4 Best Micro-Investing Apps of 2022

Stash gives users the option to choose how involved they want to be with their portfolio. 

While the app features many of the same perks as Acorns — including round-ups, recurring deposits and the option to open an IRA — it also lets you tweak your portfolio with more than 3,000 ETFs and individual stocks.  

If you prefer a more hands-off approach, Stash offers that too with its $3 a month Stash Growth account that functions much like a robo-advisor. Stash+ is the app’s $9 a month option. You’ll get access to two custodial accounts, a higher reward with Stash’s Stock-Back Card and access to $10,000 worth of life insurance.  

All Stash accounts include a bank account with no overdraft fees or minimum balance requirements. (It doesn’t earn any interest either.) You can also create goals by separating your cash into spaces for specific purposes, like buying a home.  

For a full run down of fees and services, check out our complete Stash App review.

SoFi Invest eliminates annual account fees, monthly charges and trading fees for users while still offering a $0 account minimum.  

While SoFi doesn’t charge an annual or monthly fee, you’ll still pay expense ratios on ETFs and mutual funds. This is standard for any brokerage account. However, SoFi (and most micro-investing apps) offers a broad range of ETFs and mutual funds with very low expense ratios. 

You can choose either an actively managed account for a more hands-on investing experience, or an automated portfolio for passive investing.   

You can also opt for a retirement savings account, including a traditional, Roth or SEP IRA. Each of these accounts can be either passively or actively managed. 

What makes SoFi unique from other micro-investing apps is you can chat with a financial advisor over the phone or on video at no extra cost. These certified financial professionals act as fiduciaries, meaning they’ll put your financial interests first and won’t try to sell you anything. 

Finally, you can invest money in cryptocurrency on SoFi Invest. The app offers Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and 27 other coins and tokens. Be aware that SoFi does charge a 1.25% trading fee on each crypto transaction. 

For a full run down of fees and services, check out our complete Sofi review

Acorns works as a robo-advisor by recommending one of five pre-made portfolios based on your age, financial goals and risk tolerance. Portfolios range from conservative to aggressive. You can choose a different portfolio if you disagree with the algorithm, but you can’t pick your own individual investments.  

Acorns’ portfolios are comprised of low-cost exchange traded funds (ETFs), which bundle different stocks and/or bonds into a single share. Acorns — like all micro-investing apps — buys fractional shares of ETFs so you don’t have to save up hundreds of dollars to start investing.  

The app lets you invest your spare change through its Round-Up feature. After linking a debit card to the app, your purchases are rounded up to the nearest dollar and the difference is invested into your portfolio.  

You can also enable recurring transfers from your savings or checking account on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You can set up this feature in addition to spare change round-ups to grow your money even faster.  

Another unique feature is Acorns Earn, which allows users to generate “found money” by shopping with one of the app’s 350 business partners. For example, you can get 50 cents invested each time you order an Uber or get 3.5% of your Uber Eats purchases invested.  

If you’re interested in socially responsible investing, Acorns offers Sustainable Portfolios, which the company says are “designed to provide exposure to more sustainable companies, while aiming to perform on par with a traditional portfolio.”

Acorns offers two pricing options: A $3 monthly fee for its Personal account or $5 a month for its Family account.  

The Personal account includes access to an individual retirement account (IRA) and a checking account. The Family account includes all the features of the $3 account, plus you can add multiple custodian accounts for your children.  

For a full run down of fees and services, check out our complete Acorns review

Public is a relatively new app built on the idea of growing a social investing community.  

All portfolios are public by default, so you can track other users’ stock portfolios (and they can track yours). However, the app will never show how much money users invested, lost or gained on any individual stock. 

The app has a large community forum where users can offer trading advice and ask questions about stocks. This can be attractive to beginning investors because it provides additional information, feedback and insight from more experienced traders.  

Building on its social media-like interface, Public compiles a custom feed for your profile, populated with stocks that match your interests, recent IPO announcements, upcoming earnings reports and more.  

Like other apps, Public lets you buy fractional shares of stocks and ETFs (called “slices” on Public) so you can invest with as little as $5. 

Public doesn’t offer an automated portfolio like most of its competitors. Instead, it organizes stocks into user-friendly categories called “themes.”  For example, there’s a Stay at Home theme that includes companies like Peloton, Slack and Amazon.  

These themes provide some diversification, but not in the same way as broad-based ETF portfolios offered by apps like SoFi and Stash. 

However, Public does a great job teaching you about investing as you go. You can tap on key terms to learn simple definitions and see “safety labels” on riskier investments, like companies that recently filed for bankruptcy.  

Like SoFi, Public doesn’t charge any monthly or annual fees, and offers commission-free trading. You can also buy and sell a limited number of cryptocurrency coins within the app, though a 1% to 2% markup fee applies to all crypto purchase orders. 

One major drawback with Public is you can’t set up recurring transfers or deposits to the app from your bank. 

For a full run down of fees and services, check out our complete Public review.