Options data and options analysis tools

Chains, greeks, history — and the OPRA fee that sits under every card here, which is why options cost what they cost.

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One processor, one price list

Options are the asset class where the fee structure shows through the product most clearly. Every US listed options quote — every exchange, every series — is disseminated by a single processor, OPRA, and its fee schedule is one document. There is no equivalent of buying Cboe instead of Nasdaq to get a cheaper equities feed. The floor under the price of every card on this page is the same filing, which is why a plan that sells US stock quotes for a few dollars a month usually sells options as a separate line at several times the number.

The guide to why real-time stock data is so expensive has the figures off the schedule itself. The short version: redistribution and non-display use are where an options bill stops looking like a subscription and starts looking like a contract.

What actually differs between these cards

Sixty-six cards here cover options, and they are not doing the same job.

Chains. The raw quote, strike by strike, expiry by expiry. Alpha Vantage, EODHD, Intrinio and yfinance all return one. What differs is latency, how far back it goes, and whether the bid and ask are the NBBO or a snapshot of one venue.

Surfaces and greeks. A greek is not data, it is a calculation over a volatility surface that somebody had to build and clean. ORATS is the card that sells exactly this — SMV-smoothed implied volatility and greeks, end-of-day back to 2007, starting at 199 dollars a month. QuantLib is the other end of the same problem: it prices the instruments and builds the curves, and supplies no data at all.

History as files. Options history is enormous — every strike of every expiry of every underlying, every day — so it is usually sold as files rather than streamed. Cboe DataShop sells it per dataset, per date, per symbol, straight from the exchange. AlgoSeek leases OPRA tick history per asset class. Tick Data prices per symbol-year, and the ratio on its own rate card is the whole story of this page: 32 dollars for a symbol-year of US equity Level I, 1,000 for the same symbol-year of OPRA options.

Flow and positioning. What the tape says about who is doing what. Unusual Whales sells the options tape and Greek exposure over REST and WebSocket; Market Chameleon does the analysis in a browser, on 15-minute-delayed data, with no API at all. These two look adjacent and are not substitutes.

Where a free tier stops

The pattern across the free tiers on this page is consistent enough to state as a rule. Free options data is delayed rather than live, near-dated rather than the full chain, and comes without greeks. Each of those three is a licensing or a cost decision rather than a technical one: the delay avoids the per-subscriber real-time fee, the truncated chain caps the response size, and the greeks are the expensive part to compute and maintain.

The same wall shows up in the bought-once archives. FirstRate Data sells options as end-of-day Cboe chains going back to 2010, unadjusted for splits, with no options on futures, FX or commodities and no intraday options history at any price. That is a coverage boundary, not a plan you can upgrade past.

Free and cheap is enough for a great deal of work — a screener, a backtest on end-of-day settlements, a position tracker. It is not enough to price a spread you are about to put on. Read the latency field on a card before the price.

The cards that are here for a different reason

Not every card on this page is a data vendor, and the ones that are not are easy to miss.

Brokerage APIs. SnapTrade, Plaid Investments and the rest of brokerage account aggregation are here because they read options positions out of an account. They price nothing and quote nothing. If the question is "what am I currently holding", that is the section, not this one.

Trade journals. Seven of them, and the thing to check is whether an imported four-leg spread arrives as one position or as four trades. TraderSync classifies spreads on import and says so on the box; TradesViz treats stock options and futures options as first-class instruments with spread detection, and puts options flow and an options backtester on its top plan. Tradervue and the rest of trading journal software accept options without making them the point.

Spreadsheets. Wisesheets puts options data in a cell, which is a different ergonomics problem from putting it in a dataframe. The spreadsheet collection is the wider version of that argument.

One time-series database. OneTick is here because somewhere the OPRA feed has to land and stay landed, and that is a storage problem rather than a data-vendor one. Storing tick data is the background for it.

For the tools sold primarily as APIs rather than as products, market data APIs is the listing narrowed the other way.

All 69 of them

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FAQ

Why is options data more expensive than stock data?

Because there is only one processor for the whole asset class. Every US listed options quote reaches the world through OPRA, which prices as one thing — a redistribution licence, a direct-access fee and per-device charges on a single schedule. There is no cheaper competing venue to buy from, the way there is in equities, so the floor under every vendor on this page is the same document. See our guide to real-time market data fees for the numbers.

Does a free tier ever include an options chain?

Sometimes, and it is worth checking what shape it arrives in. Free options data is usually delayed, usually near-dated strikes only, and usually without greeks — the greeks are a calculation on top of a volatility surface, which is the part that costs money to build. A free endpoint that returns a chain is not the same product as one that returns a smoothed surface.

What is the difference between an options data API and an options analytics site?

What you get out. An API hands you the chain and you do the work; an analytics site has already done a specific piece of it — earnings-move statistics, IV rank, strategy screening — and hands you the conclusion. Market Chameleon is the second shape and has no REST API at all. The choice is not about data quality, it is about whether you want to write the analysis.

Why are brokerage APIs and trade journals on this page?

Because they carry options too, in the other direction. An aggregation API reads options positions out of an account; a journal imports filled options trades and works out what the spread actually returned. Neither one prices an option. They are here because a card that says it covers options and cannot tell you about the ones you already hold is only half the asset class.