Compare Robinhood vs Public.com side-by-side and they look like the same product: zero commission on stocks and ETFs, mobile-first design, fractional shares from one dollar, IRA support, fast onboarding. They target the same first-time US investor and want the same wallet share. The substantive difference is structural — and invisible unless you know what to ask. One app earns the majority of its revenue from payment-for-order-flow (PFOF) and the engagement design that PFOF revenue funds. The other stopped accepting PFOF in February 2021 and rebuilt its revenue model around subscriptions, crypto spread, and optional tipping.

That structural choice is the answer to almost every question that compounds over thirty years for a beginner investor. Headline pricing was settled in October 2019, when Schwab cut commissions to zero and the rest of the industry followed within a week. What separates these two apps in 2026 is what the revenue model trains the app to do with your attention, how it handles your idle cash, whether the IRA actually competes with a full-service broker, and which per-contract economics you face on options. On every one of those dimensions, Robinhood and Public.com take genuinely different stances.

The verdict, above the fold

The short version first — each app wins a clearly defined archetype:

The rest of this comparison is the math behind that scorecard.

Why robinhood vs public matters for beginner investors

The mistake most reviews of these two apps make is leading with commissions, treating $0 as the answer, and ranking app-store rating or mobile-UI polish as the tiebreaker. For a first-time investor that framing inverts the actual cost structure. The four dimensions that compound for a beginner over a long holding period are: execution quality (which is where PFOF lives), account-type breadth (especially Roth IRA support and IRA-transfer match programs), behavioural friction (the gap between the trade the investor wants to make and the trade the app makes easy), and idle-cash yield (because most beginner accounts hold meaningful cash between deposits).

Headline commission is irrelevant on those four. Every brokerage in the United States charges zero on stocks and ETFs. What matters is what each app makes its money on, because that determines what the app trains you to do with the account. A platform whose revenue scales with trade frequency will design an interface that drives more trades. A platform whose revenue is subscription-based has no incentive to push order count. Neither is wrong; both serve a particular kind of investor; the choice is which kind you are.

One caveat upfront. Neither Robinhood nor Public.com is a complete brokerage solution for an investor planning to hold a Roth IRA plus a taxable account plus an HSA plus a cash-management account in one login. For that household setup, the right home is Fidelity, Schwab, or Vanguard — we covered the trade-offs separately in the Big-3 broker comparison. The beginner-app decision is about where to start, not where to consolidate.

Fees, commissions, and premium tiers

Stock and ETF commissions are zero on both apps. Both offer fractional shares from one dollar, both support automatic dividend reinvestment, both clear trades through bank-grade infrastructure. Where the cost structure actually diverges is in the premium subscription tiers and in options.

Robinhood Gold costs $5 per month or $50 per year. As of February 11, 2026, Gold members earn 3.35% APY on uninvested cash, with no cap and no minimum. Gold also unlocks a 3% match on new IRA contributions and a 1% match on IRA and 401(k) transfers — a meaningful dollar incentive for retirement savers who would otherwise leave a previous-employer 401(k) sitting at a default plan provider. Other Gold features include Nasdaq Level 2 quotes, Morningstar research integration, larger instant deposits (up to $5,000 or three times portfolio value, whichever is larger), and partner offers.

Public Premium costs $10 per month or $96 per year, and is free for accounts with a balance over $50,000. Premium unlocks advanced analytics, balance-sheet data, Morningstar analyst reports, extended-hours trading with unlimited fee-free orders, expert interviews, and Premium-only insights. The yield on Public’s high-yield cash account is available to all users without a subscription — currently 3.3% APY as of January 2026, with FDIC coverage up to $5 million across partner banks.

Now the section that catches most readers off guard: options pricing. The conventional wisdom is that Robinhood is the cheapest options broker in the US. As of January 10, 2025, that stopped being true.

Read that table carefully. Public is not just zero per-contract on stock and ETF options — it is negative per-contract, because the Options Rebate Program pays the customer between six and eighteen cents per contract traded, depending on monthly volume. Robinhood, by contrast, has charged a per-contract fee since January 2025: thirty-five cents for Gold members, fifty cents for non-Gold. On a hundred-contract position, the difference is somewhere between forty-one dollars (Robinhood Gold, no rebate from Public) and sixty-eight dollars (Robinhood non-Gold versus Public’s highest rebate tier). The reversal is small in absolute terms for a buy-and-hold ETF investor who never trades options. For an active retail trader running options at any volume, it’s a meaningful annual cost.

Index options (SPX, NDX, RUT) carry similar per-contract fees on both apps in the $0.35-$0.50 range, so the rebate advantage doesn’t extend to the index-options sleeve. Crypto trading is $0 commission on both — revenue comes from the bid-ask spread on the crypto order itself. Both pass through standard regulatory fees on options sells.

Account types: where the apps actually diverge

For a beginner, the account-type matrix matters more than the commission table, because the wrong account structure compounds for decades while a fee difference compounds for months. The two apps cover the same core taxable + Roth IRA + Traditional IRA stack but make different choices on what to layer on top.

Two splits matter. First, Robinhood Gold’s IRA match: 3% on new contributions and 1% on transfers is real money. A maxed Roth IRA contribution of $7,500 (2026 limit for under-50 filers) returns $225 in match — close to four years of the Gold subscription cost. For someone planning to keep money inside Robinhood for at least a couple of years before any transfer, the match is genuinely additive to long-term returns.

Second, Public’s direct Treasuries access. The Treasury Account on Public lets you build a ladder of US Treasuries with maturities from three months to thirty years, or pick a pre-built ladder. That’s a meaningful product for a beginner who wants to hold something other than a money-market fund for short-term cash buckets — direct Treasuries pay state-tax-exempt interest in most US states, which money-market funds do not. Robinhood doesn’t offer this; Robinhood cash gets routed to the brokerage sweep or, if Gold, to the high-yield cash program.

Neither app supports a Solo 401(k) or HSA. For self-employed savers or HSA-eligible investors, both are non-starters — Fidelity is the only Big-3 broker with a free, no-minimum HSA with full ETF investing turned on.

Tradable assets — what each app actually lets you buy

Both apps cover the full US stock universe plus the major ETF list, with fractional shares down to one dollar and automatic dividend reinvestment across both. The differentiation is in the satellite products around the core equity offering.

Robinhood-only features: the IPO Access program, which lets retail customers participate in select primary IPO allocations alongside institutional buyers — a feature with no real equivalent on most retail platforms. Wider options chains (more strikes, more expirations) than Public for stock options. Crypto coverage that’s deeper than Public’s selection. 24-hour trading on select large-cap names, extending the regular-hours window for active retail. Robinhood’s interface is the slickest of any retail broker for high-frequency mobile order entry.

Public-only features: direct US Treasuries (T-bills, notes, bonds) via the Treasury Account. Alternative assets including art, sneakers, and collectibles through Public’s alts platform. Public also acquired Treasury App in May 2026, signalling a focused investment in the fixed-income beginner experience. Index options trade on Public the same as on Robinhood (and at similar per-contract cost).

For a beginner buying an S&P 500 ETF and a bond fund and holding for ten years, the satellite features mostly don’t matter. For an active retail user, Robinhood’s IPO Access plus the deeper options chains and the wider crypto selection genuinely change the feature comparison.

Payment-for-order-flow: the structural difference nobody talks about

This is the section that determines which app to actually choose, because everything else — the cash yield, the IRA match, the options rebate — flows out of how each app makes money.

Payment-for-order-flow is the practice of a brokerage routing customer orders to a market maker (Citadel Securities, Virtu, and a handful of others) in exchange for a small per-share rebate. The market maker takes the other side of the customer’s order, profits on the bid-ask spread, and pays the broker for the flow. For a broker, PFOF is a per-share, scales-with-volume revenue line. The more trades the broker can route, the more PFOF revenue lands on the income statement.

Robinhood’s 2024 fiscal-year results show $2.95 billion in total revenue, of which roughly $1.65 billion (~56%) is transaction-based — and PFOF is the dominant component of that transaction line. The headline framing is fair: the majority of Robinhood’s revenue comes from getting customers to trade more often. The engagement design that PFOF revenue funds — the notifications, the streaks, the gamified order entry, the in-app social proof — is not coincidental. It’s the rational business response to a revenue model that scales with trade count.

Public.com explicitly walked away from this in February 2021, shortly after the GameStop meme-stock volatility brought PFOF into mainstream regulatory scrutiny. The company stopped routing customer orders for payment and began routing directly to exchanges — more expensive operationally but free of the structural conflict. To replace the lost revenue, Public introduced an optional tipping feature (customers can tip on any trade), expanded the Premium subscription, and earned spread revenue from crypto orders. The company achieved unicorn valuation a few weeks later in a $220 million funding round.

The execution-quality implication has been debated for fifteen years and litigated in front of the SEC several times. The SEC’s 2022 best-execution rule proposal moved toward forcing brokers to demonstrate they were not systematically routing orders to maximise PFOF over price improvement. The proposal remains incomplete. The academic literature on retail price improvement is mixed: PFOF-routed retail orders generally receive small per-share price improvement versus the National Best Bid and Offer, but the improvement may be smaller than what direct routing to a competitive exchange would deliver.

For a single $10,000 ETF purchase held for thirty years, the absolute PFOF cost to the investor is small — likely under $5 in execution-quality slippage versus an idealised direct route. The cost-to-investor argument doesn’t carry the conclusion alone. What carries the conclusion is the design incentive: a broker whose revenue scales with trade frequency will, over thirty years, surface more reasons to trade than a broker whose revenue is subscription-based. The compounding cost of that engagement design — measured in average-investor return-shortfall versus index — is the real argument against PFOF for a long-term ETF investor.

Cash sweep and FDIC: where idle cash actually sits

Idle cash inside a brokerage account is the most underrated component of long-term cost-of-ownership. A beginner’s account holds meaningful cash between deposits, between trades, between months. The yield on that cash compounds.

The Robinhood non-Gold sweep is the trap. A user who signs up for Robinhood without realising the cash program is gated to Gold will leave idle cash earning approximately nothing. The fix is either to subscribe to Gold (which costs $60 annually but pays back 3.35% on cash plus the IRA match) or to manually park cash in SGOV or similar T-bill ETFs. Most beginners do neither. Public’s high-yield cash account, by contrast, is available to all users without a subscription — the default behaviour pays a market-competitive yield.

On $5,000 of cash held over three years, the difference between 3.3% (Public default) and 0.01% (Robinhood non-Gold default) is roughly $500. On $10,000 it’s $1,000. These numbers are not life-changing but they compound while the user isn’t paying attention — which is the worst category of cost.

UX, mobile-app design, and behavioural friction

Both apps are mobile-first. Both have polished onboarding flows that get a new user from download to first trade in under ten minutes. The question is which surface makes it easier to do the thing you actually want to do with the account, and which surface makes it easier to do the thing you’ll regret.

Robinhood’s interface is engineered for engagement. Push notifications on price moves, on news, on watchlist stocks, on community activity. Streak counters and reward mechanics. A simplified order-entry UI that removes friction for placing a trade — particularly options trades. The 2021 removal of the confetti animation was a public retreat from the most overt gamification, but the underlying design philosophy hasn’t changed: more screen time, more trades, more PFOF revenue. For an investor whose explicit strategy is to log in and check holdings once a month, the engagement design works against them.

Public.com leans into community-driven features instead. Live audio Q&As with company executives and analysts, public portfolios, optional commentary on individual trades, and a feed that mixes user posts with company updates. The risk on Public’s side is different: public-portfolio visibility can prompt mimetic trading (buying what other people are buying) that doesn’t serve the individual investor’s plan. But Public’s revenue doesn’t scale with order count, so the design doesn’t push that behaviour the way Robinhood’s does.

Neither surface is neutral. For a beginner the safer assumption is that any retail app will, by default, surface things you shouldn’t be doing — the question is which app’s revenue model rewards it less for doing so.

Safety, SIPC, and history of outages

Both broker-dealers carry the standard SIPC protection of $500,000 in securities and $250,000 in cash. Both are registered with FINRA and clear trades through bank-grade infrastructure. FINRA BrokerCheck shows neither with active material disciplinary action against the parent broker-dealer as of May 2026. The reliability question is operational rather than regulatory.

Robinhood has a documented operational history that matters for an account holder’s risk tolerance. The multi-day outage on March 2-3, 2020, during the peak of COVID-19 market volatility, prevented up to 12.5 million customers from accessing accounts during a session that swung several percent intraday. FINRA fined Robinhood approximately $70 million in June 2021 — the largest financial sanction FINRA had ever ordered at that point — combining a $57 million penalty with roughly $13 million in customer restitution. The January 2021 GameStop trading restrictions are a separate event with separate consequences, but they layered on top of the operational-trust concern.

Public.com has no comparable incidents on record. For a beginner this kind of operational history matters less than for an active trader who depends on real-time market access, but it’s part of the “what you’re betting on” framing when picking a broker. A multi-day outage during a volatility event is a tail risk that can’t be hedged by any other feature.

Verdict: which app for which beginner

The honest answer to robinhood vs public is that each app is the right answer for a clearly defined beginner archetype. The choice is downstream of the question “what kind of investor do I want to be over the next ten years,” not the other way around.

Choose Public.com if you’re buying ETFs to hold for the long term, you value a transparent revenue model that doesn’t depend on trading you more often, and you want direct Treasuries access for short-term cash buckets. Public’s 3.3% cash yield without subscription, its options rebate on the rare stock-option trade, and its no-PFOF stance make it the structurally cleaner home for a beginner who wants to be a long-term passive investor. The trade-off is no IPO access, narrower options chains, smaller crypto selection, and the absence of an IRA-contribution match.

Choose Robinhood if you want the slickest mobile order-entry UI, you want options trading with deeper chains and a familiar interface, you want crypto with wider coverage, you want IPO Access program eligibility, or you specifically want Robinhood Gold’s 3% IRA-contribution match. Subscribe to Gold from day one if you go this route — the non-Gold cash sweep at 0.01% is a real cost, and the 3% IRA match alone pays back the subscription on a single year of Roth contributions for under-50 filers. Be honest with yourself about whether the engagement design will lead you to trade more than your plan actually calls for; that’s the unmeasured cost.

Choose neither if you’re consolidating long-term retirement accounts and want a single login for taxable + IRA + HSA + cash management. Both apps are beginner-tier products. For one-broker-household setups, the right move is to use Fidelity, Schwab, or Vanguard — we walked through that decision in the Big-3 review. Robinhood and Public both serve a real purpose as the starter account; they don’t pretend to be the lifetime account.

Bottom line

The choice between Robinhood and Public.com is the choice between two different revenue models — one that scales with how often you trade, and one that doesn’t. For a long-term ETF investor that distinction compounds in the same direction as every other dimension of cost-of-ownership: idle cash yield, options pricing, and engagement design all favour Public.com. For an active retail user who values interface, IPO access, and the IRA match, Robinhood is the better surface. Neither is wrong; both serve a real beginner archetype; the right question is which beginner you are.