Crypto Perps Prop Firms Compared: Vest, Propr and Breakout

If you have shopped for a crypto perps prop firm recently you will have met the same page a dozen times: a ranked list, a star rating, an affiliate link, and a cheerful line about which firms "allow bots". Almost none of those pages quote the firm. They quote each other.

That matters because automation permission is the one rule that cannot be worked out by reading marketing copy, and it is the rule most likely to cost you an account. So rather than rank these firms, this comparison does something narrower and more useful: it reports what each firm's own published documents actually say, alongside the account sizes, fees and payout terms pulled from their own pages and endpoints on 5 October 2026.

The three firms are Vest Capital, Propr and Breakout Prop. Trade Dispensary supports all three as destination accounts, which is why we had reason to read the small print properly.

The three firms at a glance

Two things in that table are worth the rest of the article. The automation row, because the three firms could not be further apart. And the fee row, because Propr and Breakout are selling the same thing at different prices.

Automation and bots: what each firm actually publishes

This is the section that does not exist anywhere else, because building it means reading the vendors' own documents rather than their landing pages. We pulled every public page and terms document from all three firms on 5 October 2026 and searched for every form of the words bot, expert advisor, algorithm, API, automated, copy trading and mirror trading.

Propr: the only one of the three that says yes

Propr's published rules carry a line item for automation and set it to "None". That is unusually direct for this industry, and it is backed by product rather than just policy: Propr publishes a trading API, issues API keys, and runs a separate beta environment. Its developer documentation points new users at that beta to test a bot before putting it anywhere near a paid evaluation, which is exactly the right order to do things in.

Propr describes itself as "an on-chain prop firm built on Hyperliquid", backed by SwissBorg. Trades execute on Hyperliquid, so you get that venue's roughly 160 perpetual markets, and Propr also lists prediction markets on Polymarket.

Breakout Prop: the gap between what is claimed and what is published

Search for whether Breakout allows bots and you will find confident answers. We could not find the firm making any of them.

Breakout's pricing page, how-it-works page, home page and full Terms of Use contain no reference to automated trading in any form. Its Terms of Use point to a separate "Rules" document for trading conduct, and that document does not appear to be published: the obvious paths all return a not-found page, and the documentation subdomain simply serves the marketing site back.

That is not an accusation, and it is not a reason to avoid Breakout. It means the honest answer to "does Breakout allow bots" is ask them in writing and keep the reply. If you are planning to automate, get that confirmation before you pay, not after. We learned this lesson the hard way with a futures firm whose marketing blog and help centre gave contradictory answers on platform eligibility, and where the choice at checkout was non-refundable.

Breakout is worth taking seriously on other grounds. In its own words it is "backed by Kraken, one of the longest-operating, most regulated crypto exchanges in the world", has been "operating continuously since November 2023" and has "paid out over $60M+ to traders". It lists 63 markets, including the Nasdaq 100 and the S&P 500 alongside BTC, ETH and SOL, and it holds an "Excellent" Trustpilot rating across more than a thousand reviews.

Vest Capital: the widest range of the three, and the one people confuse

Vest is the firm with the momentum in this space right now, and it is also the one most likely to be set up wrongly, because Vest is two separate products rather than one.

If you have bought an evaluation, you want Vest Capital, and you will never touch a wallet. Trade Dispensary treats the two as different destination types for exactly this reason, so picking the wrong one is the single most common setup mistake we see on Vest.

The connection detail matters if you intend to automate. Vest Capital is reached through the same login you use on the website, so there is no API key to generate and no wallet to fund or delegate. That is how Trade Dispensary connects to it, and it is why a Vest Capital destination takes under a minute to add. The one consequence worth knowing is that Vest issues a single rotating session, so connecting an account signs you out of the Vest website once. Account sizes, fees and rule combinations are covered in the pricing section further down, where Vest turns out to be the cheapest entry of the three.

Vest Capital listed 88 markets when we checked its public instrument endpoint on 5 October 2026, and the mix is worth noting because it is not what people expect from a perps venue. It is equities-heavy, with AAPL, AMD, AMZN and ARM all present, alongside index perpetuals including NDX-USD-PERP, which Trade Dispensary displays as NQ-PERP. If you trade the Nasdaq on futures, that is a direct equivalent. One market restriction to know: XRP and HYPE are not available on evaluation or funded accounts.

Propr and Breakout are selling the same rule set at different prices

This fell out of the research and we have not seen it written anywhere. Put the two firms' one-step evaluations side by side and they are not merely similar. They are identical, with the same three plan names.

Same names, same targets, same daily loss, same drawdowns. Where they differ is the price, and the direction is consistent.

Breakout is cheaper at every size on all three identical rule sets, by roughly 20% to 30%. On a $100,000 Turbo the gap is $330 against $450.

Propr answers back in three places. It offers $200,000 on all four of its evaluation types where Breakout caps Classic at $100,000. Its payout minimum is $20 against Breakout's $50. And it is the firm that will let you run a bot, which for a systematic trader outranks a 27% fee difference entirely.

Leverage is the one place the two genuinely diverge, and it will matter if you trade coins. Propr allows "up to 10x on equity and index perps, 8x on commodities, and 5x on major crypto", applied automatically and not adjustable by the trader. Breakout's plan cards headline 10x, but its own how-it-works page qualifies that as "10x leverage on BTC, S&P 500, and Nasdaq, with up to 5x on most other assets". So on Bitcoin specifically Breakout offers double Propr's leverage, while on the index products they are level.

Account sizes and fees, firm by firm

Propr: four evaluation types, six sizes

Note that Propr's own prose says it offers "three evaluation types across five account sizes" while its own table lists four types across six sizes. The table is the thing you buy from, so that is what is reproduced above.

Propr checks both limits against equity, not balance, which means floating profit and loss on open positions counts toward a breach. The daily limit is recalculated at 00:00 UTC from the start-of-day balance. Evaluation fees are non-refundable once the account is activated, and you are never liable for losses beyond the fee.

Breakout Prop: three plans, up to $200,000

Breakout badges Pro as "Most popular" and Turbo as "Lowest price". Every evaluation includes an 80/20 split as standard, with a permanent upgrade to 90/10 available at checkout for 20% more. There is no profit target once funded, no consistency rule, no minimum trading days, no news restriction and no profit cap.

Breakout also runs a fourth product, Spark, aimed specifically at NQ and ES traders: $50,000 for a one-time $139, an 80/20 split, a $3,000 (6%) target, no separate daily loss limit, a $1,500 trailing maximum drawdown and leverage up to 40x on the index products. It is a separate product with its own rules and it is currently sold out, waitlist only. Worth knowing it exists, because nothing else in this comparison is shaped like it, and worth noting it is leveraged trading through Breakout's terminal rather than CME futures contracts.

Vest Capital: a configurable matrix, not a plan list

Vest prices differently from the other two. Rather than three plans, it sells a matrix: you pick a tier, a profit target, a daily loss limit and a profit split, and the combination is priced. There were 39 active evaluation products and four instant funded products when we pulled Vest's public plans endpoint on 5 October 2026.

Every single evaluation carries a 6% maximum drawdown. What you choose is the tier ($5,000 Silver, $10,000 Gold, $25,000 Platinum), the goal (10% or 20%), the daily loss limit (3%, 4% or none) and the split (80% or 90%). Removing the daily loss limit and taking the 90% split is what pushes the fee up.

The cheapest option at each tier is the two-step evaluation with a 10% goal, a 3% daily loss limit and an 80% split. At $15 for a $5,000 Silver two-step, Vest is the cheapest way into this comparison by some margin, and that pricing is a large part of why Vest is the name everyone is talking about.

Vest also sells instant funded accounts with no evaluation at all, and a 95% split:

Vest describes the instant drawdown as "equal to your payment", which is a neat way of framing it: the $10 on a $500 account is the 2% you can lose. A 95% split with no profit target and no daily loss limit is the most generous headline in this comparison, and the $500 tier at $10 is the cheapest entry into a funded account anywhere here. The API restriction applies to these accounts too.

One figure to check before you rely on it: Vest's documentation says funded accounts allow "up to 50x, market-dependent" leverage, while the plan data behind the checkout carries a 5x maximum on every one of the 43 products, on both the evaluation and the funded stage. Those cannot both be the operative number for the same account, so confirm which applies to the tier you are buying.

Payouts compared

All three pay in USDC, and none of them has a payout cycle you have to wait for. Propr's $20 minimum is the lowest, which matters more than it sounds on a $5,000 account where a good week might be $200. Vest splits the process into two steps worth understanding: "Claim Profit" moves money from the funded account to your primary account, and a withdrawal then moves it from there to an external wallet.

Which one should you pick

No firm here is the right answer for everyone, and anyone telling you otherwise has an affiliate link. What the data does support is matching the firm to how you trade.

If you run a bot or any kind of automated strategy, Propr is the only one of the three whose published rules say you may. It is also the only one with a public API and a beta environment to test in. Pay the 20% to 30% premium over Breakout and treat it as the cost of a written permission.

If you trade manually and want the most account for the least money, Breakout is cheaper than Propr on identical rules at every size, has the Kraken association and the longest public payout record of the three, and gives you 10x on Bitcoin where Propr gives 5x.

If you want the cheapest possible start, or a 95% split, Vest Capital is in a class of its own at $15 for a $5,000 two-step and $10 for an instant funded $500 account. It also has the widest choice of rule combinations, so you can buy the exact drawdown and split you want rather than taking a fixed plan.

If drawdown is what kills your accounts, read that column rather than the price. A 3% static drawdown on Turbo at either firm is tight, and Propr's 2-Step has the only trailing drawdown in the group at 8%, which behaves very differently from a static floor. Our guide to drawdown protection when copying trades covers why trailing limits and copied entries interact badly.

How Trade Dispensary connects to all three

Trade Dispensary supports Propr, Breakout Prop and Vest as destination accounts, which means a signal from one source can be copied into any of them, or into all of them at once, alongside your futures and forex accounts.

The destinations, exactly as they appear in the application:

Two of those need a word of explanation, because they are the answer to a question we get asked a lot.

Vest is two products, not one, as set out in the table earlier: the perps DEX and Vest Capital are separate platforms with separate APIs and no shared code, and it is Vest Capital that is meant whenever "Vest" comes up in a prop firm context. We wrote up the Vest Capital connection process and the broader perps copy trading picture separately.

Bybit is an exchange, not a prop firm, which is why it is not a row in the comparison above. It is here because it is the fifth crypto destination Trade Dispensary supports and it is often where the signal originates rather than lands. One thing worth flagging if you are in Europe: Bybit EU lists no derivatives at all, spot only, for reasons that have nothing to do with any software.

Trade Dispensary runs locally on your own machine rather than in our cloud, so your API keys and session credentials never leave your computer, and there is no monthly subscription. Feature coverage is not identical across every perps destination, and we would rather say so than let you find out: Breakout currently supports market entries and a full flatten, the Vest perps DEX has no stop loss or take profit wired, and Vest Capital has panic close but not yet bracket orders. The Propr integration is the most complete of the three.

On automation permission, the same advice applies to copying as to bots. Copying your own signals between your own accounts is the normal, widely permitted case, and copying somebody else's signals into a funded account is restricted or banned almost everywhere. Our summary of prop firm copy trading rules goes through the distinction, and the futures equivalent of this article is our 2026 futures prop firm comparison. If you are specifically looking for firms that welcome algorithmic trading, the guide to prop firms that allow algorithmic trading covers the futures and forex side in the same spirit as this one covers perps.

How these figures were checked

Everything above came from each firm's own pages, documents and public endpoints on 5 October 2026, not from review sites or roundups. The Vest numbers came from its public plans endpoint and were diffed against a copy pulled four days earlier to make sure no product had changed price or been withdrawn: 43 products both times, with no additions, removals or changed fields. The automation findings came from searching the full text of each firm's terms and public pages for every form of the relevant words.

Where a firm contradicts itself we have said so rather than picked the flattering number. That happened three times: Propr's prose undercounts its own plan table, Breakout's leverage headline is broader than its own detailed statement, and Vest's documentation and plan data disagree on maximum leverage by a factor of ten.

Prices and rules at prop firms change constantly, often without an announcement. Treat every figure here as correct on 5 October 2026 and check the firm's own page before you buy. If you spot something that has moved, tell us and we will update it.