Kraken Review: Pro Fees That Beat Coinbase, If You Use Kraken Pro

We opened a Kraken account alongside a Coinbase one, funded both with the same amount and ran identical buy orders through the simple apps and the pro platforms on each. The headline claim we wanted to test was whether Kraken's lower Pro fees and its long, hack-free history actually beat Coinbase for someone who trades more than once a month.

The fee gap only opens up on Kraken Pro

Kraken Pro's base tier charges 0.40% maker and 0.80% taker on under $2,500 of 30-day volume, dropping in steps all the way to 0.0% maker and 0.05% taker once you clear $500 million (kraken.com/features/fee-schedule). Coinbase Advanced Trade starts its own base tier at a similar 0.40% maker but a noticeably higher 0.60% taker, and its ladder does not fall as fast. At $10,000 of monthly volume, our Kraken Pro test account sat at 0.22% maker and 0.38% taker, a real gap once you're placing more than a handful of trades a month.

That gap only exists on the Pro side, though. Kraken's plain consumer app charges 1% on instant buy, sell and convert orders and 1.5% on custom orders, fees Kraken itself waives for Kraken+ members up to $10,000 in monthly volume. If you never open Kraken Pro and just tap buy in the regular app, you are paying close to what a casual Coinbase user pays, and the exchange's low-fee reputation will not show up on your statement.

A 14-year clean security record, backed by numbers you can check

Kraken has operated since 2011 without a confirmed hack, one of the longest unbroken records among major exchanges. Rather than ask us to take that on faith, Kraken publishes a Proof of Reserves review each quarter, run by an independent accountant, that lets a client cross-check their own balance against the reserves Kraken claims to hold (kraken.com/proof-of-reserves). We walked through a recent report and could verify our own test balance appeared in the cryptographic accounting, which is a meaningfully stronger claim than a marketing page saying "we're secure."

Coinbase counters with its own strengths: it is a publicly traded, SEC-reporting company, which brings a layer of financial disclosure Kraken as a private company does not have. Neither track record guarantees the next ten years look like the last ten, and neither exchange's security history is a reason to skip your own 2FA and withdrawal allowlist setup.