justETF is the fund reference desk most European investors reach for, and most of them use about a tenth of it. The screener and every fund profile are free and need no account; the paid tier adds portfolio tooling, not more data. What separates a useful visit from an hour of browsing is knowing which lines on a profile page decide anything, which five screener workflows answer real questions, and where the database stops and your own judgement has to start.
This guide is the working tour: how to read a fund page in the right order, the screens worth saving, and the one thing the database cannot tell you before you buy. Checked against the live site in August 2026.
What it costs, and what the free tier actually covers
Everything this guide describes runs on the free tier. The screener, the fund profiles, the category lists and the market overviews are open and unmetered. Premium costs €9.90 a month billed annually — €118.80 a year — or €14.90 a month on the quarterly plan, and what it buys is portfolio machinery rather than better fund data: historic portfolio simulation, benchmark comparison, rebalancing signals, monitoring and alerts.
That distinction is worth holding onto. If you are researching which fund to buy, the free tier is complete. If you want a tool that watches a portfolio and tells you when its weights have drifted, that is the case for paying — and it is a case most buy-and-hold investors with three funds do not need to make.
Comparing UCITS funds? Take the decision workbook with you.
The ETF Comparison Workbook: TER, domicile, withholding and overlap checks in one printable spreadsheet.
How to read a fund profile page, in order
Every profile has the same anatomy, and reading it in the wrong order is how people end up comparing performance charts before they have established that two funds track different indices. The order that works:
- The ISIN and the share-class selector. This is the fund’s identity, and the selector is where the accumulating, distributing and hedged siblings hide — the ones the name line collapses into a single entry. Most “which one is the real one?” confusion ends here. The vocabulary behind these labels is unpacked in our UCITS ETF terminology guide.
- The index and methodology line. This is the actual product. One click through to the index methodology tells you what you are buying — how many holdings, what weighting, which screens — and it outranks everything below it on the page.
- Fund size and launch date. The viability screen. A small fund that is also young is the combination that carries genuine closure risk; a small fund that has run for a decade usually has a reason to exist.
- Replication method and use of income. Physical, sampled or synthetic; accumulating or distributing. These are structural facts with tax consequences in most European countries, and they are not preferences you can change later without selling.
- The TER, in context. Never in isolation — always against the cheapest fund tracking the same index, which the category lists give you in seconds. A 0.20% fee is expensive in one category and competitive in another.
Two things on the page deserve scepticism rather than trust. The performance chart is endpoint-sensitive: shift the start date by six months and the ranking often inverts, which is why our performance guide treats these charts as a starting question rather than an answer. And the risk metrics are short-window statistics presented with a precision the underlying sample does not support.
Five screener workflows worth saving
The screener is the part of the site that repays learning. Five workflows cover almost every real question:
- The category floor. Filter by index, sort by TER. Thirty seconds tells you the current state of the fee war for any exposure, and it is the workflow behind every fund comparison on this site.
- The share-class finder. Search the fund family, then toggle distribution policy. This is how you find the accumulating sibling of a distributing fund — or confirm that it does not exist.
- The savings-plan filter. Availability is listed broker by broker, which turns a fee comparison into an execution question. A cheaper fund your broker will not run as a monthly plan can easily cost more in practice than a slightly dearer one it will.
- The size-and-age screen. Set a minimum fund size and a launch-date cutoff, and the closure-risk tail disappears from your shortlist before you have invested any attention in it.
- The sustainability toggle. Useful for finding the screened variant of a fund you already know — with the standing caveat that the label tells you nothing until you click through to the methodology, since screens vary from token to genuinely restrictive.
Where the database stops
justETF documents what exists. That is a real service and a bounded one, and knowing the boundary is most of what separates a power user from a browser.
The largest gap is delivery. The site tells you what a fund charges and which index it tracks; it does not tell you how closely the fund actually tracked that index after costs. Tracking difference — the realised gap between fund and index — is published in fund annual reports and aggregated on specialist sources such as trackingdifferences.com, and it routinely reorders shortlists that looked settled on headline fee alone. A fund with a marginally higher TER that lends securities efficiently can deliver more than a nominally cheaper rival.
The second gap is construction. A database can tell you a fund tracks MSCI World; it cannot tell you what that means for your concentration in a handful of US technology companies, or how much your three funds overlap. That is portfolio work, and it lives outside any single fund’s page.
The practical workflow braids the two: the database for discovery and reference facts, the fund’s own documents and tracking data for verification, and portfolio-level frameworks for the placement decision. Used as the first of those three, justETF is excellent. Used as all three, it is how people end up holding four funds that own the same companies.
justETF, extraETF, or your broker’s screener?
They converge on the same underlying facts, because they draw on the same issuer data. extraETF has stronger German-market savings-plan coverage; broker screeners have the advantage of only showing what you can actually buy on that platform, which is a real filter. justETF’s edge is breadth across European domiciles and a profile-page layout that surfaces the structural facts quickly.
The reading order and the judgement boundary in this guide transfer to any of them, which is the more durable point: the tool matters less than the sequence you run it in.
What regular use actually looks like
For a settled portfolio, justETF should be a few visits a year, not a browsing habit. The visits that earn their time are: a category comparison when you are choosing a new holding, a share-class check when your tax or income situation changes, and an annual pass re-running the category floor on funds you already own, because fees drift and the cheapest fund in a category rarely stays the cheapest for a decade.
The failure mode is the opposite pattern — opening the screener with no question, finding a fund that looks interesting, and buying it. A database is very good at generating options and completely indifferent to whether you needed one.
Browse the full series in our beginner’s guide to ETFs.
The short version
- Read profile pages in order: ISIN and share class, index, size and age, structure, then TER in context.
- Save the category-floor screen; it answers more questions than the other four combined.
- Treat performance charts as endpoint-sensitive and risk statistics as short-window.
- Check tracking difference before buying — the database does not carry it.
- Visit with a question. The screener is a poor place to go looking for one.
Frequently asked questions
Is justETF free?
The research layer is free and always has been: the screener, the fund profile pages, the category lists and the market overviews cost nothing and require no account. Premium adds portfolio tooling rather than more data — historic portfolio simulation, benchmark comparison, rebalancing signals and monitoring — and costs €9.90 a month billed annually (€118.80 a year) or €14.90 a month on the quarterly plan. Every workflow described on this page runs on the free tier.
Does justETF cover non-UCITS products?
It covers exchange-traded commodities and notes alongside funds, and flags the structure on each profile. That flag matters more than most users realise: an ETC or ETN is a debt security issued by a company, not a fund holding assets, so it carries issuer credit risk that a UCITS fund does not. Check the structure line before you treat anything on the site as an ETF.
How current are the TER figures?
They are maintained from issuer data and carry the ordinary lag of any secondary source — a fee cut usually reaches the issuer’s own factsheet and KID before it reaches a database. For a purchase decision, treat the justETF figure as the shortlist filter and the issuer document as the confirmation.
Can I find which brokers offer a fund as a savings plan?
Yes, and it is one of the most useful features casual users never find. Fund profiles carry savings-plan availability broker by broker, which turns an abstract fee comparison into an execution question: a fund with a 0.07% TER that your broker will not run as a monthly plan may cost you more in practice than a 0.12% fund it will.
What is the database’s biggest blind spot?
Delivery. justETF documents what a fund charges and claims to track; it does not tell you how closely the fund actually tracked its index after costs. That figure — tracking difference — lives on specialist sources such as trackingdifferences.com and in the fund’s own annual report, and it regularly reorders a shortlist that looked settled on TER alone.
Does justETF rank or recommend funds?
It documents and sorts rather than recommends, and that neutrality is precisely why it works as a reference source. Sorting by TER within an index is a fact; deciding whether that index belongs in your portfolio is a judgement the database does not make and should not.
Does justETF have an API or export?
Not for retail use. The platform is built for interactive browsing, and programmatic access to European fund data sits in the paid market-data world. For a private portfolio this is rarely a real constraint — the handful of decisions a year that actually need the data can be run by hand in minutes.
How does justETF make money?
Broker partnerships and the Premium subscription — standard economics for a free reference site. Worth knowing when you read anything ranked or promoted there; less relevant to the reference facts themselves, which are the part this guide relies on.
Sources: justETF and its Premium pricing page (checked August 2026) for tier features and pricing; trackingdifferences.com for realised tracking data. Verify current fund figures against the issuer’s KID and factsheet before investing. Educational content, not financial advice.
European UCITS/ETF investor with 11+ years building a global dividend and index portfolio, and founder of Financial Expert Class. I write every guide here from first-hand experience investing across EU brokers and tax regimes — not theory. More about me →