Stock Charting Platforms & Screeners

The platform fee is not the bill. Exchange data is billed separately and on top of most subscriptions here, and for an active trader it is frequently the larger number — so price the tools on what your symbols cost to watch, not on the tier name. The second thing that decides the choice is which of three jobs you are buying, because a product built around one of them is usually mediocre at the others. The third, for anyone who does not invest only in the US, is which exchanges the product actually covers.

• Charting, alerts and the largest community — TradingView.
• Technical charts, scheduled scans and alerts in a browser, without a script language — StockCharts, from $19.95 a month, though $29.95 Extra is the first level with room to save more than one scan.
• Real-time data from exchanges far beyond North America, on one Windows feed — eSignal, from $241 a month for real-time before exchange fees.
• Technical analysis for analysts, with end-of-day data in the licence — Optuma Desktop on Windows at $810 a year, or the Optuma Web App, which runs scans and backtests on Optuma's servers, at $165 a seat a month.
• Screening US stocks on fundamentals, for investors — Stock Rover (US and Canada) or Finviz Elite (US only).
• Stock, fund and options screeners as a website membership — Barchart.com, $0 to $29.95 a month, with the options-flow tools on Premier.
• Screening outside the US — Stockopedia for the UK and Europe, Screener.in for NSE and BSE, Uncle Stock across 79 countries, Wave Radar for China A-shares and Hong Kong beside the US.
• Real-time intraday scanning — Trade Ideas or TrendSpider.
• What moved today and why, with the earnings, analyst and filing evidence beside it — MarketCatalyst, US only, delayed on the free plan, real-time and an AI read on every screen from $29 a month.
• Macro, fundamentals and a research dashboard — Koyfin.
• Trading futures from the chart, or reading the order book — that is the trading platforms section.

Three jobs wearing one word

Everything in this category draws a chart, and that is close to the last thing these tools have in common. The three jobs below are bought by different people for different reasons, and a product built around one of them is usually mediocre at the others — which is why a price comparison across jobs tells you nothing.

Charting is the analysis surface: drawing tools, indicator library, multi-chart layouts, how far back the intraday history goes, and whether your marked-up charts survive a change of machine. Bought by people who make the decision themselves and want somewhere to think.

Screening is one question asked of the whole universe, once — profitable, under 15 times earnings, above the 200-day. You press run and read a list. It is a research act, usually end-of-day, and it leans on fundamentals at least as much as on price.

Scanning is the same question asked continuously of a live feed, answered by interrupting you. It only means anything intraday, it needs real-time data for every symbol at once rather than for the one on screen, and that requirement is most of why the scanning tools cost several times what the screening tools cost.

What actually decides the choice

The subscription is not the bill. Platform fee and exchange data are separate purchases, and for an active trader the data can be the larger one. TradingView's US stock bundle is $9.95 a month for a non-professional on top of the plan. CME futures data for a non-professional is $4 a month per exchange for top-of-book through NinjaTrader, $16 with depth and $48 for depth on all four exchanges; Sierra Chart bills $2, $13.50 and $40.50 for the same, but only to holders of a funded futures account. The platform or broker sets the pass-through, so the same exchange costs different money depending on who bills you. Price the tools on what your symbols cost to watch, not on the tier name. eSignal is the far end: every package excludes exchange fees, and the per-exchange prices appear only during signup, so the real monthly total is unknown until checkout. ProRealTime adds a third way to pay: its €24 and €70 desktop plans are free for a month in which you trade enough through a partner broker — about 29 and 84 trades with Interactive Brokers or Saxo — so for an active trader the platform fee is paid in volume.

The exceptions are worth knowing because they change the arithmetic. TC2000 includes real-time NYSE, Amex and Nasdaq through Nasdaq Basic in every paid tier for a non-professional, and TrendSpider includes real-time US equities, ETFs, forex and crypto, adding $7.50 a month for futures and $9.50 for OPRA options. Optuma Desktop bundles Optuma's own end-of-day data for 40-plus exchanges into the licence — five data groups on the $810 Trader edition — but nothing intraday is Optuma's, so real-time means a third-party feed paid to that vendor. Barchart.com has no exchange-data line because it sells no consolidated real-time at any tier: stocks are 15 minutes delayed, except single-venue Cboe BZX prints.

Professional status is not a judgement about you. It is an exchange classification: are you registered, trading for a firm, using the data in a business, or handling anyone else's money. Non-professional CME top-of-book is $2 to $4 a month per exchange; the professional rate is $145 to $159. Every platform makes you self-certify, so getting it wrong is a back-billing exposure rather than a discount.

"Screener" and "scanner" mean whatever the marketing page needs them to. A screener evaluates a stored snapshot; a scanner evaluates a stream and pushes. A screener with a refresh button will not tell you that something is happening right now, and a real-time scanner is wasted money if what you want is twelve candidates to research on Sunday. Check whether the alerts are server-side too — an alert that only fires while the tab is open is a different product from one that fires while you sleep.

Market coverage decides the screener before the filters do. Finviz Elite is NASDAQ, NYSE and AMEX only, so a non-US company appears as its ADR or not at all; Stock Rover is the US and Canada; Trade Ideas and TrendSpider scan no listed equities outside the US. The non-US screeners are each built around one home market. Stockopedia is UK-first and priced by region — one region £32 a month or £295 a year, all six £105 or £975, with Europe including the UK counting as two — and gives every stock a 0–100 Quality, Value and Momentum rank recomputed overnight from fixed formulas you cannot reweight. Screener.in covers NSE and BSE listings and nothing else, screens by typed query over ten years of financials on a free account, and sells one premium plan at ₹4,999 a year. Uncle Stock screens 100,000-plus listings in 79 countries, backtests a saved screen from its $35 Silver plan, and exposes a hosted MCP server; Bronze is $20 a month, and every plan also prints a Strong Buy to Strong Sell verdict computed from the vendor's own score, which is a house model rather than data. Wave Radar scans US, China A-share and Hong Kong lists for Equal Wave and Chan setups, and its paid plan ranks every live trigger by that signal's past win rate on that stock — a backtest statistic that the vendor's own control studies found no better than a random pick when traded as a book. Of the broader tools, Koyfin is global but intraday only in North America, Barchart.com switches its screeners between the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and Europe but will not export fundamentals outside US equities, StockCharts adds the LSE and India's NSE to North America, and eSignal's exchange list runs from NYSE and CME to Lima, Muscat and Ho Chi Minh City.

The strategy language is the lock-in, not the fee. Pine Script on TradingView, JavaScript on TrendSpider, PCF on TC2000, ProBuilder on ProRealTime, EFS — an extended JavaScript — on eSignal, and Optuma Scripting, written to read like Excel formulas, which runs unchanged between Optuma Desktop and the Web App and nowhere else. Even StockCharts, which has no scripting, keeps anything specific in the query language of its Advanced Scan Workbench. None of them port, and none of the vendors pretend otherwise. Six months of your own indicators and scans are worth far more than any monthly price difference, which is why people stay for years on platforms they complain about daily. Choose the language with more care than the chart.

Free tiers here are limited by counts, not by quality. The charts on free plans are good. What runs out is saved layouts, indicators per chart, symbols in a watchlist, scan results returned and — nearly always the binding constraint — the number of alerts you may keep active. At the edges the counts are the whole product: Barchart.com's free membership is 20 page views a day, and StockCharts' free level saves no ChartList, scan or alert at all. Work out which of those counts you will hit before you compare monthly prices, because that is the number that decides which tier you actually end up on.

Where this category connects

A platform subscription and a data subscription are two purchases, and the second one is priced in market data APIs — worth reading if you are paying for a feed twice. If what you want is a strategy tested properly rather than drawn on a chart, that is backtesting frameworks, and if it is the record of what you already traded, trading journals.

Six tools in the listing below are here as secondary members and are placed by a different job: AmiBroker and WealthLab are backtesters, Portfolio123 is a no-code strategy builder, and GuruFocus, Godel Terminal and Stock Analysis are fundamentals research tools.