iWeb or Halifax Sharedealing?

A question about : iWeb or Halifax Sharedealing?

I'm looking to open a low cost S&S ISA account.

These 2 services are on the same platform & are both owned by the same company. As one costs more than the other, I assume that there is a difference in the products, functionality or service offered - but I cannot work out what that is.

I contacted Halifax to ask them what features/benefits are accessed by using their higher priced service - remarkably they stated it was not policy to answer that question! They suggested that I examine both company's web sites and come to my own conclusion.

Ignoring the pros/cons of their unhelpful response to my enquiry, can any one tell me what the differences are?

Many thanks if you can help me.

Best answers:

• Have you checked out this comparison table?
  https://monevator.com/compare-uk-chea...nline-brokers/
• Thanks for this link. I had not seen this table before.
  Like most of the various comparison tables, it majors on the difference in charges and is light on the difference in services/functionality.
  It does highlight that Halifax allows Regular Investing whereas iWeb does not. This is helpful, but not a material enough difference for me to justify the higher charges.
  Does anyone else know of any other differences?
  Thanks
• iWeb reviews here:
  https://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews11269.html
  Main complaint of those giving it 1 star is that they can't get prices and it goes to negotiated trade where they get a poor price. No point getting cheap dealing if your dealing price is disadvantaged. I don't know if Halifax is any better.
  From my own experience, I find x-o and AJ Bell YouInvest fine.
• My own experience of the main Halifax platform was that it was just completely unavailable during busy times and then when I tried to phone to trade, the lines would be jammed too. Hence I left them for TD Direct Invest but they are rather expensive so now I mainly use x-o and AJ Bell YouInvest. I have not had a problem with either except when x-o were changing the software and were down for about a week.
• Thanks for this extra information.
  I will be mainly buying Funds & trading relatively infrequently. With funds having a 'once a day' pricing point, i am less dependant upon the active trading availability - but even so it is a concern if iWeb cannot cope with peak demand.
• I moved to iweb last year. I'd read the reviews about lack of availability of the site and inability to trade on line, but that's not been my experience.
  I've traded a lot, and on only one occasion, for a very frequently traded FTSE100 share, did I not get a price, but the offer of a negotiated trade. I got the chance to accept or decline: I declined, and placed the trade online again immediately, and it went through. And once I couldn't log onto the site as the screen froze at the second stage of login. I rang them, and they said they were aware of the problem, and were working on it. I tried again fifteen minutes later and it was fine. I've even had immediate prices for online trades for obscure shares, including one after 4pm in a day when there had been no other trades on the market in that share that day.
  I find they answer the phone quickly and are polite, knowledgeable and helpful; are efficient about transferring in paper share certificates into non-ISA accounts; have a website that is clear and very simple to use; and are excellent in dealing with corporate actions. They also allow you to choose to have dividends paid out as they arrive, rather than only once a month or quarterly, which is all some competitors offer.
  I wasn't too sure about embarking on holding shares in a nominee account, but I'm glad that I chose iweb.
  And they're cheap.
• Opened S&S ISA's and share dealing accounts for all members of the family last year. Buying experiences all good. No experience of selling yet.
  We were going to transfer our certificated holdings to them, but this is going to prove too complicated for us, because of all the additional dividends received in shares. Need to sell some in order to utilise this year's ISA allowance.
• Thanks for all the comments. I think I'll give iWeb a go