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Welcome @Larry You are absolutely right that if the fills are not good, low commissions are not very useful. It is very difficult to compare apples to apples - unless you have accounts with both brokers and try to submit the same order to both at the same time. Based on my personal experience and feedback from members, I still believe that IB provides best combination of fills, commissions and platform. Tradier Brokerage Special Offer provides some feedback about Tradier. Based on members feedback, I would NOT recommend TOS, but tastyworks gets very good feedback. Those are probably the best options available today. It doesn't mean other brokers are not good, and it is entirely possible that TradeStation and OptionStation have been overlooked in this discussion. Here is Barron's latest rankings - https://www.barrons.com/articles/interactive-brokers-takes-top-spot-in-online-broker-ranking-1521854071. IB is ranked #1, but TradeStation is pretty high as well.

I'll jump in, I'm always interested in other traders ideas about brokers, especially fills. As far as your first few questions, I have an IT background, but I'm not a programmer so I'll default to anyone that wants to take those questions on. As far as fills go, I'm not sure we've every come to a definitive answer. This question comes up very often, and considering we're on page 16 of this thread, and the question still comes up, I'm not sure if we'll every come to a conclusion about which broker provides the best fills. IB has their "SMART Routing" feature. Is that a feature or not? The way I understand it is, they can break apart a spread and send individual legs to different exchanges to get filled. If nobody knows how that algo really works, are we getting better fills and saving anything by going with IB because of the "hype" of SMART Routing? I really don't know. Lets open this discussion again, I would love to hear their current ideas about fills/brokers/commission.

I'm new here and I'm wondering why TradeStation and OptionStation seem to be mostly ignored in this thread. I was an IB customer for years, and a two years ago, switched to TradeStation for equities and options, primarily for two reasons: 1) platform seems seamlessly integrated with data feeds and brokerage (except you have to have separate accounts for equities/options and futures), and a reasonably programmable platform (I'm a professional programmer, so EasyLangluage, especially with its new object oriented extensions may be ugly, but gets the job done). I use NinjaTrader for futures, and I like C# better than EasyLanguage, but I'm leaning towards switching most trades to options, using services like SteadyOptions or CMLViz, so algorithmic trading is less important to me now. Still I would like to program algorithmic fill procedures. In addition, Tradestation commissions seem reasonably competitive ($1/contract for options with no ticket fee, or 5.00 + 0.50 per contract). Data fees are also competitive, and they have GREAT historical tick and minute data. The few options trades I've made (primarily ATM RUT options) have been filled within a few seconds at the mid point, but I really don't have enough experience there to generalize. Stock fills always seem spot on, less than 1 second. Tradestation's OptionStation itself, which is now free, seems OK, although not nearly as good as OptionNet. I have a 4k monitor, and the graphics are really jagged and it's clumsy to enter and modify positions. I have no experience in modifying a multi-legged position after the fill, but have had no problems slowly increasing the limit on a spread until I get filled. To me, I am primarily focused on the quality and speed of fills. It does little good to have "free" commissions if you lose 20 dollars a trade in slippage compared to paying an extra dollar per trade in commissions. So, after this long winded intro, I'm trying to find the best combination of 1) great and speedy fills, 2) decent commission and data costs, 3) accurate trade and position reporting, and finally, 4) nice option analysis software (although I'm hoping SteadyOptions will just do most of that last one for me). I've seen the reports of Tradier+Tradehawk or Dynamic, and Tradier's $40 (or is it $50 now) fixed per month commissions, or TastyWorks $10 cap...but at what price. How are the fills compared with IB or TradeStation?