Subito vs Facebook Marketplace: Which Is Better in Italy?

On this page

• What Meta told the European Commission about Subito
• A transaction platform against a noticeboard
• Fees, and who actually pays them
• The real cost of Subito: paid visibility
• Scale, sourced honestly
• What is actually on each platform
• Shipping, escrow and getting paid
• Rules and moderation, where they diverge hardest
• Volume limits and the private-to-business line
• Reputation, fairly reported
• Tax: DAC7, and the €5,000 myth
• The verdict
• Running both without listing twice
• Sources and verification
• Related guides

What Meta told the European Commission about Subito

Almost every marketplace comparison is written from the outside by someone guessing at market share. This one does not have to be: in November 2024 the two companies argued the question in front of a regulator, and both published their side.

On 14 November 2024 the European Commission fined Meta €797.72 million for tying Facebook Marketplace to its social network and imposing unfair trading conditions on rival classified-ads providers. Meta replied the same day. In its published response it argued the Commission had misread the market, and to make that argument listed the companies it says it competes with: “eBay, Leboncoin in France, Marktplaats in the Netherlands, Subito in Italy, Blocket in Sweden and Finn.no in Norway” — “formidable competitors and the market leader in many member states”.

Meta had every incentive to make its rivals look strong, so read it with that in mind. It is still the clearest public admission by Marketplace’s owner that in Italy, Subito is the one to beat, and Meta names no other Italian rival.

Subito vs Facebook Marketplace at a glance

A transaction platform against a noticeboard

This is the whole comparison, and everything else on this page follows from it.

Subito operates a real transaction layer. TuttoSubito holds the money in escrow, generates a courier label, tracks the parcel, applies buyer protection and pays the seller into a bank account. It covers all Market categories except Animali, plus Accessori Auto and Moto, but not vehicles, property or job ads.

Facebook Marketplace in Italy does not do this, and the evidence has to be assembled carefully, because Meta publishes no page saying so.

Here is what Meta does publish. Its Merchant Policies set the individual seller fee at 10% per transaction with a $0.80 minimum, on sale price plus shipping plus tax — a US dollar figure attached to onsite checkout — cap shipped items at a $500 list price, and state that Marketplace Seller Protection is “currently only available in the US”. The shipping help page warns that “some shipping features are not available to all eligible sellers”. When Meta announced prepaid shipping labels on 12 March 2026 it named no country. And the commerce eligibility page requires a seller to “be located in a supported country”, then lists none.

So the correct statement is an absence, not a rule: every published mechanism that would make Marketplace a transaction platform is scoped to the United States in dollars, and Meta publishes no country list placing Italy inside any of them. That is an inference from the shape of Meta’s documentation, not a quotation, and we would rather say so than round it up into a certainty.

The consequence for an Italian seller is blunt. On Facebook Marketplace you are arranging a cash handover with a stranger and carrying every part of the risk: no escrow, no tracked label, no dispute process that ends with money moving, no record for your accountant. On Subito you can do the same — plenty of Subito sales are still cash on a doorstep — or route the sale through TuttoSubito and be paid into a bank account. The choice existing is the difference.

Fees, and who actually pays them

On headline cost, Facebook Marketplace wins, and it is worth saying so plainly. It charges no listing fee in any market and no selling fee on local pickup, and in Italy, with no checkout, there is nothing for the 10% fee to attach to. A hundred listings cost nothing and a hundred sales cost nothing.

Subito is nearly as cheap and more explicit. Posting a private ad is free in most categories, the exceptions being Nautica, Servizi and Attrezzature di lavoro, where insertion and renewal are paid. There is no seller commission. Sell through TuttoSubito and the seller still pays zero: the service commission falls on the buyer, on the item price excluding shipping, at €1.20 plus 5% up to €300, or €1.20 plus 4.5% above, capped at €91.20.

Worked through: a €40 jacket costs the buyer €3.20 in service commission on top of shipping, which the buyer also pays. A €250 camera costs €13.70, a €900 bag €41.70, and a €5,000 item hits the €91.20 cap. In every case the seller receives the full asking price.

Two warnings. Third-party TuttoSubito figures circulate — €0.50 + 4%, a €1.49 minimum, a €30.50 cap — and none match what Subito publishes. And a buyer-paid fee is still a fee your listing must survive: on a low-value item, €1.20 plus 5% plus shipping is a meaningful fraction of the price. That is the honest reason many Subito sellers still meet in person.

The real cost of Subito: paid visibility

Because Subito takes no commission, it makes its money on attention. The five options are Vetrina, In Cima, Super boost, Urgente and In Evidenza in homepage. Their durations are published; their prices are not — not on the help centre, not in the policies, nowhere public. The support pages say the cost will be visible at the point of purchase. You cannot budget a promotion campaign in advance from published information, which for a seller with a hundred items is a real planning problem.

What makes it bite is that the free alternative is closed off. Bumping is a paid option and deleting and reposting to achieve the same effect is prohibited. Elsewhere delete-and-repost is the standard unofficial refresh; on Subito it is a rule violation that also risks a duplicate rejection. Ads run 365 days with an emailed renewal link valid 10 days, so listings do not vanish — but their position decays, and the only sanctioned way to reverse that is to pay.

Facebook Marketplace has no published equivalent: no promotion menu, no bump, no ranking lever. Subito lets you pay to be seen; Facebook Marketplace does not let you pay and does not tell you why you were not.

Scale, sourced honestly

Both platforms are large, and neither publishes the number you actually want: how many Italians will see a given ad.

Subito publishes generous figures on its about page: 26 million monthly unique users, 13 million live ads daily across 38 categories, 2.8 billion searches. The same page carries its Digital Services Act disclosure, a regulated figure rather than a marketing one: 15.3 million average monthly active recipients at 30 June 2025. Those describe different things and neither is wrong, but notice the gap.

A third number disagrees. Adevinta’s own brand page for Subito — written by the group that owned it — says “more than 16 million buyers and sellers” and 149,000 new ads approved daily. We name both because they conflict and cannot be reconciled from public sources. Our own count of live ads on 29 August 2026 came to 11.74 million.

For Facebook Marketplace the position is worse. Meta publishes 430 million items listed each month globally and no country-level Marketplace figure for Italy at all. The closest citable proxy is advertising reach: DataReportal recorded 28.5 million Facebook users in Italy in late 2025, 48.1% of the population, against 53.1 million internet users. That is ad-reach, not Marketplace usage — many of those 28.5 million have never opened Marketplace — and DataReportal warns that Meta changed its reporting methodology, so year-on-year comparisons are unreliable.

One figure you will see everywhere and should not use: “1.1 billion Facebook Marketplace users”. It is repeated across dozens of resale blogs and cannot be traced to any Meta publication, so it does not appear here as a fact.

The defensible summary: Subito is one of Italy’s largest classifieds sites by its own regulated disclosure and by Meta’s characterisation; Facebook Marketplace sits inside a social network with roughly half of Italy on it; and nobody has published a number letting you compare the two audiences.

What is actually on each platform

Subito’s shape can be measured, because it exposes live counts. Read on 29 August 2026 against a site total of 11.74 million ads:

• Per la casa e la persona — 4,910,519 (41.8%). Furniture, homewares, clothing, children’s goods.
• Sports e hobby — 2,855,936 (24.3%).
• Motori — 2,402,257 (20.5%).
• Elettronica — 1,056,718 (9.0%).
• Immobili — 293,308; Lavoro e servizi — 178,407; Altri annunci — 41,527.

By leaf category: Arredamento e Casalinghi 1,980,092, Abbigliamento e Accessori 1,398,791, Collezionismo 1,148,695, Accessori Auto 931,034, Tutto per i bambini 708,004, Libri e Riviste 607,590, Auto 530,014.

That overturns the usual assumption. Most writing treats Subito as a cars site with other stuff attached, but Per la casa e la persona is more than twice the size of Motori, and Abbigliamento e Accessori alone outnumbers the entire Elettronica macro-category. If you sell clothes, Subito is not a fringe channel in Italy.

Fashion listings carry brand and size fields scoped per clothing type rather than one global list, with roughly a thousand brands per type; watches, jewellery, bags and accessories have no size field. Condition is a five-value field: Nuovo, Come nuovo, Ottimo, Buono, Danneggiato. Ads carry six photos free, and while a paid option adds six more it is not available for fashion — a clothing ad is hard-capped at six images.

Facebook Marketplace cannot be measured the same way. Meta publishes no category taxonomy, no per-category counts and no Italian breakdown, so we describe rather than tabulate: Marketplace spans a broad horizontal set of consumer categories with vehicles, property rentals and home goods prominent, and much of it is furniture and other bulky items that are impractical to post. That is the natural consequence of a platform with no integrated shipping — its inventory skews to what a buyer can put in a car.

Shipping, escrow and getting paid

If you intend to post items rather than hand them over, this section decides the comparison for you.

TuttoSubito integrates four couriers — Poste Italiane, InPost, BRT Fermopoint and UPS, with Poste Italiane not deselectable — across four parcel bands: PICCOLO to 2kg, MEDIO to 5kg, GRANDE to 15kg, MAXI to 20kg. The buyer always pays shipping, and the seller drops the parcel at a pickup point; home collection is not offered, except for bicycles via Poste.

The clock matters. Create the label within 48 hours of payment and dispatch within six days, or the sale cancels automatically. Money sits in escrow until the buyer confirms receipt, releasing three days after delivery, or around ten days after dispatch if you shipped it yourself. A verified reseller self-shipping can wait up to 24 days, because the buyer holds a 14-day withdrawal right. Not fast — but they are payouts, into a bank account, with a record.

One hard boundary: TuttoSubito delivers only within Italian territory, and goods must be physically in Italy to be listed. If you want European reach you need a different channel — Vinted or eBay rather than either platform here.

Facebook Marketplace offers none of this. You agree a price in Messenger and you meet — frictionless when the buyer is ten minutes away and the item is a wardrobe, unworkable when the buyer is in another region and the item is a coat.

Rules and moderation, where they diverge hardest

Subito is one of the more heavily moderated classifieds platforms in Europe and publishes its rules with unusual specificity. Every ad is moderated before publication and every edit re-enters the queue. The rules that matter at volume:

• Duplicates are auto-detected and auto-rejected, and reusing the same photograph across two ads alone triggers it. Ten similar white t-shirts need ten distinct sets of photographs.
• The same item may not be posted in multiple categories, regions or provinces — its own published rejection reason. Listing a bike in both Milano and Monza is not permitted.
• Category, region, province, email, ad type and private-vs-business status are immutable after publication. Title, description, price and photos can be edited; those six cannot. With delete-and-repost banned, a category mistake is unfixable by any sanctioned route.
• Price is moderated and can be rejected as unrealistically high or low. Placeholder pricing will not survive.
• Descriptions are moderated, and one that merely repeats the title is a stated rejection reason. Bulk-generated copy that echoes the title fails.
• Links in ad bodies are banned, and emails and links are stripped from messages. You cannot drive a Subito buyer to your own store.
• One ad equals one clearly identified item. Stock lots are permitted only as a single block, in the paid Attrezzature di lavoro category.
• Posting on someone else’s behalf is banned, catching consignment, as are multiple accounts to dodge the caps.
• Listing via unauthorised management software is prohibited under Subito’s “what you cannot do” rules. Business accounts may upload a feed, but only through authorised gestionali.
• Phone verification is mandatory at registration, and only EU and Swiss numbers are accepted, minimum age 16.

Facebook Marketplace has nothing comparable in published form. There are Commerce Policies and there is enforcement — listings do get removed, accounts restricted — but no published catalogue of rejection reasons, no duplicate rule, no photo-reuse rule, no documented moderation queue. This cuts both ways. Subito’s strictness is precisely why its listings are consistent, why its categories work as a search surface, and why Italian buyers trust it. It is also why a seller with three hundred items finds it exhausting: every rule above is a way for a legitimate listing to be rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with the item. Facebook Marketplace is looser, faster and messier, and what you scroll past reflects that.

Volume limits and the private-to-business line

Subito’s free-ad allowances are concurrent caps per sub-category, not monthly quotas — the cap is on how many ads you have live at once, so it never resets with the calendar. The published figures are 45 in Abbigliamento e Accessori, 130 in Libri, 250 in Collezionismo, 30 in Arredamento and 1 in Auto. Beyond the cap, you pay.

Read that against the category data. Abbigliamento e Accessori is Subito’s second-largest leaf category with nearly 1.4 million live ads, and a private seller may hold 45. A seller with 300 garments cannot put them all on Subito as a private individual. They can put all 300 on Facebook Marketplace this afternoon.

The other half of the rule is reclassification. Subito reserves the right to decide when a user falls into the Aziende category based on the number of ads inserted. That is not a self-declaration test you apply to yourself — it is a discretionary judgement Subito makes about you, on volume. If it is applied you need a business account, which requires a partita IVA. The subscription brings a certification badge, a shop page, up to 30 images per ad, call tracking, feed upload through authorised gestionali and a dedicated consultant. Its price is not published; the consultant quotes it.

Facebook Marketplace publishes no listing cap, no volume-based reclassification and no business gate. If sheer number of listings is your constraint, that is decisive, and it is why high-volume Italian sellers treat Marketplace as the bulk surface and Subito as the quality one.

Reputation, fairly reported

Start with the headline, because a lot of writing about Subito does not. On Italian Trustpilot, as at 29 August 2026, Subito scores 4.6 out of 5 from 417,462 reviews, rated “Eccellente”. That is an enormous sample and a high score: Subito does not have a bad reputation and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. Underneath it, the one-star tail and consumer body Altroconsumo show four themes:

• Seller-targeted phishing. The standard scam contacts a seller in chat and pushes the conversation to WhatsApp, then to a fake payment or courier page. Subito publishes guidance on phishing attempts in chat and Altroconsumo covers the pattern. Stay in Subito’s chat and never accept a payment link.
• TuttoSubito payout delays and blocked payments — the most common substantive complaint on Altroconsumo’s board: sold, delivered, not released. The escrow timings above explain some of it, not all.
• Ad removals and account blocks with no stated reason, also on Altroconsumo’s board. With so many published rejection reasons, an unexplained removal is hard to diagnose and there is no meaningful appeal.
• Visibility decay. Ads sink, and the sanctioned way to raise them costs money at an unpublished price.

For Facebook Marketplace there is no equivalent comparison: Meta publishes no Marketplace-specific satisfaction measure and there is no Trustpilot profile for it as a distinct product, so we will not invent a score. What can be said is structural — every Marketplace dispute in Italy is between two private individuals with no arbiter.

Tax: DAC7, and the €5,000 myth

This is the one place the two platforms differ in kind. DAC7 is implemented in Italy by D.Lgs. 1 marzo 2023 n.32, which obliges platform operators to report sellers to the tax authority by 31 January, on consideration net of platform fees.

The de-minimis exclusion requires both conditions: fewer than 30 sales in the year and consideration of €2,000 or less. Because both are required, you become reportable on 30 or more sales OR more than €2,000. Twenty-nine sales totalling €2,500 is reportable; so is thirty-one sales totalling €400. The Commission’s DAC7 page and the directive text both set it out.

Now the platform difference. Subito reports under DAC7, but only for TuttoSubito transactions. Its own DAC7 page is explicit about that. A cash sale arranged over Subito’s messaging and completed in a car park is not in the report, because Subito never handled the money. Subito also warns that failing to complete the DAC7 form can suspend your transactions and deactivate your account — if you sell through TuttoSubito, fill it in.

Facebook Marketplace, as a listings-only platform in Italy that does not facilitate the transaction or know its value, falls outside DAC7 reporting altogether. Be careful with the sourcing: that is the analysis in tax-advisory commentary naming Marketplace and Craigslist as out-of-scope examples, not a statement from the Commission or Meta. It follows from the directive’s definition of a relevant activity, but no regulator has published a list naming Marketplace.

Now the correction that matters most, because it is the commonest error in Italian resale writing. “You can sell €5,000 tax-free in Italy” is wrong. The €5,000 figure is the INPS gestione separata registration threshold under art. 44 of D.L. 269/2003, a social-security trigger for occasional self-employment income. It is not a tax-free allowance and never was.

The statutory test for trading is “attività abituale” under TUIR art. 55, and it contains no euro threshold — it is a question of habituality and organisation, not turnover. Genuinely occasional sales are redditi diversi under TUIR art. 67, declarable from the first euro of gain. Selling your own possessions below what you paid generally produces no gain, which is the real reason most private sellers owe nothing — not a mythical €5,000 shield. If you buy to resell you are on the wrong side of art. 55 regardless of amount. Talk to a commercialista; do not take a number from a blog, including this one.

The verdict

Neither platform is better. They are good at different transactions, and the split is clean enough to state as a rule.

Use Facebook Marketplace when the buyer collects. Local, bulky, fast, cash in hand — a sofa, a wardrobe, a fridge, the contents of a garage. No listing fee, no seller fee in Italy, no volume cap, no moderation queue, no waiting for a payout. For that transaction, everything Subito adds is friction you do not need.

Use Subito when the item ships or the money matters. Anything you want to post, anything you want paid into a bank account, anything where a stranger’s cash on your doorstep is not an acceptable settlement. Subito also gives you something Marketplace structurally cannot: a buyer who arrived by searching a category. Someone browsing Abbigliamento e Accessori came looking for clothes; someone scrolling Marketplace was looking at their friends’ photographs thirty seconds ago. Intent is the quiet advantage of a classifieds site over a social feed.

Where Subito loses: the 45-ad clothing cap, the six-photo limit on fashion ads, unpublished promotion prices, the moderation queue, the immutable category, the discretionary power to reclassify you as a business. Where Facebook Marketplace loses: no escrow, no shipping, no seller protection outside the US, no dispute process, no accounting record, no buyer outside driving distance.

Running both without listing twice

For most Italian sellers the answer is both. The audiences barely overlap — one is a category-search audience, the other a social feed filtered by proximity. Both cost nothing for a private seller within Subito’s free caps, neither charges a seller commission in Italy, and there is no exclusivity on either side. Subito’s duplicate rule concerns duplicates within Subito, not where else you sell.

So the only real objection is labour: typing the same item in twice, in two taxonomies, and remembering to take it down from one place when it sells in the other. That last part is where sellers get hurt — selling the same jacket twice costs far more than the listing effort ever did.

That is what FLUF Connect exists to solve. One inventory, one set of photographs, one description, pushed to 45 marketplace channels including Subito and Facebook Marketplace — and when something sells on one channel it comes down from the others. Relisting, offer management and bulk operations are included in every plan rather than sold as an add-on. It costs £1 for 7 days, then plans from £9/month (Starter); Every plan is unlimited on listings and marketplaces; the tiers differ only by how often we check your channels for sales — every 90 minutes on Starter, down to every 15 on Super Seller. There is no free plan. Detail is on the pricing page. FLUF works for any physical product type, not only fashion — which matters where furniture and homewares are the largest category by a distance.

Sources and verification

• European Commission press release, 14 November 2024 — the €797.72m fine for tying Marketplace to Facebook.
• Meta’s response to the Commission decision — Meta naming Subito among “formidable competitors and the market leader in many member states”.
• Meta Merchant Policies — the 10% seller fee with a $0.80 minimum, the $500 shipped-item cap, no fee on local pickup, and Seller Protection “currently only available in the US”.
• Meta commerce eligibility requirements — a seller must be in a “supported country”; no countries are listed.
• Meta newsroom, 12 March 2026 — prepaid shipping labels, naming no market.
• Meta newsroom, 24 July 2026 — 430 million items listed monthly, globally.
• Meta newsroom, 14 August 2017 — the European rollout that named Italy.
• DataReportal, Digital 2026: Italy — 28.5 million Facebook users in Italy in late 2025 (48.1%) and 53.1 million internet users. Ad-reach, not Marketplace usage; DataReportal flags a Meta methodology change.
• Subito company page — 26 million monthly uniques, 13 million live ads daily, and a DSA disclosure of 15.3 million average monthly active recipients at 30 June 2025.
• Adevinta brand page for Subito — “more than 16 million buyers and sellers” and 149,000 new ads daily, conflicting with Subito’s figures.
• TuttoSubito overview and TuttoSubito policy page — no seller commission; buyer commission €1.20 + 5% to €300, €1.20 + 4.5% above, capped at €91.20.
• Selling on Subito is free and Payments and transfers — free private ads, “Vendi senza commissioni”.
• How many ads you can post — the concurrent per-sub-category caps and the discretionary right to reclassify a user as a business by ad volume.
• Subito category API — the tree behind the live counts read 29 August 2026.
• Listing mechanics: six free photos, paid extension unavailable for fashion; paid bumping, delete-and-repost prohibited; editable and immutable fields, 365-day lifetime, 10-day renewal; phone verification, EU and Swiss numbers only, age 16.
• What you cannot do on Subito, plus the published rejection reasons for duplicates, location, price and description.
• TuttoSubito: shipping for sellers, parcel bands, payout timing, Italy-only delivery.
• Subito on Italian Trustpilot — 4.6/5 from 417,462 reviews, read 29 August 2026.
• Altroconsumo on Subito scams, plus complaints on payments not received and removed ads and blocked accounts.
• Subito’s DAC7 page — Subito reports TuttoSubito transactions only.
• D.Lgs. 32/2023, Directive (EU) 2021/514, the Commission’s DAC7 page and the Agenzia delle Entrate DAC7 portal — the obligation, de-minimis test and 31 January deadline.
• TUIR art. 55, TUIR art. 67 and art. 44 D.L. 269/2003 — the habituality test, redditi diversi, and the €5,000 figure as an INPS registration threshold.

What we could not verify, and therefore left out. Meta publishes no country-level Marketplace user figure for Italy and no list of countries where Marketplace checkout, shipping or Seller Protection are available — so “Italian Marketplace sales are cash in hand” is an inference from the US-scoped policies above, not a Meta rule. The repeated “1.1 billion Marketplace users” figure could not be traced to any Meta publication and is not used. Meta publishes no Marketplace category taxonomy or per-category counts, so its category shape is described, not tabulated. Subito publishes no price for any promotion option or for its business subscription, and its GMV is unpublished — the €27.2 billion figure that circulates is the whole Italian second-hand economy, not Subito’s. Subito’s user figures conflict with Adevinta’s and both are named rather than averaged. Third-party TuttoSubito fee figures are excluded, and Subito’s title and description character limits are FLUF’s empirical observation, not published limits. Finally, Marketplace falling outside DAC7 rests on tax-advisory commentary, not on a statement from the Commission or Meta.

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