If you plan on opening an account with only a grand or two I would suggest the Robinhood App. The research tools suck but they don’t charge you anything to buy or sell. Robinhood makes it’s money by not paying interest when you hold cash which is a good deal if you don’t have much cash. You can use the free tools from all the other discount brokerage firms or from Tradingview or Stockcharts.com to do your research. Before I started investing in individual stocks a few years ago I paper traded for a few months first. You can open free paper accounts with the big discount brokerage firms as well.
Good luck. Its a lot of fun & as I mentioned before, managing your own small portfolio can’t be any worse of a hobby than buying a boat, a motorcycle or anything else that depreciates in value over time.