Databento vs Massive (formerly Polygon.io): two $199 plans that meter different things

Massive traded as Polygon.io until 30 October 2025, and many readers still know it by that name. It and Databento are the two names a developer usually ends up comparing after deciding they want US tick data rather than daily bars. Both take exchange feeds directly, both sell to people writing code, and both list $199 a month. That shared price is the misleading part. The two plans meter different things, and who you are matters more than which feed you want.

The same $199 buys different data

Massive Advanced is one asset class at $199 a month: stocks, options or futures, each a separate subscription. You get real-time trades and quotes, unlimited API calls, the WebSocket, flat files and the full history window for that asset class, which is 20+ years for stocks, 5+ for options and 7+ for futures. Quotes are top of book. No individual Massive plan sells order-book depth.

Databento Standard is one dataset at $199 a month: Databento US Equities, OPRA or CME Globex, each a separate subscription. Live data is included. The history that comes with it depends on the schema. You get twelve months of top-of-book data, one month of book depth (MBP-10 and the full order book), and the full archive of the other schemas, such as OHLCV bars. Older top-of-book or depth data is billed per gigabyte, or comes with an annual contract: Plus lifts top-of-book to the full archive, and Unlimited, $4,000 a month for US equities, lifts everything. The full archive for US equities starts in 2018.

So the two plans do not compare directly. For ten years of stock quotes, Massive's $199 covers it; Databento's $199 covers the last twelve months, and no Databento plan goes back past 2018. For the full order book of a session in the last month, Databento's $199 covers it and Massive does not sell it at any price.

Who you are decides it

The difference that ends most of these comparisons is in the licence, not the data.

• Massive's individual plans are for personal, non-business use. Advanced, the only tier with real-time data, is sold only to subscribers who qualify as non-professional. A business pays a different price list: $2,499 a month for stocks, $1,999 for options and $999 for each futures exchange. Those business plans are not Advanced with a business licence. Stocks Business and Options Business stream fair-market-value prices and minute aggregates, with historical trades and quotes. Real-time tick trades and quotes are an add-on, with the exchanges' fees on top.
• Databento sells the same Standard plan to a business. What changes is the venue's fee, passed through without a markup. Commercial use of CME data is $973 per exchange a month, and OPRA is $2,000 per firm. For personal use on Standard, the CME, CFE and Eurex fees are included for up to two devices.

Neither lets you show the data to other people on the entry plan. Massive's individual terms forbid redistribution and business use outright. Databento puts distribution, real-time and delayed alike, on Plus and Unlimited only, and the venue then adds its own distribution fee: $2,170 a month for CME, and $1,500 plus a per-user rate for OPRA.

So for a single person researching or trading for their own account, Massive's $199 is a complete product. For a company, a professional subscriber or anyone building something other people will use, Massive's $199 plan is not available to you, and Databento is the one with a published route to the same data.

If you only need history

Neither requires a live subscription for historical data, but they meter it in opposite ways.

• Databento's usage-based plan has no monthly fee. It bills historical downloads by the uncompressed gigabyte, with $125 of signup credits that expire after six months. That is the right shape for one month of forty symbols. It is the wrong shape for every trade on every US stock for a decade, because the bill grows with the size of the download and a careless full-depth query is expensive before you notice.
• Massive sells history by tier. Stocks Developer, at $79 a month and 15-minute delayed, includes tick-level trades over ten years with flat files. Quotes are only on Advanced. For bulk trade history across the whole market, a flat monthly price is easier to plan than a per-byte bill.

Before comparing a quote from either, convert your request into the vendor's unit: gigabytes of a given schema at Databento, years and tier at Massive.

What only one of them covers

Massive covers forex, crypto and US indices, sells financials as a $29 add-on (included with Stocks Advanced), and has client libraries for Python, JavaScript, Go and Java plus a first-party MCP server. Its coverage is US-only at every price.

Databento covers order-book depth, CME futures with the full book, and European derivatives venues: Eurex, EEX and the ICE Europe feeds. It has official clients for Python, C++ and Rust, and anything else talks to the HTTP API. Live data uses Databento's own protocol over raw TCP. It has no spot forex, crypto, fundamentals or news.

The recommendation

Choose Massive if you are an individual who qualifies as non-professional and wants years of US trades and quotes for your own use at a flat price. Developer at $79 is enough if delayed data and trades alone will do. Advanced at $199 per asset class is the plan once you need real-time data or historical quotes.

Choose Databento the moment any of these is true: you need order-book depth, you are a business or a professional subscriber, you will show the data to anyone else, you need European derivatives, or you want one month of data rather than a subscription. In each of those cases Massive's $199 plan is either not sold to you or does not carry the data you want.

For what the exchange charges on top of either vendor's price, see real-time market data fees. The rest of the section is on the market data APIs page.