Every July, a familiar itch shows up in UK investing forums: "should I just hand this over to someone else?" Half a year into managing an ISA yourself — checking prices, second-guessing fund switches, wondering whether that dip in your global tracker means anything — the appeal of a robo-advisor doing the thinking for you starts to look less like laziness and more like common sense. Nutmeg, Moneyfarm and Wealthify have spent the best part of a decade building exactly that pitch, and in 2026 it's worth asking honestly whether they've earned it. Trading 212 and InvestEngine have spent the last two years arguing the opposite case, quietly rolling out free auto-rebalancing baskets that do much of what a robo-advisor does without the annual fee attached. Both sides can't be entirely right, so this is really a question about which kind of investor you actually are, not which product is objectively better. And that's a harder question to answer honestly than most fee comparison tables would have you believe. Most people asking it in July aren't actually weighing up fund selection at all — they're weighing up whether they trust themselves to keep going.
What a robo-advisor actually does with your money
Strip away the branding and a robo-advisor is a portfolio built from a short questionnaire, then rebalanced automatically as markets move. You answer questions about your time horizon, your appetite for loss and roughly how much you're investing, and the algorithm slots you into one of perhaps eight to ten model portfolios — mostly low-cost index funds and ETFs, sometimes with a slice of actively managed funds layered on top. Nutmeg calls these "risk levels"; Moneyfarm calls them a "risk profile" out of seven; Wealthify uses five named tiers from Cautious to Adventurous. The mechanics differ in labelling more than in substance.
The genuine value isn't the fund selection — a competent DIY investor can build something equivalent from three or four Vanguard or iShares trackers in an afternoon. The value is the automatic rebalancing and the fact that nobody has to remember to do it. When your bond allocation drifts from 30% to 24% after a strong year for equities, the robo-advisor quietly sells some shares and buys bonds to bring you back to target. Left to their own devices, most DIY investors simply don't do this — not because they can't, but because rebalancing means selling your winners, and that goes against every instinct a new investor has. Behavioural economists have a name for exactly this pattern: the disposition effect, our tendency to hold onto losers too long and sell winners too early, which is precisely backwards from what a rebalancing strategy asks of you. A robo-advisor doesn't care about your feelings towards a particular fund; it just executes the trade.
Nutmeg, Moneyfarm and Wealthify — how the three actually differ
Nutmeg, now owned by JPMorgan, sits at the more expensive end: management fees typically run from around 0.75% down to roughly 0.35% as your balance grows past £100,000, on top of underlying fund costs of about 0.19–0.25%. Moneyfarm undercuts that slightly with a tiered fee structure starting near 0.75% on the first £10,000 and stepping down in bands, while Wealthify is usually the cheapest headline number of the three, sitting around 0.6% flat regardless of balance, plus fund costs typically in the 0.16–0.7% range depending on whether you pick its standard or ethical portfolios.
None of that is the full picture, though. Moneyfarm has leaned harder into offering a human advice layer for larger balances — you can actually speak to someone about your plan, which Wealthify doesn't offer at all and Nutmeg reserves for its higher-tier "Fully Managed" portfolios. Wealthify's ethical range is genuinely more developed than its rivals', built with actual exclusion criteria around fossil fuels and arms rather than a token ESG label bolted onto a standard tracker. If sustainable investing matters to you specifically, that's a real differentiator, not marketing gloss.
What DIY platforms ask you to do instead
Somebody still has to make three decisions a robo-advisor makes for you.
The DIY alternative — Trading 212, Freetrade, InvestEngine, Hargreaves Lansdown, AJ Bell — asks you to choose your funds, decide your asset split, and rebalance it yourself once or twice a year. InvestEngine has actually blurred this line by offering ready-made portfolios with 0% management fee (you only pay the underlying ETF costs, often under 0.2% combined), which is arguably the sharpest shot fired at the robo-advisor model in years. Trading 212's "Pies" feature lets you build an auto-rebalancing basket of ETFs yourself, for free, which does roughly what Nutmeg does for a tenth of the annual cost.
What DIY platforms don't give you is the decision itself. That's not a technical barrier — it's an afternoon with a spreadsheet — but it's the exact step where most new investors freeze, over-research for three months, and end up doing nothing at all. Freetrade and Hargreaves Lansdown both offer model portfolios of their own now, sitting somewhere between full DIY and a robo-advisor: you pick from a shortlist of pre-built allocations rather than choosing individual funds, but you're still responsible for rebalancing.
The real cost comparison over ten years
Run the numbers on a £20,000 ISA growing at an assumed 6% a year before fees. At Nutmeg's blended cost of roughly 1% (management plus fund fees combined at that balance), you'd end the decade with about £4,000 less than the same portfolio held through InvestEngine's ready-made range at 0.2% total cost. That gap only widens as the pot grows, because fees compound against you the same way returns compound for you.
- A robo-advisor at 0.9–1% total cost is paying roughly £180–£200 a year on a £20,000 pot for rebalancing and fund selection.
- A DIY platform running the equivalent portfolio through low-cost trackers typically costs £20–£60 a year on the same balance.
- The difference is what you're actually paying for: convenience and discipline, not superior returns — no robo-advisor has consistently beaten a simple low-cost global tracker over the periods they've operated, and none claims to.
That last point is the one worth sitting with. A robo-advisor is not a way to get better returns than the market — it's a way to get market-level returns without doing the admin, and to stop yourself from panic-selling in March or piling into whatever's trending. Whether that's worth £150 a year depends entirely on whether you'd actually rebalance your own portfolio, or whether — like most people — you'd set it up once and never touch it again, drifting steadily out of your intended risk level without noticing.
Switching between the two costs more than people expect
Moving an existing ISA from Nutmeg or Moneyfarm to a DIY platform usually means an in-specie transfer, where the underlying investments move across without being sold — this avoids triggering a disposal for tax purposes and keeps your ISA wrapper intact, but it can take two to four weeks and some robo-advisors charge an exit fee of around £25–£75 for the privilege. Moving the other way, from a DIY platform into a robo-advisor, is usually simpler because you're typically converting to cash first and letting the new provider invest it according to your risk profile — simpler, but it does mean a period out of the market while the transfer settles, and a cash transfer means selling everything first, which is worth planning around rather than doing on a whim in a falling market.
Who should actually use a robo-advisor
Use a robo-advisor if you know you won't rebalance manually, if you've tried DIY investing before and abandoned it out of decision paralysis, or if you specifically want Wealthify's ethical screening without building it yourself from individual ESG ETFs. Moneyfarm is the better pick if you think you'll want an actual phone call with a human at some point — its advice tier, while not free, is more substantial than what Nutmeg or Wealthify offer at comparable balances.
Don't use a robo-advisor because you think the algorithm is smarter than a basic global tracker. It isn't, and it was never designed to be.
Who should stick with DIY
Stick with a DIY platform if you're comfortable setting a calendar reminder twice a year to check your allocation, and if your total ISA balance is large enough that a 0.7–1% annual fee gap actually matters in cash terms — which, in practice, means most balances over about £15,000. Trading 212's Pies or InvestEngine's ready-made portfolios get you 90% of the robo-advisor experience — automatic contributions, a sensible starting allocation, low ongoing effort — for a fraction of the cost, and that combination is difficult to argue against once you've set it up once.
The middle path nobody quite talks about
There's a hybrid option that gets less attention than it deserves: start with InvestEngine's or Trading 212's ready-made portfolios to get the sensible default allocation and automatic contributions, then check in twice a year to nudge the split as your circumstances change — say, shifting more into bonds five years before you plan to draw on the money. You get the behavioural guardrails of a robo-advisor's default portfolio without paying a management fee for the privilege, and the rebalancing discipline comes from the calendar reminder rather than an algorithm you're paying for. It won't suit everyone; if you know for certain you'll ignore that reminder, pay the extra 0.8% and let Nutmeg or Wealthify do it for you instead. Being honest with yourself about which type of investor you actually are matters more here than any fee table — and that self-assessment, more than any spreadsheet, is what should decide where your next ISA contribution goes.