stock or ETF contract based on monthly volume, is a different structure from the usual per contract fee.

And Alpha deserves to be said plainly rather than buried: Public ships an AI research product that is free to all of its investors and reads SEC filings, earnings calls and transcripts, analyst ratings, news and social sentiment. That is not a gimmick. Filings-grounded AI research was a paid feature everywhere twelve months ago and Public gives it away. Public labels it experimental and explicitly not investment research, which is a fair and honest caveat, but the thing itself is good.

So why look elsewhere.

A broker can only see its own walls

One account is the whole field of view. Every insight Public produces is scoped to the money you hold at Public. If your 401(k) sits at Fidelity, an old Roth is at Schwab and your employer's RSUs vest into Morgan Stanley, none of that exists as far as Public is concerned. Your concentration risk is computed against a fraction of your actual exposure. This is not a criticism of Public specifically. It is structurally true of every broker and it is the single most common reason people end up unhappy with a brokerage's analytics.

There are no mutual funds. Public covers stocks, ETFs, options, bonds, treasuries and crypto. If you hold mutual funds, and most people with a retirement account do, they cannot come with you.

The account lineup is narrower than the incumbents. Brokerage, margin, traditional and Roth IRAs, crypto IRAs, high yield cash, bond accounts and direct indexing are all there. Custodial and trust accounts are not, at the time of writing, which makes Public hard to adopt as the only place your money lives.

Premium adds up. $10 a month, or free if you hold $50,000 or more. Reasonable pricing, but if the reason you are paying is analytics on one account, that is worth interrogating.

Depending on which of those is your actual problem, you want a different broker or a different layer. Both lists follow.

If you want a different broker

Fidelity

The default answer for most people, and it is the default for real reasons. Every account type including custodial and trust, mutual funds, $0 commissions on online US stock and ETF trades, and a research section that bundles reports from a long list of third party providers at no extra charge.

Good at: being the place your whole financial life can actually live.

Stops at: interface, which is dated in places, and information volume. Fidelity gives you more research than a person can read and very little help ranking it against what you own.

Charles Schwab

Similar breadth, plus thinkorswim, which remains one of the best charting and options analysis platforms available to individuals at no additional cost.

Good at: covering both the buy-and-hold investor and the active trader in one login.

Stops at: complexity. Schwab has absorbed several platforms over the years and it shows. Both Schwab and Fidelity charge a per contract options fee where Public pays a rebate, so if you trade options in any volume, run your own numbers against their current fee schedules before switching.

Interactive Brokers

The choice if your investing is not US only. IBKR reaches global markets that consumer apps do not touch, and IBKR Lite offers commission free trading on US listed stocks and ETFs.

Good at: international access, margin costs, and the professional tooling underneath.

Stops at: friendliness. The learning curve is steep and the interface assumes you already know what you are doing. Not the app you hand to someone making their first trade.

Robinhood

The closest direct comparison to Public in feel, and the closest competitor to Alpha. Robinhood Gold is $5 a month and includes Cortex, an AI assistant that answers questions about the market and your holdings and generates portfolio digests explaining what moved.

Good at: mobile polish, and Cortex is a real product rather than a bolt-on.

Stops at: exactly the same wall as Public. Cortex sees Robinhood accounts. If your money is spread across three institutions, Robinhood's picture is as partial as Public's.

M1 Finance

Different philosophy. You define target allocations as a pie and M1 handles the buying and rebalancing on a schedule.

Good at: people who want a rules-based system they do not have to touch, and who would rather not be tempted into decisions at 10am on a Tuesday.

Stops at: control over execution timing, and research depth, which is not why anyone uses M1. As of August 2026, check m1.com for current pricing on their paid tier.

If you want better insight without moving your money

Koyfin

If your complaint is that Public's research is thin rather than that it is limited to Public, Koyfin is a research terminal that does not care where you hold your account. Free tier, Plus at $39 a month, Premium at $79 a month.

Good at: fundamentals, estimates, global coverage, macro data and dashboards you lay out yourself.

Stops at: your portfolio. Koyfin knows companies, not your positions.

Helm Terminal

I built this, so weigh it accordingly.

Helm connects every brokerage account you have through Plaid, which means it reads across Public and Fidelity and Schwab as one portfolio without you moving a dollar. It records the reasons you own each position, then reads SEC filings and market reporting against those reasons and flags when the evidence turns against one, quoting the source document verbatim with its date and a link so you check a primary source instead of trusting a score.

It also computes tax-loss harvesting across all of your accounts at once. That is the clearest example of the structural point above: the wash sale rule applies across everything you own, so a single brokerage's harvesting view is working from incomplete data by definition. None of that is tax advice, and you should confirm anything you act on with a tax professional.

Free tier: the full terminal, brokerage sync, AI analysis on any US ticker, and one thesis with twelve months of evidence. Pro is $20 a month after a 14 day trial that requires a card, and it watches every position you own.

Stops at: it is not a broker. You cannot trade in it, it covers US listed securities only, and if you hold everything at one institution the multi-account advantage does not apply to you. Helm is not a registered investment adviser and nothing in it is investment advice.

Move the money, or move the analysis

If you are leaving Public because you need mutual funds, custodial accounts or a single home for everything, the answer is Fidelity or Schwab and it is not close.

If you are leaving because you want global markets, it is Interactive Brokers.

If you like Public and you are only frustrated that Alpha cannot see the rest of your money, do not leave. Keep the account, keep Alpha, and add something that reads across all of your accounts at once. Switching brokers to fix an analytics problem usually just moves the wall.

That is the thing worth taking away, regardless of which name you pick. Every broker's intelligence is bounded by its own custody. The moment your money lives in more than one place, and for most people over thirty it does, the complete picture has to be assembled somewhere else.