cTrader Platform: Availability, Brokers and What Transfers

cTrader is a forex and CFD trading platform made by Spotware Systems and licensed to brokers. It ships as Web, Windows, Mac, Android and iOS apps, with cTrader Algo for automation in C# or Python, cTrader Copy for copy trading, and a Store for add-ons. Symbols, costs, leverage and execution are set by the broker, not by Spotware.

Typing the bare product name into a search box usually means one of three things: find the download, find the login, or find out whether the platform can be opened at all. The third is the one that gets answered badly, because it is treated as a question about software when it is a question about who is allowed to be your counterparty.

cTrader is client software. It is licensed to brokers, and the broker decides the symbol list, the costs, the leverage and the execution arrangements behind it. That single split explains most of what follows, including why a trader in one country can open an account in minutes and a trader in another cannot open one at all, and why MetaTrader 4 and MT5 compared is a different exercise from comparing brokers.

This page first sets out what the product family contains, then answers the four questions the platform pages leave out: where it can be opened, which firms offer it today, how its two add-on products differ, and what survives a move between devices or brokers.

What cTrader Is, and What Ships Under the Name

The name is used for a family of products rather than one program, and the search results for it are mostly download pages, which is why the family is worth setting out before anything else. Spotware Systems is the vendor; its own site describes the platform as built for brokers and prop firms, with the trading apps, charting, copy trading, cloud-run cBots, indicators and plugins delivered to the trader through whichever firm licenses it.

The download page on the Store lists the builds directly. The Web, Windows and Mac versions are labelled as including both Trade and Algo. The Android and iOS apps, and the Amazon, APK, Huawei AppGallery and Samsung Galaxy Store builds, are labelled Trade only.

Windows support is stated as versions 7, 8, 10 and 11, and the Mac build as macOS 12.0 and later. That labelling is the practical answer to which device can build an algorithm and which can only run one.

What the table does not contain is any figure for spreads, commissions, leverage or minimum deposit, and that is deliberate. Those belong to the firm that licenses the software, which is the point the rest of this page turns on: the same application behaves differently at two brokers, and the questions that follow are about the firm as much as the platform.

Where cTrader Can and Cannot Be Opened

The useful way to ask this is not whether the platform works in a country. It is whether a firm permitted to take the other side of your trade in that country has licensed it.

In the United States that permission is narrow and specific. Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulations require a firm offering retail foreign currency contracts to be registered as a futures commission merchant or as a retail foreign exchange dealer, a category the final retail forex rules created.

The National Futures Association describes that category by what the firm does rather than by what it is called. It stands on the other side of an off-exchange currency deal, or offers to, facing a customer who falls outside the eligible contract participant definition, where the deal runs on leverage, on margin, or on financing supplied by the firm making the offer. Registration also pulls the firm into National Futures Association membership and into Forex Dealer Member status.

The capital rule attached to that status is what shortens the list. A registered firm has to carry 20 million dollars in net capital, and once what it owes retail forex customers runs past 10 million dollars it adds 5 percent of the excess on top. A bar set there leaves very few firms standing, and a platform reaches a country only through the firms that are.

So the answer to the availability question moves with the broker register, not with a software release. It is worth re-checking against the register rather than against a platform review, and it is one of the reasons the account types a firm can offer differ so sharply between jurisdictions.

Which Brokers Actually Offer It, and How to Check

The vendor publishes a broker directory, and the notice attached to it repays a read. cTrader Ltd puts its own role at supplying the platform and the software work behind it. On the same notice it disclaims any check on the regulatory standing, the dependability or the service quality of the firms it lists, warns that entries may be partial or stale, and states that it does not solicit retail investors. That is a technology directory rather than a vetted one, and the company says so itself.

Aggregator round-ups carry the opposite problem: they are ranked lists that age quietly. The check that settles it is to open the firm own site and read the platform menu. Below is what three firms showed on their own pages on 21 August 2026.

The third row is the reason the check is worth running. A firm can appear on third-party cTrader broker lists long after its own site has stopped offering the platform, and only the firm own page carries the current answer. One further firm, FxPro, could not be read at all: its site returned an automated-traffic block on two attempts, so nothing is stated here about it either way.

One refinement makes the check reliable: read the page for the legal entity that will hold your account rather than for the brand, because a group can license a platform under one regulated entity and not another. If you plan to connect anything external, confirm what the firm exposes through a broker trading API before opening the account, since that is set by the broker as well.

What Changes When One Broker Offers Both

Where a firm runs cTrader alongside MetaTrader, the two are separate products with separate terms, not one account seen through a different window. The platform is licensed, but the pricing unit and the leverage ceiling behind it are set by the broker, and they do not have to match across the two.

IC Markets is the case there is verified evidence for, because it publishes both. Its Raw Spread account exists twice, and the commission is not quoted in the same unit on each. On cTrader it is charged against traded notional; on MetaTrader it is charged per lot.

Those are different units, so neither figure can be compared with the other until one is converted, and a table listing a single commission for the broker has already lost the distinction.

Figures verified against the published terms of IC Markets on 2026-07-26, with the MetaTrader Raw Spread commission re-verified on 2026-08-18. Entity: Raw Trading Ltd.

The leverage row is the one that changes a position size rather than a cost. The cTrader account is capped at 1:1000 while the MetaTrader accounts run higher on major and minor pairs at small position sizes, so the same deposit does not support the same maximum exposure on both.

The instrument count is the row that cannot be filled, and it is worth saying why. Two independent readings of the pages of this broker disagreed: one recorded 2,250 instruments on MetaTrader against 121 on cTrader, and the other recorded a different breakdown entirely. That conflict is unresolved.

No figure is stated here. Comparison sites routinely print one instrument count per broker without naming which platform it belongs to, which is the same distinction being lost a second time.

Availability is also narrower than a broker directory suggests. Across the nine broker entities in the verification file behind this site, only IC Markets lists cTrader among its platforms. Exness, XM, FXTM, FBS, Equiti, Amana and Admirals publish MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 with their own web or mobile apps, and Tickmill adds TradingView rather than cTrader.

That is a measurement of the brokers reviewed here rather than of the whole market, and it points the same way as the check above: read the platform menu of the firm that will hold the account.

cTrader Automate and cTrader Copy Are Two Products, Not One

Two products sit alongside the platform, and search suggestions mix them constantly. They are documented separately, and only one of them involves writing code.

The first is documented by Spotware as cTrader Algo. It is the framework for algorithmic trading and custom tools, and it covers three object types: cBots, custom indicators and plugins. Algorithms can be written in C# or in Python.

The documented requirements are the .NET SDK and the cTrader Windows or Mac application, signed in with a cTrader ID, with Python installed as well for Python development. Note the naming: cTrader Automate and cAlgo are earlier names for the same framework and still appear in reviews written years apart.

The second is cTrader Copy, an integrated social trading product available in the cTrader apps and in the cTrader Store. An investor allocates funds to a strategy, and the money is moved into a dedicated copy account. That account is opened under your cTrader ID as an account in its own right, and it can hold nothing except the one strategy you allocated to. Provider trades come across on an equity-to-equity model that scales volume to each investor equity, and provider fees run on a high-water mark model.

Two limits sit in the documentation and are easy to miss. Copying is forbidden on symbols representing stocks and shares even though a provider may still trade them, and the availability of live copying depends on each broker regulatory permissions and on the jurisdiction. General copy trading mechanics apply on top of those.

What Carries Across Web, Desktop and Mobile

The platform exists as a desktop application, a browser version and mobile applications, and brokers list them separately, the same three-way split that governs MetaTrader WebTrader availability. IC Markets, for example, presents cTrader Web, cTrader for iPhone and iPad, cTrader for iMac and cTrader for Android as distinct entries rather than as one download.

Spotware calls the Windows build fully functional, and says its charting and its trading tools match what the other builds carry, with trading accounts reachable across different devices and operating systems.

The published minimum requirements for it are a dual-core processor, 2 GB of memory, Windows 7 or later, an internet connection of 50 kB per second or faster and a screen resolution of 1280 by 800. The recommended figures are the same processor, 4 GB of memory, the latest version of Windows and 100 kB per second.

One thing does not carry across, and it is the thing most likely to matter. Algorithm development is documented as requiring the .NET SDK together with the Windows or Mac application. A cBot can run without you sitting at that machine, but writing and compiling one is a desktop task, so a trader working only from a browser or a phone can use algorithms and cannot build them.

What travels between devices is the cTrader ID, which is a Spotware credential rather than a broker one. The trading account, and the money in it, stay with the broker. The wider question of what changes when you work from a phone is covered in our guide to trading from a mobile app.

The Order and Execution Behaviour That Differs From MetaTrader

Comparisons between the two platforms usually settle on execution speed, and that is the one thing the platform does not control. Speed, spread and slippage come out of the broker pricing, its liquidity arrangements and its execution model. The same client application at two firms can behave very differently, which is why the useful question is what the firm does on instant and market execution rather than which logo is on the window.

What genuinely differs is nearer the account than the order. MetaTrader 5 exposes netting and hedging position accounting modes, set on the account, which change what happens when a second order arrives in the same symbol as an open position. That is a property of the account configuration in that ecosystem, and a trader moving across has to establish how positions in the same symbol will be aggregated before assuming anything about a strategy that opens several.

The second real difference is the automation runtime. Programs written for MetaTrader run in the MetaQuotes language and its terminal. They do not execute on cTrader in any form, because the framework there is C# or Python running under the .NET SDK. This is not a compatibility gap that a converter closes; the two are separate runtimes with separate languages and separate distribution stores.

What Moving Platforms Does Not Move With You

A platform switch is often described as free. It is not, and the costs are specific rather than vague.

Automated strategies do not move. A MetaTrader expert advisor is a compiled program for a different runtime, so a codebase represents work that has to be rewritten rather than migrated. Custom indicators are in the same position.

Copy relationships do not move either. Because each allocation lives in a dedicated account opened under your cTrader ID for one strategy, it is tied to that arrangement and to a firm that supports the product. Changing firms means setting the copying up again rather than carrying it over.

Chart layouts, saved templates, watchlists and alerts are held per platform, and there is no interchange format that carries them between the two ecosystems. Each platform also sets its own ceiling on what a single list may hold, as the TradingView watchlist limits show. Neither is your money: the trading account is held by the broker, and the cTrader ID that logs you in is a Spotware account that can hold access to accounts at more than one firm without holding funds itself.

The one thing that does survive is your record of what you actually did, provided you keep it outside the platform.

Who Should Not Switch

Four situations make a switch a poor trade, and all four are checkable in advance.

If you own a working MetaTrader codebase, the migration cost is a rewrite in another language, and that cost is paid before any benefit appears. If the reason for switching is faster execution, the change will not deliver it, because execution is set by the broker rather than by the client application.

If your interest is specifically in copying strategies on stocks and shares, the documented restriction on those symbols rules it out. And if the firm that would hold your account is not permitted to offer the platform in your jurisdiction, the question is settled before it is asked.

The situations where a switch does hold up are the mirror image: you are starting without an existing codebase, you prefer C# or Python to the MetaQuotes language, and a firm you would open an account with anyway offers it on its own site today.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is cTrader available to traders in the United States?

The constraint is on the broker rather than on the software. Commodity Futures Trading Commission rules require a firm offering retail foreign currency contracts to register as a futures commission merchant or as a retail foreign exchange dealer, and a registered firm has to carry 20 million dollars in net capital plus 5 percent of what it owes retail forex customers above 10 million dollars. The question is whether a firm holding that registration licenses the platform, and it is answered at the register rather than at a platform review.

Which brokers offer cTrader accounts?

Read the platform page on the site of the firm that would hold the account, for the legal entity that would hold it. The vendor directory itself disclaims any check on the regulatory standing of the firms it lists and warns that entries may be partial or stale. On 21 August 2026 the platform was listed on the own sites of Pepperstone and IC Markets, and was absent from the RoboForex platform menu.

Is cTrader better than MetaTrader?

The comparison decides less than it appears to, because costs, symbols, leverage and execution come from the broker and not from the client application. What genuinely differs is the automation runtime and the position accounting model. If you already own MetaQuotes language programs, that is a cost on one side; if you prefer C# or Python, that is a benefit on the other.

What is the difference between cTrader Automate and cTrader Copy?

They are different products, and cTrader Automate is an earlier name for what Spotware documents as cTrader Algo, the framework for building cBots, custom indicators and plugins in C# or Python. cTrader Copy is a social product where an investor allocates funds to another trader strategy, and the copying runs in a dedicated account opened under your cTrader ID.

Does a cTrader account keep the same login on web and mobile?

Sign-in uses a cTrader ID, a Spotware credential rather than a broker one, and it can hold access to trading accounts at more than one broker. The trading account and the money in it stay with the broker. Building algorithms is the exception to device parity, because the documented requirement is the .NET SDK together with the Windows or Mac application.

Does a cTrader account cost the same as a MetaTrader account at the same broker?

Not necessarily, and at IC Markets it does not. The Raw Spread account is offered on both, but the commission is quoted per 100,000 USD traded on cTrader and per lot per side on MetaTrader, so the two figures are in different units. The maximum leverage also differs, at 1:1000 on the cTrader account against a higher ceiling on the MetaTrader accounts for small position sizes. Read the terms for the platform you intend to use.