Kraken vs. Binance: Which Is Right for You?

Kraken offers the convenience of being able to use a debit or credit card. But fees are going to be quite high if you’re planning on using this method. The fee is 3.75% of your deposit in processing fees, plus $0.25. There is also a 0.9% fee for stablecoins and 1.5% for any other crypto or FX pair. Add it up, and you could be looking at up to 5% on top of your transaction in fees alone, a very high amount.

It does offer Kraken Pro, however, where the fees are much more competitive. Kraken employs a maker/taker fee schedule incentivized by lower fees for higher volume trades. Within this structure, the maker fees range from 0.16% all the way down to 0% (meaning you don’t pay anything in maker fees at a certain volume). And the taker fees range from 0.26% to 0.10%, also extremely palatable.

Binance employs a similar fee structure. Again, fees are dependent on your trade volume in the past 30 days, but with reductions applying for the amount of Binance Coin (BNB) you hold. Binance also uses the maker/taker discrepancy where fees differ based on whether the transaction is adding liquidity to the market (maker fees) or taking away liquidity from the market (taker fees).

Based on this, Binance fees range from as low as 0.02% on maker transactions and 0.04% on taker transactions.

On the higher end, so if you are dealing in low trade volumes, Binance fees max out for both maker and taker fees at 0.10%. So as you can see, Binance fees are quite a bit lower than Kraken’s 3.75% starter fee. And on top of that, Binance fees are even lower than Kraken Pro fees.

For example, a trade for Bitcoin on Binance would have a 0.10% fee starting out. Keep in mind though that you could get a 25% reduction on transaction fees if you pay with Binance Coin (incentives!). But lets assume you are new to Binance and do not have any Binance Coin to use toward the fees. That means at 0.10% fee for Bitcoin, a purchase of $100 of Bitcoin would end up being $100.10 in total, not bad at all. Especially compared to Kraken, where $100 in BTC would cost you 3.75% plus the $0.25 convenience fee, putting you at $104.