Reviews

Public Review: Good Beginner-Friendly Platform (Now with IRAs)

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R.J.'s Take: Compared to apps like Robinhood, I much prefer Public. Public stands out by not pushing active trading or leverage.

Public offers both taxable and retirement accounts. For hands-off investors, they provide preset portfolios that take a straightforward approach - for example, their aggressive portfolio uses three broad-market ETFs covering U.S. stocks (59%), international developed markets (30%), and emerging markets (11%). While simpler than the 8-12 fund mix typically found at robo-advisors, these portfolios still provide solid global diversification for long-term investing.

Overall, Public makes it easy to invest in a diversified portfolio across both retirement and taxable accounts. It's a solid choice for beginners focused on building wealth steadily over time.

Pros:
  • Free trades on stocks and ETFs.
  • Offers investment plans for broad diversification.
  • Can invest in fractional shares.
  • $5 minimum investment.
Cons:
  • Lack of comprehensive banking features
  • No tax-loss harvesting
  • Crypto is held by a third party and can’t be transferred to a private wallet.

Public Investing App at a Glance

Public offers free trading of most U.S. listed stocks and ETFs and allows you to buy and sell fractional shares (with a $5 minimum investment). It also offers access to options trading, cryptocurrencies, bonds, done-for-you investment plans, a high-yield cash account, and a bond account.

Your assets are combined into a single portfolio, making tracking your total gains and losses easy.

While many no-commission trading platforms focus on professional traders, Public is designed with more of the everyday investor in mind. The interface is built around simplicity, making it easy to find and trade assets without sifting through the mountain of settings, charts, and data that many investors find intimidating and difficult to navigate.

Some unique features of Public include:

  • Alpha. An AI-powered chat tool powered by GPT-4, designed to help you source information. In my testing, I found it helpful in answering questions like “What is Apple’s historical P/E ratio?” However, it will reject questions that it considers financial advice, such as “Should I increase my allocation to Apple?”
  • Corporate Bond Fund. The Public Bond Account invests in 10 specific corporate bonds, offering a fixed, higher yield (an APY of 6.7% as of December 2024) compared to the variable, lower yield of a diversified fund like the Vanguard Total Bond Fund. It focuses on corporate bonds with regular interest payments but carries higher concentration risk, limited liquidity, and lacks broad diversification compared to a bond fund like Vanguard’s.
  • Treasury Bonds. Public’s Treasury Account allows you to invest in 6-month U.S. Treasury bills with a minimum of $100. T-bills are purchased at a discount to face value, and the full amount is paid at maturity, offering secure, state and local tax-exempt earnings backed by the U.S. government. Accounts include SIPC protection for up to $500,000 for Treasury securities.

While Public is not nearly the size of its most popular competitor, Robinhood, it has built up a user base of millions across its web platform and mobile app, with positive ratings (4.1 on the Google Play Store and 4.7 on the iOS App Store). This is largely thanks to its ease of use and social features.

Public Key Facts

Fees:No commissions on U.S. stock/ETF trades, except for extended hours trading, OTC securities, options, crypto, and some account services. There are no inactivity fees. Select fees are waived for Premium members.
Account minimum:$5 for stocks/ETFs. $100 for Treasuries.
Account types:Self-directed investing and IRAs
Available assets:Stocks, ETFs, a limited selection of cryptocurrencies, options, index options, bonds, investment plans, a high-yield cash account, a bond account, and 6-month Treasury Bills. As of November 2024, alternatives such as fine art, music royalties, and collectibles are no longer available.
Financial advisor access:Not available.
Promotions:Transfers bonus of up to $10,000.

Public Pros and Cons Explained

In the summary box above, we highlighted a few key benefits and downsides to using Public. Here’s a more in-depth look at the platform’s pros and cons.

Public Pros

  • Provides access to fractional shares. A major benefit for the beginner investor with limited funds, fractional share trading allows you to buy stocks based on dollar amounts. Instead of buying a whole share, you can invest any amount (with a $5 minimum). This gives you access to companies that would otherwise be out of your reach, and allows you to better diversify a small portfolio. For example, you can invest $50 per week in many different companies, rather than being forced to save up and invest in a single share of one company.
  • Offers investment plans for broad diversification. In June 2023, Public introduced Core Investment Plans. Prior to this, they only offered baskets of theme-related stocks, such as companies that invest in specific sectors (e.g., artificial intelligence or cyber security). These Core Investment Plans are well-diversified and low-cost index-based portfolios that you could use for short, medium and long-term goals. Based on the number of stocks and ETFs, investment plan fees range from $0.49 to $1.99, but are waived for Premium members. Crypto transactions in plans incur a 1.25% fee regardless of the amount.

Public Cons

  • There are limited account types available. While competitors like Robinhood and M1 have evolved into comprehensive financial platforms offering checking accounts, credit cards, and other banking features, Public remains focused primarily on investing. This more focused approach might be limiting for those seeking an all-in-one financial solution.
  • No tax-loss harvesting. While Core Investment Plans are a great feature for the long-term index investor, Public doesn’t offer tax-loss harvesting on these accounts.
  • You can’t withdraw your crypto to a private wallet. You could, therefore, face tax implications for moving your crypto outside of Public, as you’d first have to liquidate to cash.

Public Premium

Public Premium is an optional add-on service priced at $8 monthly ($96 if paid annually). The fee is waived for accounts over $50,000.

A Premium subscription is not required to use the app, but it may help some users.

Here’s what’s included with Public Premium:

  • Unique performance indicators. These are business metrics specific to each company, such as subscriber growth and revenue segments broken down by product line. This data can help you keep track of a company’s performance and trends in order to make more informed investment decisions. 
  • Streamlined ETF insights. You’ll get quick in-app access to data related to the holdings of exchange-traded funds. While this information is available publicly elsewhere, being able to review it within the app is extremely convenient. 
  • Analyst ratings. Review the current state of a stock’s buy, hold and sell ratings and read reports from Morningstar (a leading investment research firm). 
  • VIP customer support. Public calls this “white-glove support,” though it’s unclear how it differs from the customer service offered to members without a Premium subscription.

For the sake of comparison, Robinhood’s premium subscription (called Robinhood Gold) costs $5 per month and includes access to analyst ratings and Morningstar investment research reports, as well as $2,000 in interest-free margin leverage (if your account qualifies for margin). 

Is Public Premium worth it?

The information included with a Premium subscription is valuable and can help you make better investment decisions. However, $8 per month is a relatively high price.

For example, let’s say you were to invest $83 per month in your Public account for a full year, resulting in a portfolio worth $1,000 (not accounting for any gains or losses). At that savings rate, an $8 monthly subscription fee would cost you $96 annually, or 0.96% of your investment.

That’s significantly more than you would pay to invest in a professionally managed mutual fund. And it means that in order to justify the cost, you would need to have confidence that the data you’re unlocking will produce more than an additional 1% gain.

Therefore, we think Public Premium offers more value to those with larger portfolios, where the $8 monthly fee represents a lower cost on a percentage basis.

Investment Options

Public’s investment selection is straightforward: you can invest in stocks and ETFs (but not mutual funds).

They also offer pre-built portfolios based on how much risk you’re comfortable taking and when you need your money. While these portfolios are functional – containing a mix of stock and bond ETFs – they’re quite simple. For instance, their most aggressive portfolio uses just three ETFs, compared to the 8-12 funds you might find at M1 Finance or robo-advisors like Betterment. This simpler approach works, but you won’t get the same level of diversification or tax optimization that more sophisticated platforms offer.

Public provides access to 26 cryptocurrencies, which can offer exposure to these assets without the need to sign up for a dedicated crypto-trading app like Coinbase. This can simplify buying and selling crypto while making it easy to track all your investments within a single dashboard. 

However, unlike Coinbase, Public doesn’t provide users with individual cryptocurrency wallets. As such, you can’t transfer cryptocurrency holdings in and out of Public without selling to cash first.

Customer Support

Public has both in-app chat and web chat support, as well as email agents. Unfortunately, no phone support is available.

Fees

There are no fees for trading stocks and no account fees. There are technically no fees for crypto purchases, but you will pay a markup (usually around 1-2%) on those transactions.

Before you make an investment, you can tip the Public, but this is optional and not required. Tipping is also not the only way the company makes money; it generates revenue from interest on cash balances, transaction fee rebates on crypto transactions, and alternative asset fees.

Public Premium is an optional subscription that provides access to market research data aimed at helping you become a better investor. Learn more about it in the Public Premium section above.

Usability

Both the Public.com web interface and the Public app are user-friendly and free of clutter, although the platform does display a significant amount of social media information, such as recent trades made by people in your network. While many users find this aspect of Public helpful, there’s no way to turn it off if you’d prefer a more streamlined and distraction-free experience.

Reputation

Note: This data was last updated on Dec. 12, 2024. We update the ratings and review counts below periodically throughout the year. 

On the iOS app store, the Public app has a 4.7/5 rating with ‎‎72,961 reviews. There has been no positive or negative change in the rating since our last update.

The Public app has a 4.1/5 rating on the Google Play store with 47,706 reviews.

Public.com Alternatives

Public’s most prominent competitors are Robinhood, M1 Finance and Webull. Here’s a quick look at how Public stacks up against each.

Public vs. Robinhood

Robinhood is the most popular trading app for individual stock and ETF trades.

Public has done a good job offering many of the same features as Robinhood. One difference is that Robinhood matches the money you contribute to an IRA if you’re a Gold Member ($60 annually).

Most notably, Robinhood makes money through payments for order flow (PFOF), where they route your trades to market makers who profit from the difference between the buy and sell prices, called the spread. This system encourages more frequent trading, which can lead to poor investment habits. Public, on the other hand, doesn’t use PFOF, aiming for more transparent revenue sources to avoid pushing users toward unnecessary trading.

Since frequent trading often leads to lower overall gains, especially on apps designed to facilitate constant trading like Robinhood, I recommend beginners who want to buy a few stocks use an app like Public instead. Public has certain built-in limitations that promote a more thoughtful approach to investing.

Public vs. M1 Finance

M1 Finance is one of our favorite overall brokers. The platform is geared towards long-term investors looking for more balanced investment options.

Where Public offers basic pre-built portfolios using a handful of ETFs, M1 provides more comprehensive options with up to 16 different funds covering additional corners of the market. With M1, these sophisticated portfolios come pre-built and automatically rebalance – whereas with Public, you’d need to research, build, and manually rebalance any more complex portfolios yourself.

M1 does have higher minimums (starting at $100) and lacks any social component.

Learn more in our M1 Finance review.

Public vs. Webull

Webull is similar to Robinhood in that it offers commission-free stock and ETF trades, along with many additional features like options and margin trading.

If you’re an intermediate to advanced investor who is looking for something above and beyond the simplicity of Public, Webull is a solid choice.

Similar to Robinhood, Webull is aimed explicitly at active traders and features a wealth of research and analytical tools that new investors may find overwhelming. It also makes money off of PFOF, so the app is more designed to encourage trading.

Learn more in our Webull review.

Public.com Review FAQs

Is identity verification required when signing up for Public?

All new Public users are subject to identity verification and are required to provide a government-issued ID, as well as other pertinent personal details that may be required to prove their identity. This is standard practice and similar to the process required by any other investment app or trading platform operating within the United States.

Is the Public app safe?

Any cash held in your brokerage account is protected by FDIC insurance, covering up to $250,000.
Public does not sell, rent or trade your personal information.

Financial account linking is through Plaid, which uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES 256) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), which is considered best in class. Plaid is the best-known and most trusted account linking platform within the financial services industry, and we’re comfortable using it with our own accounts.

Is the Public app available worldwide?

No, the Public investment app is only available within the United States.

Can you fund your Public account with a credit card?

No. Public offers fee-free instant account funding via debit card, but you cannot fund your account via credit card. This is not a negative thing, however, because such transactions are usually billed as cash advances by your credit card issuer, and thus may have fees or higher interest rates.

Is Public Right For You?

I see Public as a solid choice for beginner investors who want a straightforward approach to both retirement and taxable investing. Their simple interface and lack of fees make starting with IRAs and regular investment accounts easy.

While basic, the platform’s core investment portfolios can work as a foundation for retirement savings. However, if you’re looking to maximize tax efficiency and diversification, you might want to consider a robo-advisor or a more comprehensive platform like M1 Finance.

For those interested in individual stock investing, Public’s approach is sensible. The platform doesn’t push active trading, which aligns well with long-term investing principles.

Bottom line: Public works well for investors who want a simple way to handle both retirement and taxable investing in one place. Just be aware that you won’t get the same level of portfolio optimization or tax efficiency as more sophisticated platforms.

R.J. Weiss
R.J. Weiss, founder of The Ways To Wealth, has been a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ since 2010. Holding a B.A. in finance and having completed the CFP® certification curriculum at The American College, R.J. combines formal education with a deep commitment to providing unbiased financial insights. Recognized as a trusted authority in the financial realm, his expertise is highlighted in major publications like Business Insider, New York Times, and Forbes.

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